This novel and mysterious little machine, with a glass jar underneath, many coils and wheels within, and an odd, toothed crest of little upreaching metal fingers, had been produced only at great cost, great sacrifice. It had seemed wholly right and reasonable that all of young Halsey's five hundred dollars should disappear little by little, and it had done so, long ago. It seemed proper that the small savings which Grace had deposited in a tin baking-powder can--for she was like her mother, part ground-squirrel, and secretive--should also disappear little by little, and they also had gone. In some way, only the women knew; how, they all had had enough to eat, so far as that meant actually necessary food; but the entire Rawn family were a gaunt and haggard, as well as a wearied and anxious quartette, when finally they gathered about the little machine out of the woodshed. Their play was on one card, and the card was turned. What was it? If either of the women doubted, she held her peace. Rawn did not doubt. He had been sure all along that Charles Halsey, engineer, would work out his, Rawn's, idea. And young Halsey, engineer, had done that very thing. There is no roof in all the world ever has covered a vaster and more epoch-making thought than did the patched cover of the woodshed in Kelly Row. On the afternoon of the day wherein they emerged from the woodshed, these two, none too well clad, took the street-car to the city, Halsey with a newspaper bundle under his arm. In it was what Mr. Rawn called his second-current motor, which comprised the basic idea of International Power, soon to loom large in the business world. CHAPTER XI THE TEST I In the most commonplace way in the world, and quite as though he had always done this very thing, Mr. Henry Warfield Standley, president of the I. & D. A. Railway Co., warned in advance by Mr. Rawn's telephone, came to the door himself. Presently the three, Rawn, Halsey and the president of the company for which both so long had worked, sat at the long glass-covered table, where lay many papers. The president pushed a button and ordered the attendance of Mr. Theodosius Ackerman, the general traffic manager; so that now they made four in company. The G.T.M., as he was known, had suffered great abrasion of the nerves by the delay of Mr. Rawn to produce a machine done up in a newspaper or in any way whatsoever, and he had joined the president in a disgusted belief that in some way he had been made foolish. He frowned now savagely at John Rawn, and John Rawn now, his hat on his head, frowned quite as savagely at him.