The host of readers who have enjoyed following Mr. Appleton's quaint characters through their various amusing adventures will doubtless be deeply interested in this account of how another of the partners' cherished "good things" goes wrong

WHAT I need," says Billy Martin, wiping the mud off his shoe with a bunch of grass, "is a rich uncle to die and leave me a fortune."

      "What you'll need if you spring that old gag on me again," says I, "is an ambulance. Every time we've gone broke at the track this way, Billy Martin, you've worked that one off some time durin' our perambulations back to civilization. I'm getting so good and tired of it I can taste it comin'. You want somebody to give you a new line of thought more'n you need a rich uncle — and you're more likely to get it, too."

      The plank Billy was walking on up-ended and he soshed into another hole. That's one thing the track managers don't look after right — accommodations for the walkers back. It was getting dark, and we was still in Milldale, a long way from home. While Billy was cussing the mud and his luck and his friend I goes on ahead of him.

      "You talk about that uncle that never lived, like you could reach up in the sky and pull down the money," says I. "You're older than me, Billy, but you ain't any stronger on philosophy than if you'd been born yesterday. If you had paid less attention to your feed-box tip, and more ⸺" And that was as far as I got. The next minute I was rooting up real estate, one foot tangled in a piece of clothes-line. Billy laughed when I cut loose with a few remarks about careless washerwomen, and then stops and commenced pulling on the line.

      It wasn't hanging from a post or tree; it went straight up into the air until it was out of sight.

      "That's funny," says he to himself.

      "It would have been funnier still," says I, "if I had sprained my fool ankle and you had to carry me home. What are you doing?"

      "Nothing," says he, pulling on the line sailor fashion. "I'm just: curious to see what's on the end of this here rope."

      "Perhaps it's the rich uncle," says I; "unless you don't think he went in that direction when he died."

      Something that looked like a buzzard came swooping down on me from the sky at the other end of the rope just then. It had got dark now, so we couldn't see exactly what it was; but Billy struck a match and held the light long enough to show that it wasn't no bird. The best we could make out of it was a little balloon, with a lot of wires and boxes and levers and things on a piece of tin, hung below the gas bag.

      "Well," says Billy, "name it and it's yours."

      "Not for me," says I; "it's some sort of an invention, and if there's one thing Pm leery about it's inventions. Keep it yourself, with my regards. Merry Christmas, Billy — and I hope you know what to do with the flying machine!"

      He was already wrapping the rope around it, and I see by the way he done it that he was going to carry the thing home.

      "If that is your uncle," says I, "of course you've got the right to bury him where you like; but if it happens to be that some oroide inventor is looking for it I don't know you, and never saw you before, when he gets wise to who stole his air-ship. Understand?"

      Billy kept on wrapping the bundle up. "Finders is keepers," says he; "especially when you find things in the sky. Mebbe we have reached up there and pulled down a fortune, after all, Jimmy Raines; you can't tell."

      "And neither can you," says I, "until the coppers nab you for swiping some angel's plaything. Carry it home if you want to, but don't ask me to help nurse the thing."

      "Don't worry about that," says he; "if I need help I'll pick out somebody with something besides scrambled eggs and sure-thing tips that forget to win lining their skull. Come on!"

      And as I hadn't got the rope loose from my foot yet I came on.

      "Don't try to frisk me for my plaything," says Billy, feeling me sawing at the rope with my knife; "you didn't want it at first and now you can't have it."

      "Any old time," says I, giving the rope a last swipe, "that I try to lift one of the inventions that you go crazy about, send me to Longview and lose the key! You can have all the medals coming to us on that score, and welcome."

      I hears somebody talking excitedly, behind us in the dark, but Billy was grumbling about the sidewalk, and didn't stop. And knowing we had a long walk ahead of us — we hadn't even held out car fare — I let him go on.

      When we got home the gas was all out of the balloon, and there wasn't enough left in Billy to answer me when I asks: "Where will your adopted relative sleep? In your bed or mine?" He just shoved it into a' corner and commenced to shuck his clothes; and seeing he was in a bad humor I didn't pursue the subjeck, as the side-show spieler used to say.

      I come to the next morning, thinking I'd dropped into a clock store overnight and all the alarm buzzers was working overtime. The racket didn't come from our room, but as soon as I got my eyes open enough to see that Billy wasn't in bed, I figured the noise was his. Whatever Billy Martin does he does heartylike; and if he wanted to raise the shingles off the roof with a poker and a piece of sheet iron, nobody in that neighborhood would try harder than him to get the most noise out of the combination.

      I sticks my head out of the back window. Down in the back yard he had the balloon filled with gas, floating about over his head. He was sitting cross-legged on the end of the rope, and hammering a rag-time with a broomstick on a stove zinc, that would have put a boiler factory all to the bad. He'd look hard at a little machine sitting beside him and then up at the tin platform hung onto the balloon, and he seemed so happy and unconcerned you might have thought him leading Sousa's band for five dollars a number. I took a bellows full of air and yells: "Billy!"

      He stops and looks up at me.

      "If you have to break all the windows and tear the house up just to keep that out-of-the-sky uncle of yours awake," says I, "why in creation don't you use dynamite, and get it over with? Ain't he up yet?"

      "Who?" says Billy, dreamylike.

      "That fake uncle. He couldn't stay dead with that hullabaloo going on."

      "I'm not trying to wake my uncle," says Billy, very dignified; "I'm generating power."

      Well, it had come at last! Many a time Id warned him not to fool with patents and inventions, or he'd get a flat wheel; and now he'd got it. Poor Billy was loony — that was sure.

      "Generating power?" says I, reaching for my clothes. "He'll be generating a straight-jacket for himself if I don't get that thing away from him;" and I hustles into my day harness any old way I could.. When I reached the yard I expected to find Billy with a wild look in his face, babbling baby talk to himself; but he wasn't. He'd softened up his Indian war drumming so it didn't jar your back-bone to hear it, and before I could make up my mind how to hold him till the police got there he turns around and says: "Jimmy, this is no angel's plaything; it's a model of a power engine — it's a sound machine."

      "From what I've heard," says I, getting my suspenders on right, "it certainly sounds like it! But don't you mind, Billy! We'll get you to the hospital and they'll give you nice medicine, and you'll go to sleep, and when you wake up it will be all right again. I'm your ⸺"

      "Cut it out," says Billy, as natural as if he had't lost his mind. "I'm not dippy. I was just experimenting. Look at the little engine right there in front of you; you can see I'm telling you the straight of it. This balloon is a combination of a telephone and graphophone, and a lot of other phones I don't know about. When it is sent up in the air, the noise from the streets and the factories rises till it hits them sensitive plates. They commence to wobble just like the telephone receiver does, and that starts the wire trembling. It is connected with the engine you're nearly stepping on, and — see the wheel go round?"

      Foolish as his talk seemed, the wheel he pointed at was running. It slowed up now and stopped; but when Billy tapped the zinc with the broomstick a couple of times it commenced to whirl again. Billy was in his right mind, after all.

      "Well," says I, "what's it to you? You've got a sound machine, as you call it, but what'll it do? Make hokey-pokey or mend umbrellas? I don't see no fortune in whirling a two-inch wheel around with the racket you gather up free of charge out of the air. Show me the graft."

      "You're always shy on imagination," says Billy, very snappish; "can't see anything till I throw it in your face. This machine is only a model, mutton head. When the big one is made it will have enough power to run real machinery — a house full of it. Multiply the sound machine by a hundred, and you've got all the power you want to operate a dozen manufacturing plants. Pretty soon the sky will be full of these things — big ones — all soaking up vibrations from the streets and handing it over to the machines in the factories. The wheels go round — and you don't have to buy coal or electricity. It's a great idea."

      "Yes," I says, trying to head him off, "it's hot stuff, all right, but I ask again where do we get in? If you build a bigger sound machine and hitch it up over the city and sop up a lot of noise and turn it into steam and electricity, somebody'll come along and claim ⸺"

      "That is my machine!"

      We both ducked; a quiet looking gray-haired man was standing back of us, pointing at the contrivance Billy had kidnaped.

      "Youah stole it from me, across the river last night," he says, his voice trembling, "but I followed! And I'll have the law on you."

      "Hold on a minute," says Billy, smooth as butter, as I give him credit for being when it looks like rain, "we didn't steal your balloon; it tripped my friend, Mr. Raines, and trying to get him free from the anchor rope we pulled it down. Not knowing where it had come from, and you not being there, we carried it home, intending to advertise it in the papers. I was just giving it a try-out to see what sort of an invention you have; and I must say, sir, you have opened up a wonderful field! This will revolutionize all power generating the world over!"

      Ain't it funny what a little Mexican salve will do when it's spread right? Billy surely knows that game, and before he had finished the blood had gone out of the old fellow's eye, and he was smiling as proud as a boy with a new lockjaw pistol. "If that is the case, suh," says he, "and youah did not intend to appropriate my property, I accept your explanation, and will take the machine and depart."

      "Certainly, certainly," says Billy, "but I see you are hot and tired. Jimmy, get that bottle out of the closet and some ice and sugar; Mr. — Mr. ⸺"

      "Tesledy, suh; Colonel John Harmsworth Tesledy, of Kentucky."

      "Colonel Tesledy," says Billy, "I would consider it an honor if you would mix a small julep for yourself."

      That did the business! Before Colonel Tesledy left us him and Billy had framed up a company to build the machines, and had their fortunes all made and ready to spend. They took me in as vice-president — so's to keep me quiet, Billy said — and the next day we went over to the colonel's house and finished up the work of organizing the company. When Billy Martin gets a start on a thing of that kind he moves some; and it wasn't a week before we had a machine of the regular size built.

      The colonel did a good part of the work himself, of course, because that was his secret, but Billy and I helped, and when the machine went up into the air and the engine commenced to run it certainly began to look good, even to me.

      We hitched it onto a lathe, and there was nothing to complain about as far as it went — it did the work. I never was ‘strong on machinery, a wheelbarrow being about my limit in this line, but I could see there wasn't nothing wrong with that bunch of wheels and levers.

      While we stood watching the lathe buzzing, Colonel Tesledy says to me, as proud as if he'd won his first race: "It would appeah, Mr. Raines, that we are closely approaching perpetual motion, suh. We simply place our machine where it gathers and concentrates the vibrations that are filling the air; we transmit them to the lathe; it runs, casting off other vibrations; these, added to the noise of the street cars, teams, factories and pedestrians, float upward again to the collector and condenser, new power is generated and transmitted to the lathe once more — and there youah ah, suh!"

      He shoves his cuffs up with the backs of his hands and smiles. If ever a man was pleased he was wearing the colonel's moccasins that day! And Billy was almost as proud himself.

      For a week we worked like roustabouts getting the new factory over in Cincinnati into shape. But the day we opened up is one I hate to think about! Just when we could see the world coming to us and begging to be taken in out of the wet; when we was planning where to spend all the money we was going to make, and getting ready to buy dress-suits for the banquets kings and dukes and lords was going to give us, we had a crimp put in us that is never been ironed out to this day.

      I was attending strictly to my duties as vice-president, I remember, when it come, I had fixed all the blotters clean and nice, and was smoking my third cigar, with my feet on the desk, when the wild man from Borneo drops into the office and spills himself over the railing.

      "Colonel Tesledy!" he yells, like a calliope out of tune, "you've stole my idea! You have no right to the sound machine. Give up this plant to me or I'll take your life!"

      My feet came off the desk, and if I didn't swallow the cigar it wasn't because I kept my mouth shut.

      "Excuse me!" says I, loud and positive. "You've got the wrong party. I'm not Colonel Tesledy, and I need all the life I've got in my own business. If you're looking for the colonel step into the machine shop; out that way, and two doors to the right."

      He starts, and I makes a break to get in the back way to tip him off to the colonel. But I've took notice that your Kentuckian don't need no one tipping off trouble to him. He smells it coming — and goes to meet it with a smoke wagon. Before the wild man could say the colonel's name he was covered by a gun with a muzzle as big as a sewer pipe; and he wasn't wild. enough to keep on going when the colonel says "Stop!

      "Sit right down where youah ah, suh," says the colonel; "and when youah ah sufficiently composed to make youahself understood, youah may explain the reason for this visit."

      Mr. Wildman sits down. "You've stole my machine," says he again, "and you'll give it back to me or I'll wreck you!"

      "Mr. Raines," says the colonel, calm as a frog pond, "will you be kind enough to promulgate a little of that select Bourbon this way? I think our visitor would be more intelligible if he were to join us in a julep or a high-ball."

      I steps over to the colonel's desk and gets the bottle out.

      "Don't try to put me off," says the wild man, "you cannot escape me! I demand my rights. Unless you give up those sound machines by to-morrow morning, I'll wreck you. I swear it!"

      The colonel took the bottle from me and passed a glass across the table to Mr. Crazy. "Wreck us?" says he, raising his eyebrows. "And would you mind telling me how, suh?"

      The trouble hunter leans across the table hissing like a rattlesnake. "You don't know the power I have in this town," says he. "I'll have every street paved with tanbark! I'll get an ordinance through the council to make everybody wear rubber heels! The wagons shall be rubber-tired; the street-car wheels shall be the same; the factory windows shall all be closed. In a week, Colonel Tesledy, Cincinnati shall be known as the Silent City. There will be no noise to run the sound machine! That is how I will wreck you. See here!" and he pulls from his pocket a bunch of papers that would have choked a hippopotamus. "Here," says he, "are the ordinances, drawn up. Look at the names signed; they mean that they will become laws without delay, for I tell you I have the power, and I will use it!"

      The colonel, who was pouring out a glass of his favorite Bourbon, stops, and I notice his face begun to get frosted. As for me, I had cold feet then and there. If that wild man could do half he said, we was playing a horse that was running the wrong way, and that's no dream! That thought hit me hard, and I could see, easy enough, that with little old Cincinnati doing a sleep-walking act, dressed in mackintoshes and sneaks, we wouldn't be one-two-six with our sound machine. We had to have a noise to get it going — and Mr. Stakeclaimer was going to see that we didn't get it.

      The colonel's hand shook while he turned the fizzy water into the whisky in his glass, and I knew he was thinking ninety miles an hour. "Before we go any further, suh," says he, at last, "suppose we irrigate. Regards!" and he drank his down. Mr. Nuts did the same — and then he makes a face that would have put Pat Rooney, the old monkey, all to the bad. "Your ideas of irrigating," says he, "are about as bad as your ways of acquiring machines. That stuff is vile."

      Colonel Tesledy stops with his second glass on the way to his mouth, and if he had any blood in the rest of his body it was because his face couldn't hold it.

      "Will you say that again?" he asks ina voice that made the window panes crack with the cold.

      "I says," repeats Mr. Bughouse, easy and confident, "that's the worse stuff I ever drank, What do you call it? Wood alcohol?"

      "What!" says the colonel, talking to somebody up in Columbus, judging by his voice. "What! That, suh, is some of the very oldest, most choice, most perfect Bourbon ever made in Kentucky. From my own county, suh, in a distillery that has been in continuous operation for sixty-five years. That whisky is wuth its weight in gold, suh, and I tell youah ⸺"

      "I tell you," says Mr. Batty, pushing the bottle away, "that you are no judge of whisky."

      The colonel rose to his feet, and the red in his face turned green and purple. He tried to say something, and then he tried to get his gun out again; but before he could do either he clasps his hands to his head, and slap! bang! he goes to the floor. I makes a fireman-jump for him, and the wild man starts to sneak, but the door opens in his face, and there was Billy Martin, with two huskies in gray uniforms.

      "That's the man," says one of them, while Billy hot-foots across the room to see what I was doing. Then I hears the husky say to our visitor: "Come along with us, Harney; the wagon's out here, waitin' for you. Well go back with you, and talk about your machine all the way."

      The wild man grinned. "All right, Fred," he says; "I was just selling my rights to these gentlemen when you came in. I'll be worth a million dollars to-morrow, and I'm going to get you both new suits of clothes — pretty ones, all strung with diamonds and pretzels and gold dollars."

      I was loosening the colonel's collar and pouring water in his face, but I stopped long enough to ask Billy: "Which asylum?"

      "Longview," says he. "Escaped last night, and they traced him here. Did he hit the colonel?"

      "Yes," says I.

      "Where?" asks Billy, turning to go after the bughouse boy and soak him.

      "In his pride," says I; "but it won't be fatal. Bring him to, and explain that the guy was a nut, and he'll be all right."

      But he wasn't. Billy says that it's a phishislogical. fact, whatever that means, that a great shock on a man's nerve often does what that did to the colonel. He come to all right, and he talked as good as ever; but when we went back to the machines he'd clean forgot how to put the finishing touches to 'em. Try as he would, he couldn't get that last kink into the blamed things. He done his best all that afternoon, but it wouldn't come; all he could remember when he tackled them was, "You're no judge of whisky!" And with them words burning into his heart and ringing in his ears he'd sit down and cry like a two-year-old.

      It looked sort of ridiculous, that's true, and Billy and me had to button our faces up to keep from laughing; but when the next day and the next passed without the colonel being able to connect with his ideas, it come over us that we'd never get both trolleys back on the wire again.

      And we never did. Every other way the colonel was able to toe the mark; but when he tried machine thinking he run wild. Me and Billy talked it over one night, and decided to hook up with the proposition ourselves; but every man's got his limits, and if mine is a wheelbarrow, Billy's don't get much further than a lawn-mower. Inside of two hours we had ruined all the sound machines — ruined 'em good and proper and for all time, too; and when Billy come out of the last mix-up, grease on his hands and oil on his face, he says:

      "This, James, is where we transfer. We've played the sound machine for all it's worth, and backed it off the board, but I know when I've got enough; do you?"

      Did I? Ask me! That vice-president job was a good one, as long as the cigars lasted and the blotters was handy; but I had a sneaking idea there'd be other visitors from the foolish factories — and they're the kind of playmates I never did get enthusiastic about.

      I wipes my hands and takes my coat off the hook.

      "Billy," says I, "I moves that this Sound Machine Corporation dissolves here and now. What do you say, colonel?"

      The old gentleman nodded; he was too near leaking tears to say anything, for he knowed we was nosed out at the finish of our race, by his falling down on us.

      "Agreed," says Billy; "it looks like a shame to give up all this good machinery to the scrap pile, but there ain't no use projecting around with it. Billy and I can make some kind of a living picking twenty-to-one shots, colonel, and I know you are well fixed down home in your own country. You go back there and take it easy; if you ever remember the combination again you know where to find us, and were game to try it again; but now I think we had better dissolve the Sound Machine Corporation, Limited — in one of your unequaled mint juleps; if you're willing!"

      And we was all willing!