The Fulton County news. [volume] (McConnellsburg, Pa.) 1899-current, 1917-12-27

1
Ing solar energy, although he had not
succeeded In making his process yalu.
able commercially.
Unfortunately, like many men of
genius, MacBeard had one disastrous
failing. He had trained himself intel.
lectually at the expense of his moral
faculties. He had never learned TO
control his primal gutter-urchIn pro-
pensities.
He was a thief.
He did not steal big things. but little
ones, and everyone knows that this is
more damning socially.
They called 1t kleptomania. and let
him resign. But It was not klepto-
mania; 1t was theft. MacBeard's ca
reer was finished. The only club that
would admit him to membership was
the Inventors'-and that only because
the furious chickering's of its members
had compelled the passage of a rule
that there should be no blackballlng.
Anyone could join the Inventors club,
but only inventors wanted to.
MacBeard, embittered, brooded over
his wrongs. They assumed monstrous
proportions In his mind. He was al
ready approaching fifty; he believed
that at death the soul perishes with
the body, and the thought of his 81
gantic brain being obllterated filled
him with frenzy. He wanted to make
lasting mark upon the world.
His first idea was to use his solar.
energy plant to produce simultaneous
eruptions Of the volcanoes in Italy and
Iceland, Japan and California upon IN
unprecedented scale. A lava desert
should cover all the titled fields and
cities, burying man q thousand feet
under Its surface and obllterating civil.
lization.
The science and art of nineteen.
twentieths Of the world would disap.
pear. MacBeard not only hated the
world, which had made him an out.
cast, but he despised II intellectually
as beyond redemption. He wanted to
bestride Its ruins as a superman, a
god.
However, his scheme had several
drawbacks. 1t was utterly beyond his
financial means. He could not fore
see exactly the results of 1t. There
were disturbing possibilities, and he
was not the man to act without mathe-
matical exactltude.
His vengeance must take other forms.
He wanted less academic plan, one
which reeked less of the midnight
lamp. He wanted more concrete,
personal triumph. He wanted to lead
IN army to victory, not to sit back
and watch the working out Of blind
forces that he had set In motion.
Besides, destruction must be fol-
lowed by construction, to satisfy his
scientific mind.
His second thought was to produce
q race Of men, somewhere In the Ice
bound wastes Of Greenland, that
should grow to maturity In a few
years; a race organized for war, a pri-
NAL blend Of man and tiger. 1t had
been done with the plants.
But he was too old. He would be
seventy before this plan could be car
ried to perfection. And then II was
improbable that the details would
work out as he anticipated. His final
Idea came through Masterman.
Masterman was one Of the many
men whom he had broken In his days
of power. But Masterman was of q
different caliber from the rest. Mas-
terman had tried to come back, and
had almost succeeded.
MacBeard, at first contemptuous Of
the old dreamer, came at last to watch
Masterman uneasily. He knew that
the old captain was crazed upon the
subject Of deep-sea life; but he knew,
too, the facts that underlay his letters
to the newspapers.
lie had sent paper embodying this
subject to the magazine of the Inven-
tors club. Unfortunately, Hatfield
had won the ballot for the editorshlp
that month. Masterman's scholarly
contribution had been consigned to the
waste basket. and the articles In the
magazine had been as follows: "A
King In Masquerade" king James
as Universal Man." Shakespeare and
the JIM cipher" "Bacon and the NIL
Cipher" "What Civilization Owes to
James l."
When Masterman's proxy ballot won
the elitorship during his absence, the
printers, instead Of inserting his latest
paper. as he had requested, used O
quantity oi his old, unpublished ma
terial.
Secretly MacBeard had known that
the carapace which Masterman had
brought back from the North was not
that OF stegosaurus. His attack upon
Mnsterman had been inspired by envy
and hatred. He had examined the
relic, and admitted to himself that II
was that of IN unknown deep-water
animal.