The big house stood silent, bathed in the moonlight; there was no sign of anyone about, other than the miscreant who stood now in the shadow, surveying the place. Presently he put down his pack, went to a window and, quick and silent as an expert burglar, jimmied the sash. There was only one sudden, sharp snap of the breaking sash bolt and in a moment the fellow had vanished within the darkness and Gus distinguished only the occasional flash of a pocket torch inside.

There was but one thing to do, and that as quickly as possible. The dog had gone around to lie again on the front veranda. Gus made a bolt for the rear of the grounds, reached the garage, found an open door, began softly to push it open and suddenly found himself staring into the muzzle of a revolver that protruded from the blackness beyond.

"Don't shoot! I'm Gus Grier, Mr. Watchman." The boy was conscious of a certain unsteadiness in his own voice.

"Oh! An' phwat air yes doin' here?"

"Talk low," said Gus, "but listen first: There's a burglar in the house.

I spotted him some time ago, followed him and saw him get through the dining-room window. Move fast and he's yours!"

Pat moved fast. He recognized that he had not been up to his duty so far and he meant to make amends. With Gus following, the boy's nerves on edge with the possibility that the housebreaker would shoot, the Irishman, who was no coward, reached the house, entered the bas.e.m.e.nt, flooded the house with light, alarmed the inmates and in a few minutes had every avenue of escape guarded, the chauffeur, butler and gardener coming on the scene, all half dressed and armed.

What followed needs little telling. Hardly had the men decided to search the house before the sound of a rapidly approaching motor horn was heard and from the quickly checked car two men leaped out, the constable and a deputy from the town--and then Bill Brown! The illuminated house had stopped their course. The search revealed Thad cowering in a closet, all the fight gone out of him. Grace and Skeets were not even awakened; Mrs.

Hooper did not leave her room.

As the constable turned a light on the handcuffed prisoner he remarked: "That's the chap all right. Description fits. He'll bring that five hundred all right."

"A reward; is it?" said the watchman. "An' don't ye fergit who gits it.

Not me, ner you, Constable, but the bye here." He laid his hand on Gus's shoulder. The constable laughed:

"Oh, you're slow, Pat. We all know that. The kid and his pal, that young edition of Edison by the name of Billy Brown, got the thing cinched over their radio. We didn't know that the description that Willstown sent out fitted Mr. Hooper's own nephew."

And so with relief, mixed with regret for Mr. Hooper's sake, Gus and Bill saw a sulky and rebellious Thad vanish into the night and out of their immediate affairs.

CHAPTER XXIV

GENIUS IS OFTEN ERRATIC

The fourth radio talk on the life, character and accomplishments of the world's foremost inventor proved to be the most interesting of the series. Fairview had heard of these entertainments and so many people had asked Bill and Gus if they might attend, the boys became aware that the modest little living-room of the Brown home would not hold half of them. They, therefore, decided to let the radio be heard in the town hall, if a few citizens would pay the rent for the evening.

This was readily arranged, but when the suggestion was made that an admission be charged, the boys refused. This was their treat all round, even to transferring their aerial to the hall between its cupola and a mast at the other end of the roof, put up by the ever willing Mr. Grier who could not do too much to further the boys' interests.

Early in the evening the hall was filled to overflowing, and ushers were appointed to seat the crowd. Naturally there was much chattering and sc.r.a.ping of feet until suddenly a strain of music, an orchestral selection, began to come out of the horn and there was instant quiet.

After its conclusion came the voice:

"This is our last lecture on Edison. Following this will be given a series on Marconi, the inventor of the wireless.

"As I have told you, Mr. Thomas Alva Edison's leap to fortune was sudden and spectacular, as have been most of his accomplishments since. Those who do really great things along the lines of physical improvement, or concerning the inception of large enterprises are apt to startle the public and to surprise thoughtful people almost as though some impossible thing had been achieved.

"From a mere salaried operator to forty thousand dollars in a lump sum for expert work was quite a jump.

"The forty thousand dollars, however, did not turn Mr. Edison's head as has been the effect of sudden wealth on many a good-sized but smaller minded man.

"He used it as a fund to start a plant and hire expert men to experiment and work out the inventions which came to him so fast in his ceaseless work and study. He could get along with as little sleep as Napoleon is said to have required when a mighty battle was on. Edison could lie down on a settee or table and sleep just as the Little Corporal did even while cannon were booming all around him.

"There was something Napoleonic, also, about Edison's intensity of application and his masterfulness in his gigantic undertakings. If genius is the ability to take great pains, Thomas A. Edison is the greatest genius in the world to-day--if not in all history.

"Sometimes, as Napoleon did with his chief generals before a decisive engagement, Edison would shut himself up with his confidential coworkers. Sometimes he and they would neither eat nor sleep till they had fought out a problem of greater importance to the world than even Napoleon's crossing the Alps or the decisive battle of Austerlitz. But, though he began to work on a large scale, young Edison's financial facilities were of the crudest and simplest.

"Almost all of his men were on piece-work, and he allowed them to make good salaries. He never cut them down, although their pay was very high as they became more and more expert.

"Instead of _books_ he kept _hooks_--two of them. All the bills he owed he jabbed on one hook, and stuck mems of what was due him on the other.

If he had no tickers ready to deliver when an account came due, he gave his note for the amount required.

"Then as one bill after another fell due, a bank messenger came with a notice of protest pinned to the note, demanding a dollar and a quarter extra for protest fees besides princ.i.p.al and interest. Whereupon he would go to New York and borrow more funds, or pay the note on the spot if he happened to have money enough on hand. He kept up this expensive way of doing business for two years, but his credit was perfectly good.

Every dealer he patronized was glad to furnish him with what he wanted, and some expressed admiration for his new method of paying bills.

"But, to save his own time, Edison had to hire a bookkeeper whose inefficiency made him regret for a while the change in his way of doing business. He tells of one of his experiences with this accountant:

"'After the first three months I told him to go through his books and see how much we had made.

"Three thousand dollars!" he told me after studying a while. So, to celebrate this, I gave a dinner to several of the staff.

"'Two days after that he came to tell me he had made a big mistake, for we had _lost_ five hundred dollars. Several days later he came round again and tried to prove to me that we had made seven thousand dollars in the three months!'

"This was so disconcerting that the inventor decided to change bookkeepers, but he never 'counted his chickens before they were hatched.' In other words, he did not believe that he had made anything till he had paid all his bills and had his money safe in the bank.

"Mr. Edison once made the remark that when Jay Gould got possession of the Western Union Telegraph Company, no further progress in telegraphy was possible, because Gould took no pride in building up. All he cared for was money, only money.

"The opposite was true of Edison. While he had decided to invent only that which was of commercial value, it was not on account of the money but because that which millions of people will buy is of the greatest value to the world.

"After he stopped telegraphing, Edison turned his mind to many inventions. It is not generally known that the first successful, widely sold typewriter was perfected by him.

"This typewriter proved a difficult thing to make commercial. The alignment of the letters was very bad. One letter would be one-sixteenth of an inch above the others, and all the letters wanted to wander out of line. He worked on it till the machine gave fair results. The typewriter he got into commercial shape is now known as the Remington.

"It is not hard to understand that Mr. Edison invented the American District Messenger call-box system, which has been superseded by the telephone, but very few people know when they are eating caramels and other sticky confectionery that wax or paraffin paper was invented by Edison. Also the tasimeter, an instrument so delicate that it measures the heat of the most distant star, Arcturus. One of the few vacations Mr. Edison allowed himself was when he traveled to the Rocky Mountains to witness a total eclipse of the sun and experiment on certain stars with his tasimeter, and this very clearly shows that Mr. Edison is as much interested in the advancement of science as in matters purely commercial."

CHAPTER XXV

THE GENIUS OF THE AGE

"I want to tell you something more about the personal side of this great man," continued the voice from the horn.

"One of the striking things about Thomas Alva Edison is his gameness. In this respect he has been greater than Napoleon, who was not always a 'good loser,' for he had come to regard himself as bound to win, whether or no; so when everything went against him, he expressed himself by kicking against Fate. But when Edison saw the hard work of nine years which had cost him two million dollars vanish one night in a sudden storm, he only laughed and said, 'I never took much stock in spilt milk.'

"When his laboratories were burned or he suffered great reverses, Edison considered them merely the fortunes of war. In this respect he was most like General Washington, who, though losing more battles than he gained, learned to 's.n.a.t.c.h victory from the jaws of defeat,' and win immortal success.

"Some of Edison's discoveries were dramatic and amusing. During his telephone experiments he learned the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations, and he had made a little toy that, when you talked into the funnel, would start a paper man sawing wood. Then he came to the conclusion that if he could record the movements of the diaphragm well enough he could cause such records to reproduce the movements imparted to them by the human voice.