“Beastly ingratitude, I’d call it,” exclaimed Kemp. “I’ve been told that your father waived all rights to royalty on all the patents he put into the company and Cummings only gave him a fifth of the stock in the original corporation to cover everything. Do pardon me! But that whole business made me hot when I heard about it.”
“It was pretty hard to bear,” Grace murmured.
“I’m no angel,” said Kemp, “but in the long run I think we get it in the neck if we don’t play the game straight. Cummings is riding for a fall. It tickles me to see two or three places right now where he’s likely to come a cropper. His narrowness and lack of vision are going to have the usual result.”
“But you, the great Kemp, are going to push right ahead!” laughed Trenton, laying his hand on his friend’s knee.
“Oh, nothing can keep Tommy down,” exclaimed Irene in mock admiration. “Tommy’s brain isn’t just cottage cheese.”
Kemp enjoyed their chaffing and encouraged it. They were still discussing Grace’s suggestion that Mars and other planets might become littered with Kemp machinery as new markets were sought for it when they reached the farm.
III
A winding road led from the highway through a strip of woodland that bore upward to a ridge where the lights of the house suddenly burst upon them. The river, Kemp explained, lay just below.
A Japanese boy in white duck flung open the door and smilingly bowed them in.
Kemp called his place The Shack, but in reality it was a dignified old homestead that had been enlarged and only slightly modernized. The parlor and sitting room of the old part had been thrown into one room with the broad fireplace preserved. The floors were painted and covered with rag rugs; the furniture was of a type that graced the homes of well-to-do Middle Westerners in about the period of the Mexican war. The rooms were lighted by a variety of glass table-lamps with frosted shades adorned with crystal pendants. These survivals of the days of “coal-oil” lighting were now cleverly arranged to conceal the electrical source of their illumination.