“So it appears.”
“Then, we want to keep in the lead. The Swift Construction Company ought to put out a boat that will lead them all, even if we never make a penny out of it.”
“Don’t talk that way!” urged Ned. “Our books have got to show a balance on the right side at the end of the year. Go ahead. Do all the experimenting you want. But in the end, Tom Swift, I shall expect you to evolve something that will pay the company big.”
In secret Tom believed that was exactly what he should do. But he did not like to be too sanguine. After all, a good many of the ideas he had evolved regarding the new invention were so embryonic that he hesitated to go into particulars about them with Ned, or even with his father.
Barton Hopkins had been a dreamer, like his son, in his younger days. But age usually makes a man critical. Tom did not want anybody to tell him a thing could not be done until he had tried it out himself and was satisfied that it was impossible.
During these days after the departure of Mr. Damon and Mary’s father for Denmark Tom lived in a good deal of a mental haze. He allowed nothing, at least, to interfere any more with his consideration of the new invention. Rad Sampson declared that the younger Swift was so absorbed by his work that he did not know what he ate half the time.
“Dat boy sartain sure work hisself sick,” grumbled the old colored man. “Dem things he is playin’ wid take all his mind off’n ’portant things. Suah do!”
To Rad the pleasures of the table were far more important than the building of a flying boat that was to astonish the world.
“Some shingles an’ pigs’ bladders and pieces of string—huh!” grumbled Rad. “Let dis yere Koku play wid ’em. They jest de sort ob things childern and heathens plays wid. I’s ’shamed of Mars’ Tom.”
The model Tom had built upon his bedroom table, however, was all that Rad saw of the flying boat. It was merely a rough suggestion of what the young inventor hoped the Winged Arrow would be when it was done. In one of the locked rooms attached to his office suite at the works he was working out in full detail the mysterious seaplane.