and cheap tea-places for----"

"I know now," I said. "It has keys like a typewriter. That's all right.
I thought for a moment it might be a book, a ledger, you know. Go on."

"Well, Tim's machine is out and away the best thing of its kind ever
seen. There's simply no comparison between it and the existing cash
registers. I've had it tested in every way and I know."

I began, so I thought, to see what Ascher was to be roped into.

"You want money to patent it, I suppose," I said.

But that was not it. Gorman had scraped together whatever money was
necessary to make his brother's invention secure in Europe and America.
He had done more, he had formed a small private company in which he held
most of the shares himself. He had manufactured a hundred of the new
machines and was prepared to put them on the market.

"Ah," I said. "Now I see what you're at. You want more capital. You want
to work the thing on a big scale. I might take a share or two myself,
just for the sake of having a flutter."

"We don't want you," said Gorman. "The fewer there are in it the better.
I don't want to have to divide the profits with a whole townful of
people. But we might let you in if you get Ascher for us. You have a lot
of influence with Ascher."

I had, of course, no influence whatever with Ascher. But Gorman, though
he is certainly a clever man, has the defects of his class and his
race. He was an Irish peasant to start with and there never was an Irish
peasant yet who did not believe in a mysterious power which he calls
"influence." It is curious faith, though it justifies itself pretty well
in Ireland. In that country you can get nearly anything done, either
good or bad, if you persuade a sufficiently influential person to
recommend it. Gorman's mistake, as it seemed to me, lay in supposing
that influence is equally potent outside Ireland. I am convinced that it
is no use at all in dealing with a man like Ascher. If a big financial
magnate will not supply money for an enterprise on the merits of the
thing he is not likely to do so because a friend asks him. Besides I
cannot, or could not at that time, boast of being Ascher's intimate
friend. However Gorman's mistake was no affair of mine.

"If Ascher goes in at all," I said, "he'll do it on a pretty big scale.
He'll simply absorb the rest of you."

"The fact is," said Gorman, "I don't want Ascher to join. I don't want
him to put down a penny of money. All I want him to do is t