“Won’t I?” he rejoined defiantly, taking me with entire seriousness and developing a flash of opposition in his eyes. “No, he won’t, either. I’ve had that done to me before, but it won’t happen this time. I know the tricks of them sharps. I’ve got all this patented. The last time I only had my application in. That’s why I’m out here on this road today interducin' this myself. I lost the other company I was interested in. But I’m going to take better care of this one. I want to see that it gets a good start.”
He seemed a little like an animated scarecrow in his mood.
“Oh, I know,” I continued dolefully, but purely in a jesting way, “but they’ll get you, anyhow. They’ll swallow you whole. You’re only a beginner; you’re all right now, so long as your business is small, but just wait until it looks good enough to fight for and they’ll come and take it away from you. They’ll steal or imitate it, and if you say anything they’ll look up your past and have you arrested for something you did twenty or thirty years ago in Oshkosh or Oskaloosa. Then they’ll have your first wife show up and charge you with bigamy or they’ll prove that you stole a horse or something. Sure—they’ll get it away from you,” I concluded.
“No, they won’t either,” he insisted, a faint suspicion that I was joking with him beginning to dawn on him. “I ain’t never had but one wife and I never stole any horses. I’ve got this patented now and I’ll make some money out of it, I think. It’s the best soap”—(and here as he thought of his invention once more his brow cleared and his enthusiasm rose)—"the most all-round useful article that has ever been put on the market. You gentlemen ought really to take a thirty-cent bottle"—he went back and produced a large one—"it will last you a lifetime. I guarantee it not to soil, mar or injure the finest fabric or skin. Cornmeal is the chief ingredient and eight other chemicals, no alkali[alkali]. I wish you’d take a few of my cards"—he produced a handful of these—"and if you find anyone along the road who stands in need of a thing of this kind I wish you’d just be good enough to give ’em one so’s they’ll know where to write. I’m right here in Binghamton. I’ve been here now for twenty years or more. Every druggist knows me."
He looked at us with an unconsciously speculative eye—as though he were wondering what service we would be to him.
Franklin took the cards and gave him fifteen cents. Speed was still washing his hands, some new recalcitrant spots having been discovered. I watched the man as he proceeded to his rattletrap vehicle.
“Well, gentlemen, I’ll be saying good day to you. Will you be so kind as to return that pan to that lady up there, when you’re through with it? She was very accommodating about it.”
“Certainly, certainly,” replied Franklin, “we’ll attend to it.”
Once he had gone there ensued a long discussion of inventors and their fates. Here was this one, fifty years of age, if he was a day, and out on the public road, advertising a small soap which could not possibly bring him the reward he desired soon.
“You see, he’s going the wrong way about it,” Franklin said. “He’s putting the emphasis on what he can do personally, when he ought to be seeing about what others can do for him; he should be directing as a manager, instead of working as a salesman. And another thing, he places too much emphasis upon local standards ever to become broadly successful. He said over and over that all the druggists and automobile supply houses in Binghamton handle his soap. That’s nothing to us. We are, as it were, overland citizens and the judgments of Binghamton do not convince us of anything any more than the judgments of other towns and crossroad communities along our route. Every little community has its standards and its locally successful ones. The thing that will determine actual success is a man’s ability or inability to see outside and put upon himself the test of a standard peculiar to no one community but common to all. This man was not only apparently somewhat mystified when we asked him what scheme he had to reach the broader market with his soap; he appeared never to have approached in his own mind that possibility at all. So he could never become more than partially successful or rich.”