Merriwether fumbled in his vest pocket. In a minute and a half he would perfunctorily ask this man for lunch, and then he would kill him. But he would give him a match first--for Merriwether Buck was a well-brought-up young man. As he fumbled he picked out the exact spot on the other's waistcoat where he would plant the bullet. But the idea of a man on the edge of the grave lighting a cigar tickled him so that he laughed aloud as he held out the matches.
"What can I do with these?" snorted J. Dupont Evans. "They are the sort that light only on their own box." From his glance one might have gained the impression that he thought Merriwether Buck a fool.
"Great principle that," said Merriwether Buck, cackling with hysteria. It was so funny that a dead man should want to smoke a cigar! He would let him play he was alive for fifty seconds longer.
"Principle?" said Evans. "Principle? What Principle?"
"Well," said Merriwether, with the random argumentativeness of insanity, "it _is_ a great principle. Apply that principle to some high explosive, for instance, and you have no more battleship flare-backs--no premature mine blasts----"
"Say," the other suddenly interrupted, "are you an inventor?"
"Yes," lied Merriwether Buck, glibly, although he had never given five seconds' thought to the subject of high explosives in his life. "That's how I know. I've invented an explosive more powerful than dynamite. But it won't explode by contact with fire, like powder. Won't explode with a jar, like dynamite. Won't freeze, like dynamite. Only one way to explode it--you've got to bring it into contact with a certain other chemical the same as scratching one of these matches on its own box."
"The deuce, young man!" said the other. "There's a fortune in it! Is it on the market at all?"
"No," said Merriwether Buck, raising his pistol hand slightly and thrusting it a bit forward, under the mask of his coat pocket, "no money to start it going."
"Hum," mused the other. "I tell you what you do, young man. You come along to lunch with me and we'll talk the thing over--money and all."
And the directing deities of New York struck twice on all the city clocks, and striking, winked.
|How I ever come to hit such a swell-looking house for a handout I never knew. Not that there was anything so gaudy about it, neither, as far as putting up a bluff at being a millionaire's mansion went, which I found out afterwards it was, or pretty near that at any rate. But it was just about the biggest house in that Illinois town, and it's mostly that kind o' place with them naked iron heathens in the front yard and a brick stable behind that it ain't no use to go up against unless you're looking for a lemon. If you need real food and need it sudden and ain't prospecting around town for no other kind of an opening you better make for the nearest public works like a canal being dug, or a railroad gang. Hit the little tin dinner buckets, men that does the unskilled labor on jobs like that, except Swedes and Dagos, knowing what it is to be up against it themselves now and then and not inclined to ask no fool questions.