“And I’ve got a burglar alarm on the kitchen door,” cut in Aunt Polly, making her needles fly.
A domino game failed to draw our thoughts from the talking frog; and Tom told us how the Milwaukee company was planning to get out a complete line of talking toys—this in the event that Mr. Ricks’ experiments were successful.
“It seems to me,” said Scoop, out of his thoughts, “that twenty-five thousand dollars isn’t enough money for such a big idea.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” spoke up Peg, whose folks are poor, “is a fortune, I want to tell you!”
“Of course,” nodded Scoop. “But an invention [[16]]like this ought to be worth more than twenty-five thousand dollars to the man who thought it up. A hundred thousand, I should say. Or half a million.”
“I forgot to tell you,” Tom said, “about Pa’s royalty.”
“Royalty?” I repeated.
“It’s this way,” Tom explained. “Pa’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars cash money for the idea; then the company will develop and apply the idea, and Pa’ll get a royalty on each talking toy sold.”
I asked what a royalty was.
“It’s a written agreement,” Tom told me, “under which Pa’ll get a certain part of every dollar that the company takes in. The money is his pay, as an inventor, for letting them use his idea. For instance, if they sell a million dollars’ worth of talking toys, Pa’ll get fifty thousand dollars. That’s five per cent.”