Walter looked a little startled. “What you mean, I can’t? Why not?”
“You’ve got to help me,” Adams explained slowly; and he frowned more deeply, as if the interview were growing increasingly laborious for him. “It’s going to be a big pull to get this business on its feet.”
“Yes!” Walter exclaimed with a sharp skepticism. “I should say it was!” He stared at his father incredulously. “Look here; aren’t you just a little bit sudden, the way you’re goin’ about things? You’ve let mother shove you a little too fast, haven’t you? Do you know anything about what it means to set up a new business these days?”
“Yes, I know all about it,” Adams said. “About this business, I do.”
“How do you?”
“Because I made a long study of it. I’m not afraid of going about it the wrong way; but it’s a hard job and you’ll have to put in all whatever sense and strength you’ve got.”
Walter began to breathe quickly, and his lips were agitated; then he set them obstinately. “Oh; I will,” he said.
“Yes, you will,” Adams returned, not noticing that his son’s inflection was satiric. “It’s going to take every bit of energy in your body, and all the energy I got left in mine, and every cent of the little I’ve saved, besides something I’ll have to raise on this house. I’m going right at it, now I’ve got to; and you’ll have to quit Lamb’s by the end of next week.”
“Oh, I will?” Walter’s voice grew louder, and there was a shrillness in it. “I got to quit Lamb’s the end of next week, have I?” He stepped forward, angrily. “Listen!” he said. “I’m not walkin’ out o’ Lamb’s, see? I’m not quittin’ down there: I stay with ‘em, see?”
Adams looked up at him, astonished. “You’ll leave there next Saturday,” he said. “I’ve got to have you.”
“You don’t anything o’ the kind,” Walter told him, sharply. “Do you expect to pay me anything?”
“I’d pay you about what you been getting down there.”
“Then pay somebody else; I don’t know anything about glue. You get somebody else.”
“No. You’ve got to–”
Walter cut him off with the utmost vehemence. “Don’t tell me what I got to do! I know what I got to do better’n you, I guess!
I stay at Lamb’s, see?”
Adams rose angrily. “You’ll do what I tell you. You can’t stay down there.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because I won’t let you.”
“Listen! Keep on not lettin’ me: I’ll be there just the same.”
At that his father broke into a sour laughter. “THEY won’t let you, Walter! They won’t have you down there after they find out I’m going.”
“Why won’t they? You don’t think they’re goin’ to be all shot to pieces over losin’ YOU, do you?”
“I tell you they won’t let you stay,” his father insisted, loudly.
“Why, what do they care whether you go or not?”
“They’ll care enough to fire YOU, my boy!”
“Look here, then; show me why.”
“They’ll do it!”
“Yes,” Walter jeered; “you keep sayin’ they will, but when I ask you to show me why, you keep sayin’ they will! That makes little headway with ME, I can tell you!”
Adams groaned, and, rubbing his head, began to pace the floor. Walter’s refusal was something he had not anticipated; and he felt the weakness of his own attempt to meet it: he seemed powerless to do anything but utter angry words, which, as Walter said, made little headway. “Oh, my, my!” he muttered, “OH, my, my!”
Walter, usually sallow, had grown pale: he watched his father narrowly, and now took a sudden resolution. “Look here,” he said. “When you say Lamb’s is likely to fire me because you’re goin’ to quit, you talk like the people that have to be locked up. I don’t know where you get such things in your head; Lamb and Company won’t know you’re gone. Listen: I can stay there long as I want to. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: make it worth my while and I’ll hook up with your old glue factory, after all.”
Adams stopped his pacing abruptly, and stared at him. “‘Make it worth your while?’ What you mean?”
“I got a good use for three hundred dollars right now,” Walter said. “Let me have it and I’ll quit Lamb’s to work for you. Don’t let me have it and I SWEAR I won’t!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Is everybody crazy that needs three hundred dollars?”
“Yes,” Adams said. “They are if they ask ME for it, when I got to stretch every cent I can lay my hands on to make it look like a dollar!”
“You won’t do it?”
Adams burst out at him. “You little fool! If I had three hundred dollars to throw away, besides the pay I expected to give you, haven’t you got sense enough to see I could hire a man worth three hundred dollars more to me than you’d be? It’s a FINE time to ask me for three hundred dollars, isn’t it! What FOR? Rhinestone buckles to throw around on your ‘girl friends?’ Shame on you! Ask me to BRIBE you to help yourself and your own family!”
“I’ll give you a last chance,” Walter said. “Either you do what I want, or I won’t do what you want. Don’t ask me again after this, because–-“
Adams interrupted him fiercely. “‘Ask you again!’ Don’t worry about that, my boy! All I ask you is to get out o’ my room.”
“Look here,” Walter said, quietly; and his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek. “Look here: I expect YOU wouldn’t give me three hundred dollars to save my life, would you?”
“You make me sick,” Adams said, in his bitterness. “Get out of here.”
Walter went out, whistling; and Adams drooped into his old chair again as the door closed. “OH, my, my!” he groaned. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy! The way of the transgressor–-“
CHAPTER XVI
He meant his own transgression and his own way; for Walter’s stubborn refusal appeared to Adams just then as one of the inexplicable but righteous besettings he must encounter in following that way. “Oh, Lordy, Lord!” he groaned, and then, as resentment moved him—“That dang boy! Dang idiot” Yet he knew himself for a greater idiot because he had not been able to tell Walter the truth. He could not bring himself to do it, nor even to state his case in its best terms; and that was because he felt that even in its best terms the case was a bad one.
Of all his regrets the greatest was that in a moment of vanity and tenderness, twenty-five years ago, he had told his young wife a business secret. He had wanted to show how important her husband was becoming, and how much the head of the universe, J. A. Lamb, trusted to his integrity and ability. The great man had an idea: he thought of “branching out a little,” he told Adams confidentially, and there were possibilities of profit in glue.
What he wanted was a liquid glue to be put into little bottles and sold cheaply. “The kind of thing that sells itself,” he said; “the kind of thing that pays its own small way as it goes along, until it has profits enough to begin advertising it right.
Everybody has to use glue, and if I make mine convenient and cheap, everybody’ll buy mine. But it’s got to be glue that’ll STICK; it’s got to be the best; and if we find how to make it we’ve got, to keep it a big secret, of course, or anybody can steal it from us. There was a man here last month; he knew a formula he wanted to sell me, ‘sight unseen’; but he was in such a hurry I got suspicious, and I found he’d managed to steal it, working for the big packers in their glue-works. We’ve got to find a better glue than that, anyhow. I’m going to set you and Campbell at it. You’re a practical, wide-awake young feller, and Campbell’s a mighty good chemist; I guess you two boys ought to make something happen.”
His guess was shrewd enough. Working in a shed a little way outside the town, where their cheery employer visited them sometimes to study their malodorous stews, the two young men found what Lamb had set them to find. But Campbell was thoughtful over the discovery. “Look here,” he said. “Why ain’t this just about yours and mine? After all, it may be Lamb’s money that’s paid for the stuff we’ve used, but it hasn’t cost much.”