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became a dollar-a-year man?” he asked.
    Her eyes widened a trifle as she gazed back at him.
    “Surely, you
must have heard of Frank Imberline!” she ex claimed. “Imberline, of Consolidated Rubber. Of course, it was his father who built up the rubber combine, but
at least this Imberline hasn’t done anything
to weaken that combine. There are hints, rumors——”
    She broke off
abruptly and gnawed her lip.
    “Go on,” said Simon pleasantly. “I’m interested in the
saga of The Imberline.”
    She moved her hands again.
    “Oh, it’s
just rubber trade talk,” she said. “Something you couldn’t possibly be interested in.”
    “Suppose I
hear it and decide for myself.”
    “Well—Father doesn’t like Imberline, and he may be pre judiced—probably as. But he maintains
Imberline is nothing more than a straw man for a syndicate of unscrupulous men who wangled
his WPB appointment in order to further their own ends. I told you that Father’s an individualist. I
suppose that’s a nice way of
hinting that he’s a near-eccentric. Some in ventors are. He’s frightfully bitter against the people in Wash ington who gave him the runaround, and he insists
that cer tain interests are trying to smother his process in order to
build up their own business during the war and, more selfishly, after the war.”
    “And your father, I take it, has only the good of the people at heart.”
    She looked down at her drink and he spoke swiftly.
    “I’m
sorry,” he said. “A few days of Washington and I find myself afflicted with cynicism.”
    “It’s all right,” she said in a low voice. “It was a
logical question, after all.”
    She raised her
eyes to his and met them squarely.
    “Yes,” she said stoutly. “He does have the good of the
people at heart. He offered his invention to the Government, free and clear, but his offer never got to
the men he wanted to give it
to. Instead, he was interviewed by strangers whom he didn’t like or trust. When he refused to give them his formula, when he insisted on being taken to the top man,
the mysteri ous accidents began to happen.”
    “Does
Imberline know of all this?”
    She shrugged.
    “Who knows? I’ve told you that he’s not exactly the heavy intellectual. It might be that he’s of
the popular conviction that all
inventors are pathological specimens who just want to waste his time. Heaven knows he must meet plenty of that type, too. Or it might be that somebody in his office
does work for some other interests, as Father insists, and never lets
him see anything or anybody they don’t want
him to see.”
    She leaned forward eagerly.
    “But
I’m sure that if I could get to him. I could make him listen, get him interested.” She colored slightly. “Frank
Imberline , you see, is one of those
I’m-old-enough-to-be-your-father persons. I—I think he’ll at least give
me a hearing.”
    Simon eyed the girl soberly. Her face blazed suddenly.
    “I
know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I can put up with that if it would help Father
and—yes—help the war ef fort. It sounds corny, I know, but I really mean it.”
    Her eyes were beseeching.
    “Couldn’t
you help me to see Imberline?” she pleaded.
    He gazed at her soberly. She was not stupid in the way he had thought, but it appeared that there
were certain of the facts of
life that had not yet completely entered her aware ness.
    “Of
course I will,” he said kindly. “But it might take some time to get an audience with the
pontiff. I’m not so well up In the routines for getting into the inner sanctum of a Washing ton panjandrum …”
    The Saint had a faculty of hearing things without listening for them, and of correlating them with the instantaneous
effi ciency of a sorting machine, so that
they were sharply classified in his mind almost before the mechanical part of
his sense of hearing had finished processing them.
    This particular sound was no more than the shyest ghost of a tap. But it told him,