“Dinsmore was mopping his head and growling: ‘Rantoul was a blankish eastern idiot; he might as well throw up the sponge. Two square miles of this ash-heap!’
“But,” in the fervour of his tale, Wilbur turned squarely to the girl, “I smiled at him. ‘Dinsmore,’ I said, ‘you know how to draw a brief and run a caucus and bluff a jury,—and perhaps a few other things,—but you don’t understand this game.’ ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘what have you got to offer?’ ‘Irrigation,’ I said; and he howled. ‘Irrigate, you damn fool, when the banks of that cussed river are twenty-five feet high on either side, and no coal within two hundred miles!’
“Then I explained myself. I told him how I and a classmate at Michigan one spring invented just the machine for this. ‘It’s working to-day on father’s farm up in northern Michigan.’ ‘How long will it take us to git there?’ he jerked out. ‘Three days.’ Well, the old wheel we had rigged up, Jim Center and me, was there pumping away like the day we left it, when Dinsmore and I drove over from the station.”
Here Wilbur, in his excitement, had stopped at a deserted brasserie, and taking two chairs from the nearest table, he described minutely the water-hoister with all its superb points. Miss Anthon sank into a chair. They were near the hotel now, and the tale absorbed her.
“Dinsmore looked it over; he said nothing; then he started it running; then he looked it over again. ‘My boy,’ he said, as we walked up to the house, ‘there is a desk for you in my office in Chicago. You read law. Some day you will be managing a “Water-Hoister Company.”’ That was near three years ago.”
Wilbur ordered a bock. After one sip he put the glass down and went on. There were delightful appendices to this epic. Dinsmore had tried to cheat him, but—
“I held him up in his own office, on the tenth floor of the Sears building. ‘A square deal,’ I said, ‘or you don’t get out of this office.’ And Dinsmore has done the right thing ever since.”
Miss Anthon’s blood ran in little throbs as he described this primitive arrangement in the tenth floor of an office-building, where the old eel of a politician had been foiled by his sharp clerk.
“Then Dinsmore tried to do Rantoul on his land, when he saw what a fat thing we had. But,” here the young fellow smiled in appreciation of his astuteness rather than of his honesty, “Rantoul has his third now.”
Later Wilbur had gone to Washington as secretary for an Illinois boss, and while there had arranged the patents and started the Water-Hoister Improvement Company. Center was remembered.