“Oh, no; Jack Lamont is a Russian. He is called Prince Ivan Lermontoff when he’s at home, but we call him Jack Lamont for short. He’s going to help me on the Russian business I told you of.”
“What Russian business?” asked Katherine. “I don’t remember your speaking of it.”
Dorothy went white, edged a little way from her friend, while her widening eyes flashed a warning at the Lieutenant, who, too late, remembered that this conversation on Russia had taken place during the walk from the bank. The young man coughed slightly behind his open hand, reddened, and stammered:
“Oh, I thought I had told you. Didn’t I mention the prince to you as we were coming here?”
“Not that I recollect,” said Katherine. “Is he a real, genuine prince? A right down regular, regular, regular royal prince?”
“I don’t know about the royalty, but he’s a prince in good standing in his own land, and he is also an excellent blacksmith.” The Lieutenant chuckled a little. “He and his sister have both been touched a good deal by Tolstoian doctrine. Jack is the most wonderful inventor, I think, that is at present on the earth, Edison notwithstanding. Why, he is just now engaged on a scheme by which he can float houses from the mountains here down to New York. Float them—pipe-line them would perhaps be a better term. You know they have pipe-lines to carry petroleum. Very well; Jack has a solution that dissolves stone as white sugar dissolves in tea, and he believes he can run the fluid from the quarries to where building is going on. It seems that he then puts this liquid into molds, and there you have the stone again. I don’t understand the process myself, but Jack tells me it’s marvelously cheap, and marvelously effective. He picked up the idea from nature one time when he and I were on our vacation at Detroit.”
“Detroit, Michigan?”
“The Detroit River.”
“Well, that runs between Michigan and Canada.”
“No, no, this is in France. I believe the real name of the river is the Tarn. There’s a gorge called Detroit—the strait, you know. Wonderful place—tremendous chasm. You go down in a boat, and all the tributary rivers pour into the main stream like jets from the nozzle of a hose. They tell me this is caused by the rain percolating through the dead leaves on the surface of the ground far above, and thus the water becomes saturated with carbonic acid gas, and so dissolves the limestone until the granite is reached, and the granite forms the bed of these underground rivers. It all seemed to me very wonderful, but it struck Jack on his scientific side, and he has been experimenting ever since. He says he’ll be able to build a city with a hose next year.”