The smile of this unknown foot-farer spoke of a conscious comradeship which surprised Justin, who held himself a little more stiffly and hurried forward at a quicker pace to reach his destination, which was now in sight. His eye approved the new paint and the air of decent reserve which appertained to the building; the new sign at the side of the hallway bore the legend of the typometer, with his name conspicuously above. As Justin entered he turned again involuntarily, and the man on the other side of the street, who was himself on the point of entering a hallway, turned also. This time Justin smiled in response. The opposite building, as he knew, bore a sign much resembling his own, with the name of Angevin L. Cater upon it; the air of proprietorship bespoke Mr. Cater himself. The meeting gave a welcome pleasure to rivalry, and brought back the dew of the morning.
The offices were in the second story, his own especial one railed off near the front windows and covered with a new green rug. To one side were the compartments of his subordinates and the open desk-room of the lower clerks; beyond these was the packing department of the factory; from above was heard the ceaseless whirring and clicking of machinery. The larger parts of the instrument—the copper tubing and the steel bars—were bought in the rough, so to speak, and shaped to their proper functions here, where, also, the more intricate portions were manufactured.
The undertaking, briefly told, rested on the merits of a timing-machine invented and patented some years before in Connecticut, and sold to a manufacturer there, who had taken it as a side issue and failed properly to exploit it. The right to it had changed hands several times, during which it was pushed with varying energy, being finally domiciled in New York. In the meantime other machines, differing slightly in construction, had also been patented and put on the market in various cities, none of them with any great success until the present moment. Then the public began to wake up suddenly to the value of timing-machines, and Leverich and Martin, organizers of corporations, seized the opportunity of buying all the rights to the Warford Standard Typometer—so called because, in addition to measuring stated periods of elapsed time, it mechanically produced a type-written statement of it. The Warford, as the first invention, had some merits never quite attained by the later ones, in the eyes of its present purchasers. They said all it needed now was push.
Thousands of little books entitled “Sixty Seconds with the Typometer” had been sent abroad in the last month, setting forth with attractive brevity, and in large black print that could be read without glasses, Why you wanted a typometer, Which was the best one to buy, and Where you could buy it. Long articles advertising it appeared in the daily papers, in which the sales of the machine reached an effective aggregate.
The business, in fact, showed signs of seriously forging ahead under the renewed efforts of Leverich and Martin, and their portrayal of its future was within the bounds of possibility. The foreman of the factory was one of the original workmen, and some of the men had also been associated with the machine for several years, so that the running-gear ran with fair smoothness; the head bookkeeper and manager, an elderly man, had also remained a fixture through all the fluctuations, and had been the great dependence of the new purchasers; if he had possessed the requisite mental capacity, it is doubtful whether Justin’s services would have been needed at all.
As Justin went up to the factory floor on this morning, the foreman stepped out from among the machinery to offer his greeting; he was a slight man with deep-set, swiftly observant eyes and a mouth that drooped at the corners; his sleeves were rolled up over his thin, muscular arms.
To Justin’s pleasant good morning he responded, with a quick gleam of pleasure in his eyes:
“Good morning, sir. I’m glad to see you here so early. You’ve perhaps heard of the big order that came in last night from Cincinnati.”
“No,” said Justin; “I came up here first. That’s good news, Bullen.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve made a list of the stock we’ll need as soon as we can get it in, I sent it down to your desk, sir, a moment ago. I’ll want to see you later, Mr. Alexander, about taking on more men.”