LUCK

INTRODUCTION, by Vella Munn

The short story “Luck,” which wasn’t published during Homer’s lifetime, focuses on issues he’d explored in “The Greater Miracle” and “No Fool.” All three touch on the possibility of life after death. His correspondence with his wife never touched on questions of immortality, but shortly before his death he took out a life insurance policy. This was because he expected to soon start a job that entailed elements of risk—driving daily over mountain roads.

Chances are the stories were more than simple fiction because when he was only twenty-six, Homer wrote his father the following:

“Facts regarding Immortality. There are none. There is plenty of assumption, plenty of semi-scientific data from the Spiritualists, and still more speculation via deduction from the facts of earthly life. But we have no absolute facts whatever. A fact is a statement of truth. To be convinced of a truth is a mental process which becomes emotional only when Desire enters into the case. Sometimes conviction follows upon a desire to believe; and just as often it occurs as a result of Defiance—refusal to believe; the opposite of desire. In either case conviction occurs from being sentimentally forced to conclude that the person Desires to believe the Fact.”

Several months after his death, a sensational article in The Oakland Tribune capitalized on the theme:

THE MYSTERY ENVELOPING THE DEATH OF HOMER FLINT, FICTION WRITER and began, “What killed Homer Eon Flint? And what relation did his end have to the daring, highly imaginative stories of visits to Mercury, Venus and other planets which he wrote for the magazines? Why was there a peaceful smile on his face in death?… Did he kill himself as a result of an overwhelming desire to visit the mystery world that lies beyond the pale? His works have been saturated with the occult…. A letter written to a friend seems to make more reasonable the conclusion that he deliberately killed himself in the most spectacular fashion by driving off the embankment.”

LUCK

“Come right up,” I called down to him.

Now, the place where I do my writing isn’t a den, but a roost; a ten-by-twelve room perched atop of a water tower, or tank-house, as we call such structures out West. It means climbing three flights of steep, narrow, wind-swept stairs to reach me. I reason that if anybody wants to see me so badly that he’ll climb all the way up those stairs, I ought to make him welcome, even if he’s a bill collector.

I met the chap out on the landing. Not until then did I recognize him.

“Doc Scott! When did you get here?”

“Not two hours ago,” panted he. He paused to get his breath; and I noted how thin and worn he had become, how peculiarly aesthetic-looking, since his trip to the South. He went on:

“When I reached my apartments just now I found something that changed all my plans. I thought it wisest to hunt you up at once. And I think you’ll agree with me when—well, here!” and he handed over a large, legal-size envelope, containing a single sheet of closely typewritten material.

I gave it a hurried little reading. Details will fit best into this account a little further on. I returned the manuscripts without any attempt to camouflage my intense interest.

“Well, Doc?”

“I take it that you’re with me in this, F.”

“Absolutely!”

“Then come right along. Shut up your desk; put on your hat and come. Don’t ask questions. I’ve figured out exactly how to proceed.”

Within him ten minutes he brought his roadster to a stop in front of the Second National Bank Building, the most important structure of its kind in Santa Josepha. We jumped out, and Dr. Scott took a large, square case of black metal from the compartment of his car. We stepped together to the elevator, taking care to avoid dropping our burden.

Inside of a minute our names had been taken in to young David Armstrong. I had known him by sight, only, up to that time. I now saw him to be very like his father, the late millionaire cattleman; spare of build, economical of words, the kind of man who knows the value of money and who makes every cent conform to an iron will. However, he was young and therefore modern.

“I have a proposition to make to you, Armstrong,” said my friend, without delay; “a proposition that should mean more to you than anything you have ever taken up with before in your life. Have you a full hour to spare?”

The young financier started to object; then, he thought better of it, as he reflected that the famous surgeon would not waste anybody’s time.

“Just a moment while I make some arrangements,” said he. An assistant or two were called and given some cryptic instructions. Then Armstrong faced the doctor. “Fire away!”

But Scott glanced at me.

“Suppose you do the honors, F.; that is, the gist of what has happened up to the time of my leaving for the South?”

I saw that the subject was still a painful one to Scott. I said:

“The story has already been published, Armstrong. Possibly you saw it, in one of the popular magazines; it came out in April of last year.”

“Fiction?”

“Yes and no. The facts were there, plus only just enough elaboration to—”

“I never read fiction, F.”

“Well, I’ll just sum it up in a word or two. First, did you ever know a Santa Josephan named John Carter?”

“No, I think not.”

“He died the same day that Scott went below. He wasn’t prominent in any way; he was an invalid for years. But he was well educated along standard lines, and in addition possessed an extraordinary knowledge of occult matters. I knew him fairly well; Scott, here, was his physician; he used to attend Avery’s church; and another of his friends was Whitney, the Second Ward boss.

“Now, our medical friend, here, used to be an infidel. Yes,” I insisted, as Armstrong glanced in open incredulity at Dr. Scott; “for years he held to the opinion that death ended all. He denied that the soul could survive the death of the flesh.

“But John Carter was a firm believer in immortality. Rather, I should say, he was intellectually convinced of it; his was no mere faith. It was a sound conviction based upon reason, not upon emotion.

“Well, Armstrong, John Carter changed Scott’s mind about it.”

Instantly Armstrong sensed the extraordinary significance of my statement. From that second his interest was of the deepest, in the startling proposition that an invalid scholar of the occult had persuaded a highly educated physician, a materialist with an exceptional intellect, to believe in the survival of the mind after death.

“How did he do it, F.?”

“He killed himself.”

Armstrong suddenly recoiled, and blinked, as though I had struck him with my fist instead of with a thought.

“Carter—killed himself!”

“Precisely. However, I should have sprung it less melodramatically than that. Let me give you some details:

“John Carter was convinced several years ago that, when his own body died, his mind would go right on living. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted to prove it to others; and especially did he want to prove it to sophisticated intellectuals like Scott. He searched high and low for a way by which he could convince such minds. Well—he found the way, Armstrong.”

“What did he discover?”

I reached out my hand, and Scott passed over the paper which he had shown to me a few minutes before. I gave one paragraph another reading, and said:

“Carter dabbled in what you might call the chemistry of the brain, and succeeded in insolating the elements which vitalize the particular group of cells that function in mental telepathy, or mind-reading. We found it possible to reproduce those chemical elements in a crude state, artificially. And, to put it in a sentence, he did this:

“He rigged up a typewriter which could be operated by his mind, after the death of his body.”

There was silence. Armstrong was thinking hard, trying to grasp the fuller meaning of this idea. He gave me and Scott a couple of keen glances, as though to make sure that we were not trifling with his credulity. Apparently he was satisfied.

“Well? Did it work, F.?”

“Yes, it worked. However, Carter didn’t rely upon that alone; he knew what sort of a mind the Dr. has, and he allowed for it. Also, Carter had done some rather original thinking along biological lines.

“So, before he died he wrote out a remarkable argument in favor of the survival of the mind after death. It was an argument that would appeal to a physician, more than to a layman. Probably you would not care to—”

“Let’s have it!”

I racked my mental thesaurus for concise words.

“Carter drew a parallel between physical birth and mental birth. That is, he compared the entrance to a newly-born infant into this world of ours, with the entrance of a mentality into the next world.

“He pointed out that the human infant, during the nine months preceding its birth, really does through the entire process of evolution, from the one-celled amoeba to the fully-developed babe. That is to say, the baby re-accomplishes as much in less than a year, as the entire human race has accomplished in millions of centuries. Quite a considerable stunt, that, in itself.

“But Carter’s main point was this: the unborn baby doesn’t breathe. It never draws breath, all the time that it’s in the womb. For nine months it’s like a fish in water.

“Then, all of a sudden, it’s born—just like taking a fish out of water. If you do that to a fish, it’ll die; but a baby doesn’t die—it lives! It gets away with it, Armstrong; it breathes, right from the word ‘go,’ and continues to breathe without a stop until its three-score-years-and-ten.

“Now, that’s going some, Armstrong, when you stop to think of it. It’s a genuine miracle.

“But until Carter pointed it out, nobody considered it a miracle. It was too commonplace. It’s happening all the time. We take it for granted.

“But when you remember that the human infant is the most helpless of all created things, and yet it manages somehow to survive the terrific change from life-in-the-womb to life-in-the-air, you see that Carter had a powerful—”

But Armstrong’s eyes had lighted up; his mind had run ahead of my words.

“I get you! He reasoned that, if a helpless infant could survive the loss of the womb (and every last one of us did it!) then we—that is, our minds—ought to survive the loss of our skulls!”

“Precisely! Carter figured that a strong, conscious, striving mind must inevitably survive so-called death. In fact, he considered the birth of a child to be a far greater miracle than the birth of a mind into the next world.”

Yet Armstrong didn’t rush to a decision. With the caution of a sound business mind, he said:

“I’ll think it over. It sounds good, yet—”

“You see, it all happened on the afternoon that Carter took the overdose of sedative and committed suicide. Scott had just finished reading the argument, in fact, when he learned that Carter was dead. And Carter had been clever enough to leave his manuscript unfinished; it lacked just one sentence of being completed.

“Well, within a single minute of Carter’s death, his typewriter—this specially arranged machine that he had tinkered with until it was so delicately balanced that a breath would operate it, and doped, too, with this chemical find of his—this typewriter suddenly began to perform. It typed away for several seconds, without a living soul nearer than ten foot.

“After it had stopped, we discovered—”

“That Carter had finished the sentence!”

It was Scott who said this, with an explosive suddenness that told him how emotionally powerful the experience still remained with him. And without sparing his own feelings in the slightest, he rushed on:

“I had been a fool, Armstrong—worse, a beast! I had been engaged to be married; but Lydia died, and with her I buried all my hopes. I lost all faith in a life hereafter.

“Well, because of my conviction that death would end everything, I began to live the life of a damned libertine! I went in for pleasure of the grossest sort, for the simple reason that I didn’t expect any future happiness!

“But Carter’s argument turned me square round. I couldn’t deny the points he had made; and as for the way he clinched it, on his typewriter, within a minute of his death—that settled it, Armstrong!

“I became a different man. I dropped the bestiality for good. Not only that, but—well, it was this way:

“I had been taking the most particular care of my health. I had refused to touch any case that would endanger my life even remotely; you see, I was banking on the idea that I must make this one life last as long as possible, because I didn’t hope for another life to come.

“But Carter made me see that my mind was dead sure to survive my body, whether I wanted it to or not. And believe me, I certainly was willing, once that I saw it was possible!

“It meant—Lydia!” He choked, and added: “It meant—we weren’t to be parted—eternally; but—I shall find her waiting—when I pass over.”

As he said this, Scott’s face became transformed. Never again shall I see a man look so much like an angel. It was an exaltation such as only the saints know; and in my mind, at least, Dr. Scott will always be a saint.

Armstrong understood, or seemed to. He spoke in a tone of respect and sympathy:

“Small wonder you worked so hard, during the plague down South, Scott. You had nothing to worry about. In fact, I suppose you wouldn’t have minded if—”

He stopped, abruptly aware that he was treading upon sacred ground. But Scott was determined not to spare himself, in order to make the other understand.

“Wouldn’t have minded? Man, I’d have welcomed the plague! Don’t you see that I went there in the hope and expectation that I’d never come back?”

I think that I must have held my breath for a minute. I felt that I was suffocating. I was enormously glad when Armstrong broke the tension.

“I think I get your viewpoint, Doctor. You’re back here, and you’ve got an unusually solid philosophy of life behind you. I’m highly interested to know what your project can be.”

Scott drew a long breath, as of immense relief. He gave me a swift glance of gratitude for what I had done to help him along. And without further ado, he took the cover from the heavy, black case which he and I had brought up with us.

It revealed John Carter’s typewriter; an ordinary-looking machine of popular make, remarkable only for the delicacy of its scientifically adjusted mechanism, and for the extra wide carriage which permitted the writing of double the usual number of words to the line.

“Put a piece of paper into it,” directed Scott.

Armstrong took a sheet of bond from his desk, and did as he was bid. Scott moved the carriage of the machine over the extreme right, to the starting point of a line. Then he replaced the cover.

“Listen,” said he, as though to himself: “All right, Carter!”

There was a second’s hush. Next, the typewriter began to tick away, exactly as though someone were inside that cover, operating the thing.

Presently the sounds ceased. Scott removed the cover. The carriage now rest at the extreme left. Scott took out the paper and handed it to Armstrong.

The younger man’s eyes were bulging, but he kept his composure. He read the line of typing which the formerly blank paper now held:

Ask Scott to show you the instructions which I willed to him with this machine. —John Carter

In silence Scott passed over the sheet of manuscript which I had already seen. Armstrong read it, and read it again. And as the unprecedented import of that document sank into his mind, his eyes dilated, his breath shortened, and the color left his face. In the end, he stared at us like a man possessed.

“Good Lord!” he whispered, shakily. “Good Lord!”

Then he gave a hysterical little laugh, the laugh of a man to whom has been given one of the world’s greatest ideas, an idea so immense that it seemed almost absurd: Carter’s six-fold project.

“Oh, great heavens!” cried Armstrong, in sheer rapture. “What a corking achievement!”

“Are you game to take hold?” inquired Scott, evenly.

“Game! Game?—Say, I wouldn’t miss this, if it cost me twenty years of my life! It’s the greatest stunt the world has ever known!”

* * * *

I doubt if Grace Williams ever knew that John Carter, living, had loved her. She was too much interested in someone else.

The “someone else” was Dan McAllister, a chap of about the same age as Carter had been, but of an entirely different type. Dan and Grace had attended the same school as John; the three had been well acquainted. This much I found out without difficulty, by reading the papers that Carter had left for Scott and by making a few inquiries.

It was not so easy to find out the rest. In a word, I learned that Grace, now a woman in her late thirties, had been engaged to Dan McAllister for over fifteen years.

That they hadn’t got married was due entirely to him and yet was not his fault. I explain this by describing the man as an impractical dreamer, an inventor, a poet to whom a bare existence was quite sufficient provided only there remained enough to pay for his beloved experimenting.

If Dr. Scott could be called the hero of the previous account, then perhaps Dan is the main figure in this.

Always success lay just ahead. Always Dan talked of the particular invention that he happened to be at work upon just then. When that proved a success, all would be well and glorious; a little more tinkering, a little more perfecting, and then—

But he never perfected things. He was forever starting new ideas, only to drop them before they were fully developed. The trouble was Dan stood too far in advance of his time. He worked on airplanes years before the Wright brothers; and he would have succeeded, but for lack of a suitable motor. Always he was too early in the field; and invariably he grew tired and discouraged before the time was ripe.

Meanwhile Grace taught school.

It was the best thing that she could do. By nature motherly, she just simply had to care for children; she couldn’t help it. And for lack of some of her own, she mothered other women’s.

And, at thirty-eight, she was still a fine-looking woman.

But Dan didn’t feel that he was doing her an injustice by keeping her waiting. He wanted her to feel that she had drawn a prize, not a blank, when they finally were married. And no man worked harder than he.

“Genius is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration,” he quoted a famous inventor. “I’d work my head off to make you proud of me, Grace!”

How could she answer that? It was true. All she could say was this:

“Somehow you are unlucky, Dan. You never seem to hit upon the right thing to invent. You’ve got poor luck.”

“Luck!” he laughed. “There’s no such thing, Gracie! Hard work is what wins out—not luck!”

Well, anyway, Number One on John Carter’s list was the case of Grace Williams and Dan McAllister.

The very next morning after our consultation with young Armstrong, Dam McAllister was called to the phone. It was the financier.

“Hello; Mr. McAllister? This is David Armstrong. I want to have a talk with you. Can you arrange it right away?”

Any other man in the state would have jumped at the chance to “have a talk” with the millionaire. But the inventor cast an anxious glance over his shoulder at a retort which he had just left simmering, and gave a dubious answer:

“I don’t know about it, Mr. Armstrong. I’ve got a new experiment under way, and I don’t like to leave—”

“That’s just what I want to talk to you about: a new experiment!”

Dan woke up.

“D’you mean it?”

“Of course!”

“Say—I’ll be with you as soon as I can make it!”

Half an hour later he had finished telling the millionaire all about that invention. In the end Armstrong shook his head.

“McAllister—you’re sincere, and all that, but you haven’t got good judgment. A machine to travel to the moon! Man—what’s the sense in that?”

Dan looked dazed.

“Why, it would be a wonderful stunt, Armstrong. Think of the honor and the benefits to—”

“If it worked.”

“Oh, it’ll work, all right! All it needs is the proper compound, and a little ex—”

“All it needs,” emphatically, “is several hundred years of patient investigation! Some day men will travel to the moon, Mac; but science isn’t far enough advanced yet. The sooner you realize that, the better!”

“You think I’d better give it up?” dismayed.

“Of course! Work on some invention that’s practical; something that you can realize upon immediately!”

Dan sighed. He had heard the same advice before. Previously, he had disregarded it; but, coming from a success like Armstrong—there must be something in it.

“Well,” relinquished Dan, “what would you advise me to invent?”

For reply, Armstrong took out his wallet, and abstracted a slip of paper. He handed it to Dan.

There was simply one line of typewriting. It ran:

Invent a new match. —J.C.

* * * *

Nature has often been remarked for her way of trying to even things up. Sometimes the compensation is in one direction, sometimes in another. In Stanley Wentworth’s cast, Nature had hoped to substitute an inherited half-million for a twisted back.

The compensation was satisfactory, so far as the cripple himself was concerned. It was anything but satisfactory to others.

For Wentworth’s contorted body was reflected, somehow, in a mind similarly askew. He didn’t see things in what we call a human light. He viewed all things cold-bloodedly.

To him, the proposition of asking Grace Williams to be his wife was quite an unemotional thing. He viewed the matter neither as adventure not as a lark. He had no illusions about honoring Grace with the proposal; neither did he feel the slightest thrill in the situation. He was only half a man and he knew it.

No; the proposal was purely business.

“I suppose McAllister has told you,” said he, in his steely tones, “that I have loaned him several sums of money for his experimenting?”

“Yes, Stanley. He often says how kind you are, to give him so much time, and—”

“I have decided to call in those loans.”

He waited for her to feel the full force of this blow. Then he observed:

“It occurs to me that perhaps you would prefer that I do not turn the matter over to the sheriff. Possibly you would rather that McAllister did not lose his equipment. Doubtless it would ruin him. If you would care to interest yourself in his fate—”

“Stanley! What do you mean?”

“Really, you are the only person who can alter the problem. If you will agree to marry me, I will not only cancel those loans of McAllister’s, but even advance a little more for—”

Whereupon Grace got up and fled from him. Had she remained a second longer, she would have fought the man. Always she had hated his cold-bloodedness; but this—this was ghastly of him.

And yet, when she got off by herself and thought it over, a little more calmly, she saw it in a different light.

Like every other normal person, Grace was really two individuals in one. There was a Grace who allowed herself to indulge in girlish dreams at times; dreams of romance, and of an abiding, overwhelming love. It was this Grace that had promised to wed Dan McAllister.

The other Grace was practical. This Grace saw no hope in the future, as things now stood. Dan was no nearer to marriagability than he had been fifteen years before; while the profession of teaching was slipping from bad to worse, her own small income becoming steadily smaller. For years she had known this, had known that she was getting tired of her work, that middle age would soon be upon her.

And now—ruin for Dan, unless she married Wentworth!

In her misery she blamed herself for having failed to assert herself, earlier in the engagement. She blamed herself for not having set a time limit upon the waiting. Had she done so, Dan might have taken a brace he might—

But all that was past.

She had heard things about Wentworth. He had had a score of housekeepers, none of whom stayed very long. Not that he was cruel or niggardly; it wasn’t that. But one of the women was rumored to have said that it was like caring for a snake, or some grotesque, misshapen horned-toad.

It is a pity that Grace was not more of a coward. Had she not so much courage, or had she loved Dan less—

But she consented to marry her lover’s creditor.

Nobody knows just how the inventor took the news. The announcement was made shortly after his memorable call upon young Armstrong. A neighbor of Dan’s told me that he did not experimenting for seven days and nights; after which, perhaps in a feverish, desperate attempt to forget, he delved once more in his laboratory and shop.

The wedding was to take place in the middle of the following month. Stanley Wentworth would doubtless have preferred a much earlier date, but Grace wanted to finish teaching her term. It was enough to undertake such an obligation, without breaking another.

As for Dan, he took back his ring without a murmur. Oh, I suppose he made some small protest, probably telling Grace about the advice that Armstrong had given him, and telling her of his progress towards perfecting a new match.

But he didn’t have much faith in his own proposition. To man of his ingenuity it seemed altogether too simple. A match! He was half-ashamed of it even as he told about it. And he wasn’t surprised to hear Grace—the practical, not the dreaming, Grace—say something like this:

“Why, what a strange idea! Mr. Armstrong may be a clever businessman, but his judgment must be wrong this time! What’s the sense in perfecting a new match, when the market already is flooded with varieties?”

“Just what I tried to tell him, but I couldn’t make him back down. He insisted that he was absolutely certain, a successful new match would be salable.”

“What made him so sure?”

“I don’t know. He had it all written down on a slip of paper; and from the way he handled that paper, you’d think that it was a tip direct from heaven.”

Now, what prompted Dan to choose such words?

Well, he went back to his workshop, and Grace, to her uncompleted term. Wentworth engaged a Jap to clean up his house, pending the arrival of his partner-to-be.

As for Dr. Scott, Armstrong and myself, we went about our usual activities, and once or twice got together and compared guesses. It was impossible for us to understand the strange command that Armstrong had passed on to Dan. It didn’t seem like good sense. A new match? What for?

John Carter’s typewriter gave no sign.

The week of Grace’s marriage arrived. The first day or so passed by, without any change in the situation. Then, one morning—

Dan burst into Armstrong’s office.

Under his arm was a package. He tore it open, like mad, and showed the young millionaire what it contained.

Whereupon Armstrong experienced a genuine sensation. A single glance showed him that the dreamer had dreamed the right dream at last. Within a few minutes Armstrong was “talking turkey” over the long distance phone, to the manager of the country’s largest match factory.

Two more days passed. Then, the manager phoned back to Armstrong.

It was the day of Grace’s wedding. I would rather not go into details; such things stir up the morbid in my nature, and I make it a rule not to tamper with that. I must leave it to the reader to imagine Grace’s preparations for an event that was to mean so much to her, which was to mark the dropping of all her ambitions, the abandoning of all her dreams—her silent sacrifice for Dan’s sake.

And while she was making ready, Dan and Armstrong sat in conference with Dr. Scott and me. Armstrong had just finished reading a telegram.

“He says that he’s mailed the check,” went on the young millionaire, “and that it’ll reach us promptly. I’m satisfied that it will. The deal is closed!”

He pressed a button. A clerk came, and brought a wide, flat book. Armstrong took out his fountain-pen. He said:

“Mac, I want to be first to congratulate you upon your good luck!”

“Luck!” echoed the inventor. “Why, if you think it wasn’t sheer, downright work, to perfect that match, then you are very much—”

“I know.” The millionaire looked up from what he was writing to smile at Scott and me. “We three happen to be very much aware that you’re not entitled to too much praise. But we’ll not quarrel about it, Mac. Here!”

It was Armstrong’s personal check for an even hundred thousand.

Dan sat as though frozen, for a minute or so. Then his glace fell upon the clock, and he remembered something. He shot to his feet.

“Wait,” said Scott, holding out a hand. Dan paused, stammering foolishly as he tried to express his thanks and explain his hurry, all at once. Scott reassured him: “It’s all right; the wedding isn’t scheduled until noon, and it’s only ten thirty. You’ll make it all right.”

“Just wait a minute!”

Dan watched curiously as Scott went to the typewriter, which we had brought up with us again. Off came the cover, and in went two slips of paper together with a sheet of carbon. Then he replaced the cover.

“All right, John,” in a low voice.

Dan’s eyes opened wide as the machine performed there before him. And they opened still wider when Scott, without stopping to read what had been written, handed him one of the two slips of paper.

“Read it when you get time, Dan, and good luck!” he called, as the inventor sped for the door.

There were just two things I wanted to know. First, I said to Armstrong:

“What was the invention? And how can we account for its success?”

Armstrong took a match-safe from his vest pocket and passed it over. I opened it, and shook out some of the contents.

It was something we all know well enough today: the double-topped match.

What a simple thing, after all! Merely a stick of wood a half-inch longer than an ordinary match, but dipped into the mixture at both ends instead of at one; that was all. And yet, could anything be more practical? Who doesn’t remember the old matches, of which you always had to take two, in case one should fail to ignite, or the head fly off? Today, one match with two “business” ends does the trick!

And—it was Dan McAllister’s luck to invent it.

“Still, it would never have been a success,” said the financier, “if it hadn’t been for something peculiar that came up a few days ago. It seems that the two chief match factories sued one another, claiming infringement of process. Each got out an injunction against the other; with the result that production was shut off in both plants.

“Dan McAllister’s idea came along just in time to save the day for the main factory.”

Scott and I looked at one another significantly. I avoided glancing at the machine. I knew that Scott had placed a fresh piece of paper into position, but I said nothing about that. I remarked:

“These injunctions, Armstrong: you heard nothing about them until a few days ago?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you give Dan? Let’s see the carbon copy?”

Armstrong and I read it together. It ran:

“Treat her right, Dan, or I’ll make you do it. And never let he know about my hand in this—John Carter.”

We gazed at each other without speaking for another half minute. Then, without warning, the typewriter began to tick.

That is what it turned out:

“You fellows are good workers. Now, for Number Two on my list! J.C.”

Scott jumped to his feet.

“Are you with me, boys?”

“Absolutely!” said we, in the same breath.