The Forbidden Trail Part 8

"I can't exactly thank you," he mumbled. "Only," his voice strengthening, "if I hadn't met you, I'd have gone back home discouraged and almost as ignorant as I left. As it is, I feel in bully fighting trim."

Old John McGinnis got to his feet. "G.o.d bless you, my lad. When I'm tw.a.n.ging a harp, up above, I'll be having an interested eye on you."

Roger started back to Eagle's Wing that evening. Ernest and Dean Erskine were both deeply interested in Roger's report, which he gave in the Dean's library the night he reached home.

"Pshaw! I should have told you a lot of things that would have helped you," exclaimed the Dean when Roger had finished. "But one forgets up here in the cla.s.sroom how the war rages out in the industrial world."

"Will patents cost a lot?" inquired Ernest. "You know I don't use all my salary. Draw at will, old man."

"Thanks, old top," replied Roger. "Since I cut out girls and golf, I've been saving a bit myself."

"The patents won't cost a great deal, if you do the work yourself, Roger," said the Dean. "But it's going to take time to learn the patent game."

"Well," said Roger, with a sigh, "if I've got to become a patent attorney in order to patent my ideas, I suppose I can. But gee, I am glad I don't want to get married. You were wise in not letting me give up that instructors.h.i.+p, Dean, as I wanted to."

Dean Erskine smiled ruefully. "Seems to have been about the only sane advice I've given you."

"Don't you think it, sir!" exclaimed Roger. "If I ever do get away with this, yours will be the credit."

"And Ernest's," added the Dean.

"You bet, Ernest! And now, I'm going out to the University library and read up on patents," said Roger, with the familiar squaring of the shoulders.

He had need to square his shoulders: a greater need than either he or his two devoted friends could dream. For as the months slipped into years, it seemed more and more obvious that either Roger's ideas were utterly impractical or else that he was actually several generations ahead of his time. In his brilliant, yet thoroughgoing way, Roger studied patent law and registered two years after his trip to Chicago _as_ a patent attorney in Was.h.i.+ngton. He worked constantly on the development of his plant, improving here, discarding there, until he had reached the point, he felt, where he could do no more until he had funds for a practical plant, in a hot climate.

He and the Dean and Ernest estimated that not less than fifty thousand dollars would be essential for such an initial plant. The sum might have been fifty million for all its accessibility to Roger. Most of the wealthy men whom Roger was able to reach admitted the cleverness and the interest of his ideas. None of them could be persuaded that the idea would be a good investment. Once in desperation Roger went to Chicago to a firm whose letter heads read "Bankers, Stocks and Bonds, Promoters, Investments." Roger was turned over to a young man who wore a garnet ring and who was at the head of the Engineering Investments Department.

The two had several long sessions. Then the man of the garnet ring proposed that a company be organized for half a million dollars and that his company undertake to sell the stock. Roger was much encouraged.

"That's fine," he said. "How long would it take to raise fifty thousand dollars?"

"Not long," replied the young promoter, whose name was Eaton. "Of course, you understand that the first money will have to go for office expenses and salaries."

"Whose salaries?" asked Roger. "I don't want any and I need only a few day laborers."

"You don't get me." Eaton was patient. "I'm speaking of the Solar Company's Chicago office."

"Shucks! We don't want an office in Chicago. What we want is a plant in Arizona."

"If you think we can sell stock in a nutty scheme like this without plenty of mahogany furniture and high sounding t.i.tles on gla.s.s doors, you're even greener than I thought you were," said Eaton.

Roger looked at him thoughtfully. "Oh, I see!" he said after a moment.

"When would you want to begin on this work?"

"As soon as you can raise a little preliminary expense money for us, say $1500."

"Oh," said Roger again. "Of course, you realize that the only thing that will give that stock any value is building plants with the money we get from selling it."

"Why, certainly! But we must make a right start. An office in your bedroom may go in Eagle's Wing but not in Chicago."

"Oh!" said Roger for a third and last time. And the conference adjourned sine die.

Something about this interview depressed Roger profoundly.

He went home, locked up his drawings and threw an old canvas over the model of the solar engine that had stood for so many years in a corner of the graduate laboratory. It was six months before he could induce himself to touch his work again. And it dawned on him that his twenties were slipping by and that he was becoming unsociable and grave. But there seemed no remedy for the matter. His dream had become the most vital part of his life, and would not let him lead a normal existence.

Such is the price that a dreamer pays for his vision.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW DAY

Roger, climbing the steps to the Science Building on the day that he was thirty years old, wondered if his working life was to end as it had begun within its ugly walls.

The building stood at the western edge of the campus. It was a Gothic, Jacobean, Victorian composite, four stories high, built of yellow sandstone, marble and brick. It boasted a round dome, rising from a Gothic main roof and a little paG.o.da-like tower on each of the mansard roofs that crowned the two wings. There had been a time when to Roger the Science Building had been beautiful. But he saw its ugliness now and laughed about it with Ernest.

On this December afternoon, Roger stayed late in the laboratory with twenty seniors who for some weeks had been carrying on strength tests of varying mixtures of concrete. The sun was low in the west and the corners of the huge old room were dark. But a red glow from the west window filled its center, turning the concrete briquettes piled on the table in the middle of the room to gold.

Roger stood by the table, examining the students' reports on the fractured briquettes. His black hair, with the sunset full upon it, was like molten bronze. Roger's face had changed in the years since his undergraduate days. His figure was the same, six feet of lean muscle; his eyes were as blue and his face as thin and intellectual as when as a small boy he had dreamed of an underground railway. But there had grown subtly into his face a look of grimness and unhappiness that robbed it of the youth it still should have retained.

A shock headed student came to the table with a briquette.

"How does the thesis go, Hallock?" asked Roger.

"Slow, just now, Mr. Moore."

"What's the trouble?"

"Oh, the best of the information is in German and I'm rotten at scientific German."

"You've taken the required work in German, haven't you, Hallock?"

"Squeezed through by a hair's breadth," the boy answered with a grin.

Roger grunted. "Neglected it, of course, when you've been told time and time again that a reading knowledge of scientific German is essential to research success. I wonder why an undergraduate has to be a fool?"

"I'm not a fool," contradicted Hallock flatly.

"Any man's a fool who's working his way through college and fails to get the most he can out of every course offered him. I know, because I worked my way through my last two years, neglected my German and had to make it up after I graduated. That thesis will make or mar you as far as your first job goes. Who'd you have your second year German with? If I were you, I'd take a semester of it over again."

"I'd rather never get a diploma than go back to old Rosenthal."

"Mr. Rosenthal," corrected Roger sharply. "Speak respectfully of an instructor."

"Aw," exclaimed Hallock, now evidently angry, "why should I speak respectfully of a beer-guzzling Dutchman who sneers at the girls in the cla.s.s every time they recite?"

There was sudden silence in the room. Hallock was evidently relieving an acc.u.mulation of irritation. "If I had been Miss Anderson this morning I'd have slapped his fat face for him."