out.”

“Well, I want a man, and I want him quick. You’re—er—not very well fixed just now, are you?”

“I haven’t a penny!” cried the other, passionately, surrendering to some clutching tide of alcoholic recklessness.

“Well, my hours wouldn’t kill you!” began the older man, fraternally.

“I’m sick of the sight of a key and sounder!”

“You’d rather do the Edison act in a Third Avenue garret, I s’pose—broodin’ round inventin’ electrical gimcrackery nobody wants and nobody’s goin’ to buy!”

“But I tell you somebody will want what I’m going to do—and somebody is going to pay money for it, and a heap of money, too!”

“What’ve you got?” inquired the older man, with the slightest curl of the lip. The younger man seemed nettled by the touch of contempt in the other’s voice.

“I’ve got an amplifier and I’ve got a transmitting camera—you needn’t laugh, for when I get a relay so sensitive that I can sit in a St. Louis office and send a message to London or Paris, or when I can send a drawing of a train wreck somewhere outside of San Francisco right through to New York, or telegraph a photo or a map or a sketch—why, I’ve got something that men are going to pay for, and pay well!”

“I’ve heard of ’em all before—in the dope page o’ the Sunday papers!”

“But I tell you I’ve got this transmitting camera! All I want is time and money to work it out, on the business side. Wait a minute, now, and let me explain. If you’ve operated a key you’ll understand it easily enough. You know what we call the Tesla currents, and you know what selenium is. Well, when I first tackled this thing, my problem was to get some special apparatus for reproducing the shadows and high-lights on, say, a photograph. I had to have a different flow of current for light and dark, to carry the impression from the transmitter to the receiver. Well, I found that selenium did the trick, for a peculiarity of that mighty peculiar metal is that it offers less resistance to a current when in the light than in the dark. My next problem was to control the light in the receiving camera. That’s where the Tesla currents came in, inducing the rays of vacuum pipes under the high tension. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, go on!” said the other man, impatiently. But his tone was lost on the young inventor, who, under the stress of his excitement, was leaning forward across the little table, gesticulating now and then with long and slender and strangely expressive fingers.

“Now, if I was telegraphing a photograph of you to Chicago, it would have to be in the form of a film, wrapped about a glass cylinder in the transmitter. Light would be thrown on it by means of a convex lens. Now, I cover the glass pipe with vulcanized rubber, or, say, with sealing wax, so that no rays get out, except through the one little window where they’ll fall on the film or the paper moving in front of it. Inside my cylinder is a lens containing selenium, where the rays fall after passing through the glass. But, pshaw, what’s all this to you?”

“Go ahead—I’m listenin’!”

“Well, as I was going to tell you, just so much light, or illumination, I ought to say, is given to the selenium cell as you’d see in the light and dark spots of the photograph. That, in turn, means a greater or less resistance offered to the electric current. Its energy is controlled automatically, of course, passing over the wire from the transmitter to the receiver, so that while the transmitting film is passing in front of the selenium at my end of the wire, the sealed tube of Tesla rays at the Chicago office is being moved before a receptive film at the far end of the wire. So the transmitted light escapes through the one little window, and records its impression on the film—and there you are!”

The other man put down his glass, unperturbed.

“Yes, here we are—but if there’s so many millions in this apparatus for you, what’s the use o’ hollerin’ it out to all Sixth Avenue? It’s fine! It sounds big! It’s as good as perpetual motion! But coming down to earth again, how’re you goin’ to get your funds to put all this pipe-dream through?”

“I’ll get them yet, some way, by hook or crook!” protested the younger man, in the enthusiasm of his fourth glass of bootlegger’s gin.

“Well, my friend, I’ll tell you one thing, straight out. Stick to me and you’ll wear diamonds! And until you’re gettin’ the diamonds, what’s more, you’ll be gettin’ your three square a day!”

It was the lip of the indignant Durkin that curled a little, as he looked at the glittering stud on the expansive shirt-front and the fat, bejewelled hand toying with the gin glass. Then he remembered, and became more humble.

“I’ve got to live!” he confessed, mirthlessly.

“Of course you have! And you’re a fool to go broke in the teeth of a cinch like this. First thing, though, how’d you ever come to get pinched by Doogan? Here, take another drink—hot stuff, eh! Now, how’d you ever come to get you’self pulled that fool way?”

“I had been living like a street cat, for a week. An Eighth Avenue manufacturing electrician I went to for work, took me up and showed me a wire on his back roof. He advanced me five dollars to short-circuit it for him. Doogan’s men caught me at it, and Doogan tried to make me out an ordinary overhead guerrilla.”

“Lightnin’-slinger, eh?”

“Yes, a lightning-slinger.”

“But I s’pose you notice that he didn’t appear against you?”

“Yes, I saw that! And that’s a part of the business I can’t understand,” he answered, puzzled by the stranger’s quiet smile.

“Say, Durkin, you didn’t think it was your good looks and your Fifth Avenue talkin’ got you off, did you?”

The younger man turned on him with half-angry eyes. But the stranger only continued to chuckle contentedly down in his throat.

“You remind me of a hen who’s just laid an egg!” cried Durkin, in a sudden flash of anger. The other brushed the insult carelessly aside, with one deprecatory sweep of his fat hand.

“Why, I had Doogan fixed for you, you lobster!” he went on, as easily and as familiarly as before. “You’re the sort o’ man I wanted—I saw that, first crack out o’ the box. And a friend o’ mine named Cottrell happens to stand pat with Muschenheim. And Muschenheim is Doogan’s right-hand man, so he put a bee in the Boss’s ear, and everything was—well, kind o’ dropped!”

The younger man gazed at him in dreamy wonder, trying to grope through the veil of unreality that seemed falling and draping about him. He was marvelling, inwardly, how jolting and unlooked for came the sudden ups and downs of life, when once the traveller is caught up out of the ordinary grooves of existence,—how sudden and moving the drama, when once the feral process is under way.

Then he listened, with alert and quickly changing eyes, as the stranger—to make sure of his man, the discharged prisoner surmised—tapped with his knife on the edge of his chinaware plate.

Durkin read the Morse easily—“Don’t talk so loud!” it warned him. And he nodded and wagged his now swimming head, almost childishly, over the little message. Yet all the time he felt,