DACE SHOWS HIS HAND.
"First off, Bricktop," said Matt, after he had taken a comfortable seat on a boulder, "you've got to stop messing around with high explosives. Smokeless powder has been on the market for some time, and you're wasting your energies."
"Shucks!" grinned Chub, "sis has been talkin' to you. That's what I told her we were after, but that was only part of it. Perk gave me the idea. If we could take a grain of powder and make it drive a bullet a mile, or ten grains and make it drive a bullet ten miles, we'd have the biggest thing that ever happened. Three men with gatling guns could kill off an army before it got in sight. It's a whale of a notion!"
"You bet it's a whale," agreed Matt. "You'd have so much power back of that bullet, Chub, it would blow the thing that fired it into smithereens—and I reckon the three men who were laying for the enemy would go along with the scraps, all right."
"You're a jim-dandy, Matt. Say, I didn't think of that," gasped Chub.
"Well, old chum, sit up and take notice of these things, and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble. I've been thinking over that wireless proposition of yours, and I've got a hunch that your ground-wire isn't anchored right. There's an old wire meat-broiler out back of your wood-shed—I saw it there the other day when you were poking around looking for scrap-iron. Hitch your ground-wire to the handle and bury the broiler about six feet down; then, if everything is in shape at the Bluebell, I'll bet something handsome you get all kinds of sparks."
Chub stared at his chum in open-mouthed admiration.
"You're the wise boy!" he chirped; "if I had your head along with my knack of corralling stuff and getting it together I'd have Edison, Marconi and all that bunch lashed to the mast. King & McReady, Inventions to Order and While You Wait. Oh, gee!"
Carried away by his fancies, Chub lay back on the ground and stared upward into the cottonwood branches above him, dreaming things Munchausen would never have dared to mention.
"Come back," said Matt dryly, "come back to earth, Chub. This is a practical old world, and I'm right up against it. That's why I'm thinking of Denver."