Chapter I: Dr. Hermann Anderwelt

I had been busy all day trying to swarm the bees and secure my honey. The previous day had been February 29th, a date which doesn’t often happen, and which I had especial reason to remember, for it had been the most successful of my business career. I had made a long guess at the shaky condition of the great house of Slater, Bawker & Co., who had been heavy buyers of wheat. I had talked the market down, sold it down, hammered it down; and, true enough, what nobody else seemed to expect really happened. The big firm failed, the price of wheat went to smash in a panic of my mixing, and, as a result, I saw a profit of more than two hundred thousand dollars in the deal. But, in order to secure this snug sum, I still had to buy back the wheat I had sold at higher prices, and this I didn’t find so easy. The crowd in the wheat pit had seen my hand, and were letting me play it alone against them all.

After the session I hurried to my office to get my overcoat and hat, having an engagement to lunch at the Club.

“If you please, Mr. Werner, there is a queer old gentleman in your private office who wishes to see you,” said Flynn, my chief clerk.

“Ask him to call again to-morrow; I am in a great hurry to-day,” I said, slipping on one sleeve of my overcoat as I started out.

“But he has been waiting in there since eleven o’clock, and said he very much wished to see you when you had plenty of time. He would not allow me to send on the floor for you during the session.”

“Since eleven o’clock! Did he have his lunch and a novel sent up? Well, I can hardly run away from a man who has waited three and a half hours to see me;” and I entered my private office with my overcoat on.

Seated in my deep, leathern arm-chair was an elderly man, with rather long and bushy iron-grey hair, and an uneven grey beard. His head inclined forward, he breathed heavily, and was apparently fast asleep.

“You will pardon my awaking you, but I never do business asleep!” I ventured rather loudly.

Slowly the steel-blue eyes opened, and, without any start or discomposure, the old man answered, --

“And I--my most successful enterprises are developed in my dreams.”

His features and his accent agreed in pronouncing him German. He arose calmly, buttoned the lowest button of his worn frock-coat, and, instead of extending his hand to me, he poked it inside his coat, letting it hang heavily on the single button. It was a lazy but characteristic attitude. It tended to make his coat pouch and his shoulders droop. I remembered having seen it somewhere before.

“Mr. Werner, I have a matter of the deepest and vastest importance to unfold to you,” he began, rather mysteriously, “for which I desire five hours of your unemployed time----”

“Five hours!” I interrupted. “You do not know me! That much is hard to find without running into the middle of the night, or into the middle of the day--which is worse for a busy man. I have just five minutes to spare this afternoon, which will be quite time enough to tell me who you are and why you have sought me.”

“You do not know me because you do not expect to see me on this hemisphere,” he continued. “Nor did I expect to find you a potent force in the commercial world, only three years after a literary and linguistic preparation for a scholarly career. Why, the mädchens of Heidelberg have hardly had time to forget your tall, athletic figure, or ceased wondering if you were really a Hebrew----”

“You seem to be altogether familiar with my history,” I put in with a little heat. “Kindly enlighten me equally well as to your own.”

“I gave you the pleasure of an additional year of residence at the University of Heidelberg not long ago,” he answered.

“I do not know how that can be, for to my uncle I owe my entire education there.”

“Perhaps an unappreciated trifle of it you owe to your instructors and lecturers. Do you forget that I refused to pass your examinations in physics, and kept you there a year longer?”

“You are not Doctor Anderwelt, then?”

“Hermann Anderwelt, Ph.D., at your service, sir,” he replied somewhat proudly.

“But when and why did you leave your chair at Heidelberg?”

“It is to answer this that I ask the five hours,” he said slowly.

“Oh, come now, doctor, you used to tell me more in a two-hour lecture than I could remember in a week,” I answered, taking off my overcoat, and touching an electric button at my desk. My office boy entered.

“Teddy, have I had lunch to-day?” This was my favourite question on a busy day, and Teddy always answered it seriously.

“No, sir, you have an engagement to lunch at the Standard Club,” he replied.