“Oh, Father!” I gasped, beginning to get the untrustful feeling again.

“Hush, Phyllis,” said the Idol, looking at Father like he was Jack, the Giant-Killer, and just about as much interested as if it was not his own tremendous fortune Father was telling about taking off with him.

“I had been down in the garden to the garage to give the new car a looking over, and I saw Rogers go into that shed and knew, from having been told by Phyllis accidentally of the steel experiments, what was happening.  I followed him a little later, and saw your trustful layout, exposed to the world as is the human nature of all Byrdsville.  Rogers is an expert and would run through your notebook and get the whole thing in a few seconds.  I knew that he would watch his time, try out the experiments at the furnace, and get the patent while you were deliberating about proceeding in a Chesterfieldian manner with an injunction drawn slowly and literarily by your friend, Judge Luttrell.  Rogers was fully equipped by his association with me to do you and—­quick.  I took no such chances as having you and the Judge’s Byrdsvillianism mixed up in the affair.  I stole your secret that had been stolen, left for a Pennsylvania furnace the next morning, had experimental furnaces built, tried out the experiments before the company, keeping dust in Rogers’s eyes by demanding to be in on his robbery, patented it by push-legislation in Washington, and am back with an offer of fifty thousand dollars down and a royalty to be decided upon in a ten-year contract.  I have a great mind to put it in trust for you, idiotic dreamer that you are—­and perhaps the most noted man in the field of commercial invention for this year at any rate!  How did you come to think out that process of a disturbance of atomic arrangement at that temperature?”

“Why, you see, Mr. Forsythe, in the laboratory at Princeton, just before I left, I had begun some atomic experiments, and out at the furnace it struck me all of a heap, what it would do if we could treat the ore at some ascertained temperature in the way I have found.  Now, in another case that I am working on, I may be able even to make the process—­”

“Help!” said Father.  “Let’s get down to business on this proposition before we get to the other one.”

And we all laughed, for it was funny to see the Idol with patches on his trousers and hardly a day’s living ahead, pass right over the fifty thousand dollars, with more in the contract, and all the sensation it had made, to begin to explain about what was out in the shed now.  He looked pained at our interruption and tried to begin again, but Father interrupted him.

“Well, have you told this one to these ‘bubbles,’ as my young friend Luttrell so appropriately calls them?  By the way, the economical Rogers had on the coat that Dr. Byrd had doctored for the cholera, which I had asked him to destroy for me, and the Scout Leader was right in his nose clue.  I suppose that was what led him to suspect me and shadow Rogers to the telegraph office.  Great boy, that Luttrell!  But to return to the girls:  If you have told Phyllis, I shall have to keep her in solitary confinement until it is finished.  Miss Roxanne, I know, can be trusted at large.”