The Morgan City daily review. (Morgan City, La.) 1916-1920, 1917-09-17
CHAPTER VII.
Ira MacBeard.

Ira MacBeard.
Ira MacBeard was one Of those rar
meh who are recognized by their con
temporaries as master minds. To tn,
public he was unknown, but amonl
the learned he was mentioned in tn,
same breath with Faraday, Sir Isaa'
Newton and Lavoisier. Hatfield Of thu
March Hares' club had once honore(
him by publicly comparing him witt
James I.
He had discovered the secret Of colo
light, and had received fortune from
one Of the largest electrical companies
for destroying his papers. This en-.
abled him to free himself from the
poverty In which he had lived.
He had bisected an ion-upon q
Blackboard; a thing considered theo-
retically impossible.
He had solved the problem of utiliz-
ing solar energy, although he had not
succeeded In making his process valu-
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-
penslties.
he was thief.
BE did not steal big things. but little
ones, and everyone knows that this 10
more damning socially.
They called 1t kleptomania. and let
him resign. But 1t was not kleptO-
mania; it was theft. MacBeard's ca.
reer was finished. The only club that
would admit him to membership was
the 1nventors'-and that only because
the furious chickering's Of its members
had compelled the passage of a rule
that there should be no blackballing.
Anyone could Join the Inventors club,
but only inventors wanted to.
MacBeard. embittered. brooded over
his wrongs. They assumed mOnstrOus
proportions in bis mind. He was al
ready approaching fifty; he believed
that at death the soul perishes with
the body. and the thought OF his g.
gantic brain being obliterated filled
him with frenzy. He wanted to make
a 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 an
unprecedented scale. A lava desert
should cover all the titled fields and
cities, burying man 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 it intellectually
as beyond redemption. He wanted to
bestride Its ruins as superman,
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-
NAUTICAL exactitude.
His vengeance must take other forms.
He wanted less academic plan, one
which reeked less of the midnight
lamp. He wanted a more concrete.
personal triumph. He wanted to lead
an 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. A.
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. It 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 1t 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 callber from the rest. Mas
terman had tried to come back, and
had almost succeeded
MacBeard, at frst contemptuous Of
the old dreamer, came at last to watch
Masterman uneasily. He knew that
the old captain was crazed ulbn the
subject Of deep-sea life; but he knew,
too, the facts that underlay his letters
to the newspapers =
He had sent q paper embodying this
subject to the magazine Of the Inven-
tors club. Unfortunately, Halneld
had won the ballot for the editorship
that month. NAsterman's scholarly
had been consigned to the
waste hosket. and the articles In the,
magazine had been ~ follows: "A
King In Masquerade" "Kiag jones II
" Universal Man." seAaksspesrs and
he I'M cipher" Bacon and the NIL
1pAes," what Civilization Owes to- .
ramAn ~