If we’d known what a trouble Sammy was going to be to us all through the winter, I guess we’d have been more careful about making him our ward. But we’d done it, and there was nothing for us but to stand by him—and he did have a monstrous appetite. After winter came on we pretty nearly had to feed him. He did get things to eat besides what we took him—chicken sometimes, I guess, and things like that. We never asked how he got them, and he never told us, but I don’t imagine it was best for folks in that neighborhood to leave things laying after dark.
We were afraid he’d freeze to death, but the cold never seemed to bother him. In the cave he had some old quilts and a piece of carpet he used to hang across the opening to shut out the wind. When he built a fire on the sand before the cave it was surprising how warm it got inside, and then he’d drop his curtain, and it seemed like the heat would stay for hours after the fire was gone.
Of course, he couldn’t stay in the cave all the time, and, though we cautioned him, he did go prowling around the country a good deal, even on the roads. Once or twice he was seen at night, and one farmer came lashing his horse into town with a story of being chased by a ghost twenty feet high with hair two yards long. We knew who the ghost was, all right, though we couldn’t see why Sammy chased the man. He told us it was just for fun. That’s the way he was, a regular little boy, and how he did love to play pranks! What with him sneaking around that section and with people missing things and catching glimpses of him in the darkness, the locality got a bad name. It doesn’t take long for a place to get a bad name; and, no matter how much folks don’t believe in ghosts, they’re ready to believe in something or other. I don’t believe in them, and Mark says there isn’t any such thing, but all the same there are times when the chills run all over you and you know there’s something that isn’t flesh and blood right behind you.
All that winter we lugged things to eat out to the cave, usually a couple of times a week, and when the drifts were high it was pretty hard work. But Sammy was always grateful, and when you come to think about what came later, and how valuable Sammy was to us, I shouldn’t wonder if he was worth more than our trouble.
During the winter Mr. Tidd worked harder than ever on his turbine, and before the last snow was off the ground he had his working model, or whatever he called it, about ready for a trial. He was excited and we were excited, but it was Mark that thought of something that gave us all a setback.
“How you goin’ to try it? You ain’t got any s-steam.”
Mr. Tidd scratched his head and looked at Mark reproachful-like, as if calling his attention to it was as bad as if Mark had come right up and taken steam away from him that he’d been saving for the purpose.
“It won’t run without steam,” he said, slow and worried. “Without steam a-sissin’ and strainin’ and workin’ it won’t do nothin’. It might just as well be a bag of potaters for all the good it is. Well, well! Um!” After a minute he brightened up like he always did. Worry and Mr. Tidd never could stay together long. “There’s some way out of it,” he said, “some way out of it. The trouble—the trouble seems to be, now I think of it, that no way comes into my head.”
He sighed and pulled a volume of the Decline and Fall out of his pocket and commenced to read. In less than a minute he’d forgotten all about us and the turbine and the steam and everything else in the world but those old Roman folks that went tearing and rampaging all over the world without much regard for anybody’s feelings, so I’ve always thought. How Mr. Tidd, a gentle, nice man, could be fond of such characters as those Romans was a mystery to me. He used to read pieces out of the Decline and Fall to us, and in the course of a year I calculate we heard most all of it. I can’t remember that those folks ever did anything but fight. From morning till night they were picking on somebody. What I’d like to know is, if the whole nation was always fighting, who tended the post-office and ran the stores and looked after things at home? Quite likely the womenfolks had to do that while their husbands were gallivanting around in Gaul or Egypt or other foreign parts. To my mind those Romans were a ridiculous lot.
“If you haven’t got steam here,” I said, trying to puzzle it out, “I guess you’ll have to take your model where steam is.”
“What’s that?” Mr. Tidd asked, looking up from his book. “What’s that? Oh yes. Of course.”
“Don’t you know anybody that’s got steam that’ll lend some to you?”
Mr. Tidd thought. Then he slapped his knee. “There’s Mr. Whiteley over at the power-plant. Him and me has got pretty friendly, one way and another. He’s got steam. Now, do you s’pose he’d be willin’? Do you?”
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t,” I told him; and Mark nodded his head once or twice to show he agreed.
The upshot of it was that Mr. Tidd went to see Mr. Whiteley and got permission to set up his turbine in a corner of the room where the engines and things were to give it a trial. When we found that out—I mean Binney and Plunk and me—we were all as wrought up about it as though it was our father doing the inventing.
Mr. Tidd put in about a week finishing his turbine and setting it up in the engine-room. We went down to see it when it was all ready. It was to be tried out the next morning. Tucked away in a corner of the engine-room it didn’t look like much. It was little and boxed in so you couldn’t see any of the machine parts that made it go, and somehow didn’t seem very important when you compared it with the big wheels and beams and one thing and another on the engine that stood, all shining with brass, in the middle of the floor. We felt a sort of sinking.
But Mr. Tidd was humming and happy. He patted his little contraption and beamed and beamed. Then he’d look over at the big engine and smile scornful-like. “This here leetle feller,” he said, “will do most as much work as you will, with all your size and brass and roarin’. You want to look out, for this leetle feller is goin’ to be the death of you, and don’t you forget it!”
“Mr. Tidd,” said Mr. Whiteley, “I hope you aren’t too confident. It won’t be too big a disappointment if it fails to work?”
“Fails to work! Why, it will work, Mr. Whiteley. It—”
“But lots of others have failed—men with technical educations, eminent engineers.”
“They didn’t know what I know, Mr. Whiteley. Not what I know. No, sir. The Tidd turbine’s goin’ to do what it ought to. You see.”
We left the engine-room, and Mark went home with his father. The trial was to come off at nine o’clock the next morning, and we were to be there. It was a promise. Nobody was to see it but Mr. Tidd and Mr. Whiteley and us four boys. Of course the engineer would be there, but he didn’t count—or we thought so, anyhow.
Binney and I were on hand before eight o’clock, and we had a whole hour to hang around. It was tiresome waiting by the door, so we got up and prowled around the building just to pass away the time and see what we could see. After a while we got tired and sat down on a plank that ran across a couple of oil barrels under a window of the engine-room and made ourselves comfortable. The window was open, and I could hear voices inside, but I supposed it was the engineer talking to some of his help and didn’t think anything about it until whoever it was came closer. It was the engineer, all right, but I couldn’t make out from the sound who was with him, though there was something familiar about the voice.
“They’re goin’ to turn steam into the thing at nine o’clock,” said the engineer. “Funny-lookin’ contraption, ain’t it?”
“Um!” said the other man. “Why didn’t you telegraph me sooner?”
“I didn’t know when they was goin’ to be ready until yestiddy. Soon’s I found out I sent off a wire right off. Anyhow, you’re here, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” said the man, in a kind of a grunt. “What d’you s’pose is inside the thing?”
“Hain’t got no idee. What are you so all-fired int’rested in it for? You don’t reckon this coot of a Tidd has up and invented somethin’, do you?”
“You can never tell, my friend,” said the man; and all at once I recognized his voice. It was the same man that we saw on the depot platform and that tried to get Mr. Tidd to show him his drawings and patterns and things last fall—the fellow that worked for some machinery company in Pittsburg.
“Confound it,” he went on, snappishly, “he’s got it all covered up with casing so’s you can’t see into it at all. Wonder what his idea is. Can’t we pry into it and see?”
I calculated it was about time to do something, so I stuck............