There was something shiny at the bottom of the hole.
He went back to the kitchen and found some day-old doughnuts and poured a cup of coffee. He sat at the kitchen table, eating doughnuts and wondering what to do.
There didn’t appear, for the moment at least, much that he could do. He could putter around all day trying to figure out what had happened to his basement and probably not be any wiser than he was right now.
His money-making Yankee soul rebelled against such a horrid waste of time.
There was, he told himself, that maple four-poster that he should be getting to before some unprincipled city antique dealer should run afoul of it. A piece like that, he figured, if a man had any luck at all, should sell at a right good price. He might turn a handsome profit on it if he only worked it right.
Maybe, he thought, he could turn a trade on it. There was the table model TV set that he had traded a pair of ice skates for last winter. Those folks out Woodman way might conceivably be happy to trade the bed for a reconditioned TV set, almost like brand new. After all, they probably weren’t using the bed and, he hoped fervently, had no idea of the value of it.
He ate the doughnuts hurriedly and gulped down an extra cup of coffee. He fixed a plate of scraps for Towser and set it outside the door. Then he went down into the basement and got the table TV set and put it in the pickup truck. As an afterthought, he added a reconditioned shotgun which would be perfectly all right if a man were careful not to use these far-reaching, powerful shells, and a few other odds and ends that might come in handy on a trade.
He got back late, for it had been a busy and quite satisfactory day. Not only did he have the four-poster loaded on the truck, but he had as well a rocking chair, a fire screen, a bundle of ancient magazines, an old-fashioned barrel churn, a walnut highboy and a Governor Winthrop on which some half-baked, slap-happy decorator had applied a coat of apple-green paint. The television set, the shotgun and five dollars had gone into the trade. And what was better yet – he’d managed it so well that the Woodman family probably was dying of laughter at this very moment about how they’d taken him.
He felt a little ashamed of it – they’d been such friendly people. They had treated him so kindly and had him stay for dinner and had sat and talked with him and shown him about the farm and even asked him to stop by if he went through that way again.
He’d wasted the entire day, he thought, and he rather hated that, but maybe it had been worth it to build up his reputation out that way as the sort of character who had softening of the head and didn’t know the value of a dollar. That way, maybe some other day, he could do some more business in the neighborhood.
He heard the television set as he opened the back door, sounding loud and clear, and he went clattering down the basement stairs in something close to panic. For now that he’d traded off the table model, Abbie’s set was the only one downstairs and Abbie’s set was broken.
It was Abbie’s set, all right. It stood just where he and Beasly had put it down that morning and there was nothing wrong with it – nothing wrong at all. It was even televising color.
Televising color!
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and leaned against the railing for support.
The set kept right on televising color.
Taine stalked the set and walked around behind it.
The back of the cabinet was off, leaning against a bench that stood behind the set, and he could see the innards of it glowing cheerily.
He squatted on the basement floor and squinted at the lighted innards and they seemed a good deal different from the way that they should be. He’d repaired the set many times before and he thought he had a good idea of what the working parts would look like. And now they all seemed different, although just how he couldn’t tell.
A heavy step sounded on the stairs and a hearty voice came booming down to him.
“Well, Hiram, I see you got it fixed.”
Taine jackknifed upright and stood there slightly frozen and completely speechless.
Henry Horton stood foursquarely and happily on the stairs, looking very pleased.
“I told Abbie that you wouldn’t have it done, but she said for me to come over anyway – Hey, Hiram, it’s in color! How did you do it, man?”
Taine grinned sickly. “I just got fiddling around,” he said.
Henry came down the rest of the stairs with a stately step and stood before the set, with his hands behind his back, staring at it fixedly in his best executive manner.
He slowly shook his head. “I never would have thought,” he said, “that it was possible.”
“Abbie mentioned that you wanted color.”
“Well, sure. Of course I did. But not on this old set. I never would have expected to get color on this set. How did you do it, Hiram?”
Taine told the solemn truth. “I can’t rightly say,” he said.
Henry found a nail keg standing in front of one of the benches and rolled it out in front of the old-fashioned set. He sat down warily and relaxed into solid comfort.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said. “There are men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before you know it you come up with something.”
He sat on the nail keg, staring at the set.
“It’s sure a pretty thing,” he said. “It’s better than the color they have in Minneapolis. I dropped in at a couple of the places the last time I was there and looked at the color sets. And I tell you honest, Hiram, there wasn’t one of them that was as good as this.”
Taine wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. Somehow or other, the basement seemed to be getting warm. He was fine sweat all over.
Henry found a big cigar in one of his pockets and held it out to Taine.
“No, thanks. I never smoke.”
“Perhaps you’re wise,” said Henry. “It’s a nasty habit.”
He stuck the cigar into his mouth and rolled it east to west.
“Each man to his own,” he proclaimed, expansively. “When it comes to a thing like this, you’re the man to do it. You seem to think in mechanical contraptions and electronic circuits. Me, I don’t know a thing about it. Even in the computer game, I still don’t know a thing about it; I hire men who do. I can’t even saw a board or drive a nail. But I can organize. You remember, Hiram, how everybody snickered when I started up the plant?”
“Well, I guess some of them did, at that.”
“You’re darn tooting they did. They went around for weeks with their hands up to their faces to hide smart-Aleck grins. They said, what does Henry think he’s doing, starting up a computer factory out here in the sticks; he doesn’t think he can compete with those big companies in the east, does he? And they didn’t stop their grinning until I sold a couple of dozen units and had orders for a year or two ahead.”
He fished a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigar carefully, never taking his eyes off the television set.
“You got something there,” he said, judiciously, “that may be worth a mint of money. Some simple adaptation that will fit on any set. If you can get color on this old wreck, you can get color on any set that’s made.”
He chuckled moistly around the mouthful of cigar. “If RCA knew what was happening here this minute, they’d go out and cut their throats.”
“But I don’t know what I did,” protested Taine.
“Well, that’s all right,” said Henry, happily. “I’ll take this set up to the plant tomorrow and turn loose some of the boys on it. They’ll find out what you have here before they’re through with it.”