The Cresting Wave

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Penn Pub. Co. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III ADVENTURE The months following the failure were dismal ones in the Spade house. The Spade house no longer meant the big house with its rugs, its pictures, its curtains and its mahogany furniture -- it meant the little house in the narrow street, where William was born. The humiliation of his failure and the worry lest his creditors should not be paid in full had driven the smile from Mr. Spade's face and had substituted for it furrows between his brows. Young William would frequently surprise him sitting with his papers lying beside him, gazing idly and unseeing before him. It would be necessary to speak twice to rouse him from his lethargy. It was soon discovered that Mr. Simpson had been the chief factor in his downfall. Mr. Simpson permitted it presently to be known that he owned the controlling interest in the plant that was purveying the duplicate of the Spade patent. The decision of the court in regard to the patentwas all that was necessary to effect his complete recovery from the malady that had laid hold of him. He took charge of the new company immediately. Mr. Spade then understood. When the patent had been granted, he had told his partner, trusting the man implicitly, that he had just found an article in a French engineering magazine which described vaguely a device similar to his. The astute Simpson made "a note of the date of the magazine. This was weapon enough for him. It gave him an almost certain chance of proving that his partner's idea was not an original one, and therefore not patentable. With this in view he had set about forming ...