He went into the little back yard of the house and, making a pile of the papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen window to watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and leaning over, father’s stern face—and then darkness.
Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the rest of the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other men in the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what those papers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole business section of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from you the fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as an inheritance but—”
“Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burned them,” he declared, tramping out of the house.
* * * * *
Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter of wells. The thing was done with nitro-glycerine. One put “nitro” and “glycerine” together, one fancied, and there was this terrible result. One did not know what “nitro” was, but had seen and felt “glycerine.” “Ah! chemistry. You wait and you’ll see what will be done with chemistry,” said father.
And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes and carted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroic well-shooter.
Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellow going nonchalantly along with the frozen cakes in the wagon behind him. Is he worried? Not at all! He lights his pipe. He looks at the stars. He sings a little ditty. “My bonny lies over the ocean. My bonny lies over the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean—Oh, bring back my bonny to meeeeeee.”
In the wagon back of him that stuff. A jar, a sudden jolt of the wagon, the breaking of a wagon axle and then—
We boys whisper about it when we meet on the streets. One of the boys holds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a little bit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blow him and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how much farther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there a land as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which the fellow might be sent, in the wink of an eye?
A glimpse of the infinite added to all the other excitement and mystery.