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But the high salary, thus pleasantly imagined, was never paid. Campbell died of typhoid fever, that summer, leaving Adams and his employer the only possessors of the formula, an unwritten one; and Adams, pleased to think himself more important to the great man than ever, told his wife that there could be little doubt of his being put in sole charge of the prospective glue-works.
His friend, still ruffling the gray moustache upward, stared at him in frowning perplexity. "Glue?" he said. "Yes. I been sort of milling over the idea of taking up something like that." "Handlin' it for some firm, you mean?" "No. Making it. Sort of a glue-works likely." Lohr continued to frown. "Let me think," he said. "Didn't the ole man have some such idea once, himself?"
Then he put on fresh clothes; but after dinner he seemed to be haunted, and asked his wife if she "noticed anything." She laughed and inquired what he meant. "Seems to me as if that glue-works smell hadn't quit hanging to me," he explained. "Don't you notice it?" "No! What an idea!" He laughed, too, but uneasily; and told her he was sure "the dang glue smell" was somehow sticking to him.
The glue-works foreman, standing in the doorway of the brick shed, observed his employer's eccentric approach, and doubtfully stroked a whiskered chin. "Well, they ain't no putticular use gettin' so upset over it," he said, as Adams came up. "When a thing happens, why, it happens, and that's all there is to it. When a thing's so, why, it's so.
Later, he went outdoors and walked up and down the small yard in the dusk; but now and then he stood still, with his head lifted, and sniffed the air suspiciously. "Can YOU smell it?" he called to Alice, who sat upon the veranda, prettily dressed and waiting in a reverie. "Smell what, papa?" "That dang glue-works." She did the same thing her mother had done: laughed, and said, "No! How foolish!
You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did you?" At that, Adams's agitation increased prodigiously. "How'd you THINK I expected to pay you?" he said. "Did you think I expected to get money on my own old bones?" He slapped himself harshly upon the chest and legs. "Do you think a bank'll lend money on a man's ribs and his broken-down old knee-bones? They won't do it!
I told him to tell you I'd pay you every last " "Well, well!" the old gentleman interrupted, testily. "I don't know anything about that." "I'm expecting to pay you," Adams went on, swallowing again, painfully. "I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I could get on my glue-works." The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. "Oh, out o' the GLUE-works?
Adams uttered an inarticulate sound, and lifted the hand that held his hat as if to make a protective gesture, but failed to carry it out; and his arm sank limp at his side. The foreman, however, seemed to feel that something ought to be said. "Our glue-works, hell!" he remarked.
A gray touring-car had just come to rest before the principal entrance of the building, and J. A. Lamb himself descended from it. He glanced over toward the humble rival of his projected great industry, saw his old clerk, and immediately walked across the street and the lot to speak to him. "Well, Adams," he said, in his husky, cheerful voice, "how's your glue-works?"
Then Adams laughed at himself for such nonsense; but could not rid his nostrils of their disgust. To him the whole town seemed to smell of his glue-works. Nevertheless, the glue was making, and his sheds were busy. "Guess we're stirrin' up this ole neighbourhood with more than the smell," his foreman remarked one morning. "How's that?" Adams inquired.
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