Owen, on his way to summon Pauline and Harry, descended to the basement, where the butler, gardener, and a colored man were uncrating the Egyptian mummy. Hicks, armed with this secret, promptly changed from a friendly creditor to a blackmailer. Through Hicks, Owen had betrayed one of his employer’s guarded secrets. This last had made him acquainted with a certain Montgomery Hicks, who lived well without visible source of income. He had borrowed and lost again, and now, for some time, had been betting on horse races.
The secretary had speculated with his modest savings and lost them. Every physician knows that morphine fiends become dishonest. Five years of the opiate had made him its slave. Owen shifted from one narcotic to another, finally, settling down upon morphine. With the sleeplessness, however, came the temptation to take drugs. Loss of sleep will make any man irritable and unreasonable, but hardly dishonest. There was no doubt that Owen was as upright and clean as the old man himself.Īt the age of forty the devil entered into Owen. During the first five’ or six years in the Marvin household the older man took pains to keep watch on this quiet, tactful youth until he knew all his ways and even his habits of thought. It was born and bred in him to be straight. When Owen came to Marvin’s attention, fifteen years before, he was a fine, honest, faithful man. This one exception was easily enough explained. Yet the most trusted man of all, Raymond Owen, the secretary, was disloyal and dishonest. Not one single case came to the old employer’s mind of a man who had failed to turn out exactly as he expected. His lieutenants had proved Marvin’s unerring instinct in judging character. The factories would go of their own momentum for a year or two at least, then his son, Harry, just out of college, should be able, perhaps, to help. His lieutenants were able, efficient and contented. There was little doubt that no primer mover in a great industry was better able to leave its helm than Standford Marvin. Stevens’s letter and read its final paragraph, which prescribed a change of climate, together with complete and permanent rest or “I will not answer for the consequences.” Tell Harry and Pauline I wish to see them.”Īlone, the old man opened a drawer and took a dose of medicine, then he unfolded Dr. Within the range of his vision was one of the most charming sights in the world-a handsome youth and a pretty girl, arrayed in white flannels, playing tennis.
Marvin drew his hand across his eyes and looked out the window. “You were just dictating about the new piston rings.” Owen nodded, poised his pencil and prompted: “Take out that bust of Pallas Athene,” he ordered, “and stand the mummy up in its place.”
Marvin’s eye coursed around the walls of the handsome library, which had been his office since the doctor had forbidden him to visit his automobile works and steel-stamping mills. I presume it is the mummy you bought on your last trip. “That reminds me, sir,” said Owen, smoothly, “that the International Express Company has delivered a large crate addressed to you from Cairo, Egypt. Stevens would make a mummy of me before I’m dead.” He much preferred a month, for there was reason to believe that the Marvin will would contain a handsome bequest to “my faithful secretary.” As a matter of fact, Owen had wondered whether his employer would last a year or a month. “Your health, sir,” replied Owen, who, like all intelligent rascals, never lied when the truth would do equally well. “What are you thinking about, Raymond?” he queried, with his customary directness. He glanced at the secretary and noted Owen’s gaze with something of a start. Now they formed a rhythm, and he heard them in his brain just before the fainting spells, which had come so frequently of late. He had lived with them, wrestled with them during his meals and taken them to his dreams at night. These things had been in his mind since the motor industry started. It came from one of his own cars-six cylinders chanting in unison a litany of power to the great modern god of gasoline. A soft purring sound floated in the open window and half-roused the aged manufacturer. In one of the stateliest mansions on the lower Hudson, near New York, old Stanford Marvin, president of the Marvin Motors Company, dozed over his papers, while Owen, his confidential secretary, eyed him across the mahogany flat-topped desk. CHAPTER III – PAULINE TAXES THE FIRST TRICKĬHAPTER XII – THE OLD GRIGSBY HOUSE PAYS PENANCE
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