"Packing--ugh!" snapped the inventor "Do you know what that is?"

"You turned down my first guess," I suggested humbly.

"Griggs, what appears to you as a packing-box is nothing more nor less than the first and only Hawkins Hydro-Vapor Lift!"

"The which?"

"The--Hawkins--Hydro--Vapor--Lift!"

"Hydro-Vapor?" I murmured. "Whatever is that? Steam?"

"Certainly."

"And lift, I presume, is English for elevator?"

"The words are synonymous," said Hawkins coldly.

"Then why the d.i.c.kens didn't you call it a steam elevator and be done with it? Wasn't that sufficiently complicated?"

"Oh, Griggs, you never seem able to understand! Now, a steam elevator--so called--is an old proposition. A Hydro-Vapor Lift is entirely new and sounds distinctive!"

"Yes, it sounds queer enough," I admitted.

"Just examine it," said the inventor joyously, leading me to the box.

There was not much to be examined. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor--all of undressed wood--that was about the extent of the affair; but in the center of the floor lay a great circular iron plate, some two feet across and festooned near the edge with a circle of highly unornamental iron bolt heads.

Beside the plate, a lever rising perpendicularly from the floor const.i.tuted the sole furnishing of the car.

"Now, you've seen a hydraulic elevator?" Hawkins began. "You know how they work--a big steel shaft pushed up the car from underneath, so that when it is in operation the car is simply a box standing on the end of a pole, which rises or sinks, as the operator wills."

"I believe so," I a.s.sented. "I think it's time now for me to be go----"

"That principle is fallacious!" the inventor exclaimed. "Consider what it would mean here--a steel shaft sixteen stories high, weighing tons and tons!"

"Well?"

"Well, sir, I have reversed that idiotic idea!" Hawkins announced triumphantly. "I have had a hole dug sixteen stories deep, and put the steel shaft down into it."

It was about what one might have expected from Hawkins; but despite my long acquaintance with his bizarre mental machinery, I stood and gasped in sheer amazement.

"Now, then," pursued the inventor. "I have had a steel tube made, a little longer than the shaft, you understand."

"What! Even longer than sixteen stories?"

"Of course. The tube fits the shaft exactly, just as an engine cylinder fits the plunger. The elevator stands upon the upper end of the tube.

We let steam into the tube by operating this lever, which controls my patent, reversible steam-release. What happens? Why, the tube is forced upward and the elevator rises. I let out some of the steam--and the tube sinks down into the ground! That iron plate which you see is the manhole cover of the tube, as it were--it corresponds, of course, to the cylinder-head on an engine."

As the novelist puts it, I stood aghast.

It overwhelmed me utterly--the idea that in a great, sane city like New York an irresponsible maniac could be permitted to dig a hole sixteen stories deep under a new office building and then fill up that hole with a shaft and a tube such as Hawkins had just described.

"And the people who own this place--did they allow you to do it, or have you been chloroforming the watchman and working at night?" I inquired.

"Don't be absurd, Griggs," said Hawkins. "I pay a big rent here. The owners were very nice about it."

They must have been--exceedingly so, I thought; nice to the point of imbecility. Had they known Hawkins as I know him, they would joyfully have handed him back his lease, given him a substantial cash bonus to boot, and even have thrown in a non-transferable Cook's Tour ticket to Timbuctoo before they allowed him to embark on the project.

It would have been a low sort of trick upon Timbuctoo, but it would have saved them money and trouble.

"Well," Hawkins said sharply, breaking in upon my reverie. "Don't stand there mooning. Did you ever see anything like it before?"

"Once, when I was a child," I confessed, "I fell while climbing a flagpole, and that night I dreamed----"

"Bah! Come along and watch her work."

"No!" I protested. "Oh, no!"

"Good Lord, why not?" cried Hawkins.

"My wife," I murmured. "She cannot spare me, Hawkins, you know--not yet."

"Why, there isn't the slightest element of danger," the inventor argued.

"Surely, Griggs, even you must be able to grasp that. Can't you see that that is the chief beauty of the Hydro-Vapor Lift? There are no cables to break! That's the great feature. This car may be loaded with ton after ton; but if she's overloaded, she simply stops. There are no risky wire-ropes to snap and let down the whole affair."

"I know, but there are no wire-ropes to hold her up, either, and----"

Hawkins snorted angrily. Then he grabbed me bodily and forced me along toward the door of his Hydro-Vapor Lift.

"Actually, you do make me tired," he said. "You seem to think that everybody is conspiring to take your wretched little life!"

"But what have you against me?" I asked mournfully. "Why not let me out and do your experimenting alone?"

"Because--Lord knows why I'm doing it, you're not important enough to warrant it--I'm bound to convince you that this contrivance is all that I claim!"

Oh, had I but spent the days of my youth in a strenuous gymnasium! Had I but been endowed with muscle beyond the dreams of Eugene Sandow, and been expert in boxing and wrestling and in the breaking of bones, as are the j.a.panese!

Then I could have fallen upon Hawkins from the rear and tied him into knots, and even dismembered him if necessary--and escaped.

But things are what they are, and Hawkins is more than a match for me; so he banged the door angrily and grasped the lever.

"Now, observe with great care the superbly gentle motion with which she rises," he instructed me.

I prepared for that familiar head-going-up-and-the-rest-of-you-staying-below sensation and gritted my teeth.

Hawkins pulled at the lever. The Hydro-Vapor Lift quivered for an instant. Then it ascended the shaft--and very gently and pleasantly.

"There! I suppose you've trembled until your collar-b.u.t.tons have worked loose?" Hawkins said contemptuously, turning on me.