CHAPTER VII

The 51st Percent

Carr Halsey looked unbelievingly at his uncle:

“You don’t mean to tell me, Uncle, that Orski had a gyro or heli come down on Abner Hemingway in those New Guinea mountains?”

“Exactly. The mission of that gyro is not in the newspaper stories which appeared in last Sunday’s paper, for the Australian lawyer who traveled in it has kept a close mouth. But I have all the facts concerning it, thanks to that Miss Flower in Orski’s offices—or rather thanks to her and her sister who has kept me apprised of things. On the morning Orski won the Billy Shilt-Higgins stock, and therefore had 49 percent, he cabled the governing British magistrate at Port Moresby, Oliver Barwick, for a gyro and a lawyer who could make a landing at the Hemingway camp in the Ogwali district. This Barwick refused, knowing the exact conditions under which the expedition was working. So Orski cabled to Somerset, Cape York Peninsula, on the very northern tip of Australia; there he hired a huge gyro and a pilot who knew New Guinea from coast to coast, tip to tip, and an Australian lawyer named Max Sny, capable of drawing up any kind of legal transfer; he provided Sny with full data of what was wanted, and armed him with a cabled letter of credit up to £6,000, with generous expense money as well for a double armed guard provided with machine guns, and empowered them to make a landing. The big gyro headed the short distance across Torres Straits, and climbed for altitude. They spotted the Hemingway Camp at last through their binoculars, and the pilot’s knowledge of the Ogwali district, and they dropped to a fair landing. Sny, following instructions, tried to buy Abner’s stock, all the way up to the £6,000—$30,000—but the latter refused absolutely to deal with him, or even to discuss the matter. In fact, he was, I understand, fearfully put out. The party left at last utterly unsuccessful. Within less than an hour—even before the Australian gyro had gotten back to Somerset—a terrified short-wave message was coming in to the Port Moresby station, telegraphed by Abner’s head gunboy, a native Papuan named Kulumadi, who spoke English and could operate the set, that the cannibals were attacking the little party, they were besieged, and that Abner Hemingway had been killed as belonging to the tribe of Master Bird Devils and having betrayed the Ogwali by stealing their innermost secrets for the Great Devil himself. The British magistrate at Port Moresby—yes, this Oliver Barwick—immediately sent up two huge armed gyro planes; they flew west at high speed, swooped down at last, and rescued the little party in distress, scattering the cannibals through the mountains. They got Abner’s body—he’d been shot in the heart from behind with an arrow from the typical Papuan short bow, and also transfixed clear through his body by two spears, also hurled from behind, and—no, Carr, the body hadn’t been eaten—it was ‘mugfa’—and they brought it to the coast.” Roger Halsey opened the drawer of his desk, and held up a telegram. “This wire is from the president of the Sheridan, Wyoming, Trust Company, a Mr. Tyson Waller, whose name and name of his company were found in Abner’s papers at Port Moresby as being most intimately connected with his estate and business affairs. They have obviously gotten in touch with his lawyer, McElligott, and the latter in turn has given them our name here as being somewhat intimately involved in Abner’s affairs. At any rate, Waller informs me that they have just this morning received a complete and correctly executed legal proof-of-death from the British magistrate at Port Moresby, by combination air mails across the South Sea Island air-mail route to Easter Island, thence to Valparaiso, Chile, and thence over South America to the United States, a quicker way, of course, than the tortuous Oriental coast route and across to Vancouver via the Aleutian Island chain. And this proof-of-death, I regret mighty deeply to say, ends conclusively the matter of Abner Hemingway and his infinitesimal stock ownership in our American Projectiscope Company here.”

“Well,” commented Carr Halsey, “all I can say is that it is too bad. Too bad that the world has to lose a man with specialized knowledge such as he had—and that you, in turn, should lose a friend. I’d say that Orski ought to be horsewhipped for monkeying in a delicate matter of life and death like that was—for trying to inject finance where he’d already been turned down flat once, and where a man’s life and career were involved in the bargain. He ought to be—well—it’s done now. And so that brings us back again to the hare and hound chase. Who, then, is Abner Hemingway’s legal heir? Have you dug this out of his lawyer? Is there a will? If there is, I see a long year of probate—a—a—what did you call it a while back?—a cow on the track.”

“Carr, it’s a shame to waste a mind like yours on the newspaper game. You should even have been a lawyer yourself—or have been in business.” Roger Halsey paused. “Yes, there’s an heir. But there’s no probate, no tie-up of Abner’s estate, not even for a day. As I told you, there was a gold-digger, this Miss ‘Babe’ Gilly, who threw Abner over and thus caused him to go off to New Guinea. Well, the facts are now at hand why she did this—and what steps he took to find out conclusively whether she loved him for himself alone—which she didn’t! Even his lawyer McElligott knows nothing of all this; up to last Sunday evening, most certainly, and probably right now, the only information obtainable from him is that he definitely knows there is no will—and also that so far as he knows Abner had no relatives living. But now, as I say, certain other facts are available to us. When Abner suspected that this chit was marrying him to get a dower interest in what little he had, he went to his friend, this Tyson Waller, president of the Sheridan Trust Company, and secretly deeded everything he had in the world, his tiny ranch and his few stocks and bonds, to a trust. The trust provided that so long as he was alive, he—and he alone—could sign an order at any time for a sale of any part of the trust at anything above par, or above tax valuation, and the money from that sale would in turn become part of the trust. In case of his death, however, the trust was payable immediately in toto to a co-holder in it—his heir, if you wish to term him thus—a nephew, one Clifford X. Hemingway—the X, as it appears, stands for Xenophon, who was, you know, a Greek historian and soldier of around 400 B.C.—and this Clifford Xenophon Hemingway was, at the time of the execution of this trust, set down in it as being a student in the University of Wisconsin, at Madison, Wisconsin, and then 22 years old—of legal age himself, I want to impress upon you, Carr, to sign papers of any kind.”

“I get you,” nodded the younger man quickly, “Then Clifford Hemingway—or Clifford X. Hemingway, to be precise—not only owns that stock this morning—but can convey it to anybody he wishes.” He mused, with brow in a frown. “And so the blond gold digger went a-flying when her ‘daddy’ showed her a copy of his trust agreement which cut her out of her dower rights.” He smiled a bit dryly. “And now, Uncle, to make the story sufficiently dramatic, Clifford Hemingway is at present on a drunk, or on a North Pole expedition.”

Roger Halsey shook his head.

“You’re correct only on the matter of the blond gold digger. She did go a-flying; and Abner went a-sailing, southward on the Oceana. As for Clifford Xenophon Hemingway, I only wish he were on a drunk—or on a North Pole expedition. Because nobody knows where he is. See? He’s evidently a queer chap himself, a bit like his cannibal-hunting uncle. He’s been considerable of a rover, I deduce. At any rate, it seems that when he was passing through Wyoming some two years ago, he read something in a newspaper he had concerning an ethnological discovery, or theory, or something, as given to the press by Abner Hemingway, living at Sheridan. He wasn’t far from there, and so stopped off and saw him. They found immediately by comparing notes and family history what the nephew evidently already knew—that they were related. Abner Hemingway even brought him in to the Sheridan Bank and proudly introduced him to the president of the Sheridan Trust Company as his nephew. A personable young chap he was, at least I am given to understand. At any rate when, two years later, Abner was drawing up this trust agreement, he was advised by the banker to put in an alternative holder so that the trust could be terminated automatically in case of his death. Evidently the name of this nephew was about the only logical name Abner had to put in. He had, moreover—Waller tells me this—just received a souvenir picture postcard from the wanderer a month before. The nephew was now a student, the latter wrote, at the University of Wisconsin. So Abner wrote Clifford Hemingway’s name in, giving the latter’s address as then being ‘Care of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.’ But water has gone over the mill since then, Carr—much water—and in the meantime Clifford Hemingway graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Science—six full weeks ago—and left the University. His whereabouts are utterly unknown to them, but are supposedly Chicago as he was heard to mention that he thought of going on to Chicago when he got his sheepskin.

“We can’t get a single line on his relatives, if he has any. Nor Abner’s relatives, either, strange to say. Abner’s lawyer didn’t even know that Abner had any; and the banker friend likewise didn’t either, other than the nephew Abner dug up and brought into the bank. In making up his biographical data for Who’s Who in America, Abner listed only his scientific attainments. He felt, at least so he told me on the dude ranch out West where I first met him, that a Who’s Who notice shouldn’t be a blatant family history. But some years later, when he was passing through here on a trip East, we touched again on the subject, and he sheepishly confided to me that some progenitor, not far removed and not far back either, had been involved in some silly world-wide scandal that had rocked every country on the globe with laughter—and that should he have given his full family connections to Who’s Who some reporter would have found, in a jiffy, a very nice salacious story to tack up to his eminent self as ethnologist. As for his stock in this company, he merely acquired it in a purchase of several different stocks from a Sheridan, Wyoming, hardware merchant; that’s how, you know, I happened originally to ride out from the dude ranch where I was staying, and see our new stockholder. And as for Clifford Hemingway, he has followed the identical policy of reticence that his uncle followed—all I can say is that that scandal in the Hemingway family must have been unusually silly and unusually salacious—anyway, be refused to fill out, on his registration card at the University, where he was born or came from—or who his nearest relatives were if he ever had any. He told the Dean that he’d done that at the last college where he studied for his first two years, and the facts of this ‘silly scandal’—queerly, Carr, he used the identical expression Abner used to me—had been connected up to him, and that he’d been the butt thereafter of every student in the place until he got out. He must have been very sensitive, I believe. Anyway, instead of producing credits from this school, he took an examination as to his prerequisites—and passed it.

“That’s positively all the information the registrar or Dean of the ‘U’ can give us. When I found a long wire here early Monday morning from this Waller, the president of the Sheridan Trust Company, sent me Sunday night after the story of Abner’s death had broken in Sunday’s papers—he, you see, had gotten in touch over Sunday with Abner’s lawyer and had thus learned that we here were vitally interested in Abner’s estate—when, as I say, I got a long wire assuring me that the details of this trust agreement could and would be kept absolutely secret by him for a few days or even a week yet, I sent Babson at once post-haste to Madison, Wisconsin, by plane to get all he could on Clifford Hemingway. I had him get a local lawyer to do the actual investigating, and, moreover, to do it immediately, and Babson kept his and our name out of it. I didn’t want the least semblance of a newsstory to break that we here in Chicago might be looking for a Clifford Hemingway. That would—so I figured then—have been a warm lead for Orski, and would have placed him neck and neck with us. But as I say, the lawyer had to report to Babson that the ‘U’ knows nothing—nothing whatever. What classmates of Clifford Hemingway’s who are still at the ‘U’ taking summer courses know nothing about him either. The landlady, a Mrs. Spottsman of 820 Johnson Street, whom he lived with during the whole time he was at Madison, reports that he lived alone, and never, during all that time, received any mail. He never talked of relatives, in fact; so I rather suspect, Carr, that outside of his uncle he just didn’t have any. Anyway, that was the impasse that presented itself to us up in Madison. That—”

“But wait, Uncle! Did you think at all of investigating Underwood and Underwood, the great news-photo agency, who have the news photos—or at least the old card records—of everybody who’s ever been in news of any kind anywhere?”

His uncle nodded, but a little sheepishly: “Yes. Except that is—the suggestion came from Babson himself. And so, following that up, I got a report late Monday afternoon through a newspaperman I know, Jim Everhard, covering all the newspaper morgues in town, and all the news photo agencies. There hasn’t been any Hemingway, Carr, ever involved in any scandal, silly or otherwise, from breach-of-promise to anything else about which a person might be sensitive. Whoever the progenitor is who rocked a couple of continents with laughter, he must have had a different name—must be a step-brother—half-brother—step-uncle—half-uncle—or something. Not a lead of any sort developed there.” He paused. “So the precarious situation that now confronts us, Carr, is that the one man in America with ownership this morning of just enough stock to enable us to put through that Zell Process for a million dollars before our option on Hextite expires a week from today, is wandering somewhere in the United States, presumably though Chicago, not knowing he has any stock left him. And Orski—”

“But see here, Uncle, what is Orski’s game in this whole thing? You say you’ve got a secret lead into his offices through this Miss Flower. So you must have the correct lowdown on everything. What is his game? Why does he want to block this sale?”

“For the simple reason,” Roger Halsey replied, “that if he can block that sale till next Wednesday, he kills it. He intends then to acquire a 2-percent block of stock—just 2-percent is enough—from any of my people who are now signed up on that conveyance. That will he easy enough then, God knows. Why, those Popolos brothers, those Greek commission merchants from Detroit, who dropped off here this morning are frankly discouraged—they’ve got 3-percent together, and Gus, I’m certain, would sell his 2-percent for a big discount after next Wednesday. Well, anyway, as I say, Orski intends to acquire a 2-percent block of our shares for any price right up to even the proportionate part of this million dollar melon that the 2-percent of shares would have gotten—but didn’t! Then, as a 51-percent majority owner around here, he intends to sit calmly for 2 months—just 60 short days—till the irrevocability clause on that last 2-percent block of stock expires as to selling the Zell Process. With his entire 51-percent then clear of all entanglements, he intends, being then majority owner around here, to negotiate that sale to Consolidated all over again for the same old million dollars. Indeed, they’ll probably not even take the million out of escrow when they know that there’s to be only a slight delay; after all, we know they’re not ready to officially release their complete process till next September anyway. And thus the sale will go through—at a million dollars, yes—but during the coming August instead of during Sol.”

“Uncle, I must be terribly dense, or something. What is the difference, one way or the other, to you and me? You’ll still have your 30 percent stock and I’ll have my 10 percent. What does it matter which million dollars we cut into—or when?”

“No, Carr, you’re not dense, but you’re naturally somewhat of an infant in business, that’s all. For don’t you see, Orski intends to sell it next time as two independent entities, the Hextite crystal and the Zell Apparatus and Method for using the crystal. The Hextite crystal is to go in at $999,999, and the Zell Apparatus or Method for using it, at $1. For no less an authority, Carr, than the Supreme Court of the United States, declared, in 1939, in the two associated industrial cases, Feebron vs. American Textile Corporation and Feebron vs. Cudmore, that, where two inventive processes were each dependent one upon the other to achieve their result, so that one could not accomplish this result without the other, and the ownership of the two processes was in the same company, or was in two or more companies of which the majority ownership was represented by the same stockholders, and in such degree in each as corresponded to the majority needed to convey assets according to the State Laws under which each was incorporated, then—getting tired, Carr?—then the possibility of determining the absolute or relative value of each interdependent process was nil, and should be determined solely and only by a registered majority vote of the stockholders of the company or of the two or more holding companies, with identical majority ownerships.” Roger Halsey paused for breath after delivering this ponderous legal opinion created by the highest court in the land. “And don’t you see now, Carr, that Orski will have maneuvered a situation absolutely identical in every detail to that of Feebron vs. American Textile in conjuncto cum Feebron vs. Cudmore? Don’t you see that he—Alexis Orski—will constitute the majority ownership on both companies, Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company and American Projectiscope Company? Don’t you see now that the Supreme Court, beyond which there is no appeal on earth, has decreed that he and he alone therefore can vote the relative values of both processes—and let me assure you that is just what he intends to do, for this Miss Flower has taken down scads of dictated correspondence between him and his lawyers before she was let out last Saturday—he intends to vote the Hextite crystal in at $999,999 and our Zell Apparatus and Method of using it at $1. Now to show you a brief curiosity of mathematics. In other words, I’ll let you compare what he personally will get out of that million dollars in this newer method, as compared with what he’d get out of it if he helped us put it through right today, as things stand now, with the Ajax Company getting just its $100,000 payment on our option with it for Hextite.” Roger Halsey took from his desk drawer a narrow slip of blue paper with penciled figures on it. He shoved it over to his nephew, making but one significant remark. “Orski is, I think I told you, a 2/3 majority owner in Ajax Manufacturing Company.”

Carr Halsey bent his attention to the slip of paper. Its mathematics were simple indeed, too simple! It read:

ORSKI’S PERSONAL PROFITS OUT OF A MILLION

DOLLAR SALE

If sale is completed now:

2/3 of $100,000 (Hextite crystal melon for Ajax) plus 49% of $900,000 (Zell Method melon for American Projectiscope Company) $507,666.66

If sale is completed sixty days from now, with 2 percent additional American Projectiscope Company stock easily acquired at knockdown rates since Orski can perpetually block all sales; and with, therefore, new voted valuations of the two interdependent processes:

2/3 of $999,999 plus 51% of $1 $666,666,51

—————

Difference in favor of Orski $158,999.85

“Just a little matter,” Carr Halsey heard his uncle saying bitterly, “of $158,999.85 more—something to apply on that magnificent home he’s building on South Shore Drive to take the place of the bachelor apartment he’s always lived in on Greenwood Avenue. Now do you see it, Carr? Do you know of any easier way for a man to personally make $159,000 than to sit still and do nothing for 60 days? Do you see now, Carr, why he can afford to pay, at the end of that 60 days, for 2 percent of our then worthless stock, anything up to even $18,000, its very share of this present melon which he can forever keep it from participating in?”

“I do,” said the other. “I do indeed. And I see now at last where that thin dime comes in: My 10 percent dividend on that one dollar is a dime! Ow! A dime. Ten cents. Confound all the Supreme Courts in the world. Confound—well, Supreme Courts are Supreme Courts, I suppose. But I see everything now. A dime for me—if we don’t find Clifford Hemingway within a week and get him aboard that conveyance paper, or get his stock. Likewise, a dime for me if Orski finds him within a week, and gets his stock. Gad, Uncle, the cards are stacked against us—whether neither we nor Orski find him, or whether Orski does, we get it in the neck just the same.”

His uncle nodded.

“Then, Uncle, what steps have you taken for locating Clifford Hemingway? Of course you’ve started first of all by advertising generously in the personal columns of the newspapers, and you’ve used the missing-person broadcast that goes out—isn’t it over Station U-WX-L-19 every night at 8?”

His uncle smiled mirthlessly: “If you’d ever have taken the trouble, Carr, to tune in on that station—but I believe you told me when we last met that you were old-fashioned enough not to be very warm over radio intrusion—yes, that’s what you called it—intrusion into your privacy—I think you even said you longed for a woodburning fireplace, instead of an electric radiator—well, anyway, if you’d ever recently tuned in on that, you’d have heard from the announcer that it’s no longer sent out—and why. Indeed, it hasn’t been sent out now for many months. In fact,” he added cryptically, “we might say that thanks to President Jose Luis Rodriguez Almedo of Mexico, and the Cactus Giganticus Saccharinosus evolved from the unfinished notes of a man named Burbank who has been dead now for many years, and Article 52 of the Geneva Conference of 1939, you and I are prevented from launching the proper kind of search for our man right here in Chicago!”