“As far as the aeroplanes go, I’m all right—I’m square. I think I am about other things, too—now, anyway. But there was a time—”
Hike walked over, as Priest stopped, and put his arm about the inventor’s shoulder, for a second. The inventor smiled a three-cornered funny little smile, then looked grim again, and went on, swiftly:
“When I was a young chap—twenty-six—I married—I can’t tell you what I thought of my wife, but she was perfect, to me anyway. I’d graduated from Massachusetts Tech., and was with a marine engine company. I was interested in aviation, too—long before the Wrights had flown, or the Bell people, when Lilienthal was just trying his gliders. Well, this engine company was small, and I had a lot to do with the business end of it, as well as the mechanical part. My wife got mighty sick—needed a lot of things, and my salary was small. And I got in debt for a lot of aeroplane material.
“Well, I just borrowed some money from the firm’s safe—really borrowed, or that’s what I thought. I was so crazy over my wife’s sickness that I didn’t think much about it, I guess, to tell the truth.
“They found out about it, and I was arrested, and sentenced for embezzlement.... My wife died while I was in prison—back East that was.... Convict, that’s what I was. I don’t know’s you’ll want to associate—
“Well, the warden was a fine old boy. He made me head of the machine shop. I got him interested in aviation—he was a handy man with the tools himself; and we used to do a lot of work on the side—him in Christian clothes, and me in stripes.
“When I got out I’d inherited several thousand dollars from my wife’s uncle, funny old chap that had just been sitting back and watching my capers without letting me know anything about it. I wandered around the world, saw what the Wrights and Alexander Graham Bell and Curtiss were doing with aviation, and what Santos Dumont was doing in France. Saw one of J. A. D. McCurdy’s first flights. Then I came out here, and built this shack, and hoped to have a machine that I could surprise the world with, just the young ranchero helping me. But now my money’s practically all gone.
“Thought I’d better tell you just how things really stand with me.... I don’t want any false impression—”
Hike started forward and wrung Martin Priest’s hand, silently. The Lieutenant did the same. They were his friends.
As for Poodle, he did the most brilliant thing of his life—nothing at all but smile his pleasantest!