"Now, see here, Phil, don't give out on the situation like that," said Father, as he slapped me on the back to still the tears while Roxanne hugged me and the Idol still held my hand.
"Please go on and tell what you did or didn't do to the 'secret,'" I sobbed, but I stood on my own feet again and was using both my natural hands to wipe my eyes.
The Idol had been for minutes standing and looking at Father like a child that has just awakened and doesn't know whether the awful thing that was pursuing him was a dream or a real bear. Roxanne was the first one to speak, and as usual she had seen the rosy side of something, even if it was not the real thing.
"You didn't really steal the secret at all, did you, Mr. Forsythe?" she asked, with her lovely and engaging enthusiasm. "I just knew it, all the time."
"Yes, I did 'steal the secret'—if that is the way you put it—pro tem, which means 'for the time being.' You are a nest of very young idiots, and I trusted to that; but you opened your puppy eyes at the time I hadn't counted on, with the help of Luttrell's scouting nose." He paused, as if not right sure that he was going to tell about everything, and as he looked at us we did look like a basket of little silly puppies with mouths and eyes wide open—the Idol most of all.
"And now first, young man," said Father, turning to Mr. Douglass, left eyelid drooping lower than usual, "I just want to say to you what I think of you for leaving not only all the traces of such a valuable discovery unprotected in a shed, but leaving your notebook and drawings, too. Any other man but a Byrd of Byrdsville, would not have trusted the book off his person a half minute, and would have destroyed the traces of each experiment the minute it was done. Those steel shavings were the most idiotic-looking things I ever saw, and when I emptied the box it was with a groan at your foolishness. Just the looks of 'em kept me from trusting you with my intentions. I couldn't afford to run the risk of your carelessness, so I took the whole thing and decamped with it."
"Oh, Father!" I gasped, beginning to get the untrustful feeling again.
"Hush, Phyllis," said the Idol, looking at Father like he was Jack, the Giant-Killer, and just about as much interested as if it was not his own tremendous fortune Father was telling about taking off with him.
"I had been down in the garden to the garage to give the new car a looking over, and I saw Rogers go into that shed and knew, from having been told by Phyllis accidentally of the steel experiments, what was happening. I followed him a little later, and saw your trustful layout, exposed to the world as is the human nature of all Byrdsville. Rogers is an expert and would run through your notebook and get the whole thing in a few seconds. I knew that he would watch his time, try out the experiments at the furnace, and get the patent while you were deliberating about proceeding in a Chesterfieldian manner with an injunction drawn slowly and literarily by your friend, Judge Luttrell. Rogers was fully equipped by his association with me to do you and—quick. I took no such chances as having you and the Judge's Byrdsvillianism mixed up in the affair. I stole your secret that had been stolen, left for a Pennsylvania furnace the next morning, had experimental furnaces built, tried out the experiments before the company, keeping dust in Rogers's eyes by demanding to be in on his robbery, patented it by push-legislation in Washington, and am back with an offer of fifty thousand dollars down and a royalty to be decided upon in a ten-year contract. I have a great mind to put it in trust for you, idiotic dreamer that you are—and perhaps the most noted man in the field of commercial invention for this year at any rate! How did you come to think out that process of a disturbance of atomic arrangement at that temperature?"
"Why, you see, Mr. Forsythe, in the laboratory at Princeton, just before I left, I had begun some atomic experiments, and out at the furnace it struck me all of a heap, what it would do if we could treat the ore at some ascertained temperature in the way I have found. Now, in another case that I am working on, I may be able even to make the process—"