“Yes, yes.  What is it?” Flint slid off the edge of the table and walked over to Herzog; stood there in front of him, and bored down at him with eager eyes, the pupils contracted by morphine, but very bright.  “What’s the best way?”

“With the electric arc, sir,” answered the chemist, mopping his brow.  This grilling method reminded him of what he had heard of “Third Degree” torments.  “That’s the best method, sir.”

“Now in use, anywhere?”

“In Notodden, Norway.  They have firebrick furnaces, you understand, sir, with an alternating current of 5000 volts between water-cooled copper electrodes.  The resulting arc is spread by powerful electro-magnets, so.”  And he illustrated with his eight acid-stained fingers.  “Spread out like a disk or sphere of flame, of electric fire, you see.”

“Yes, and what then?” demanded Flint, while his partner, forgetting now to smile, sat there by the window scrutinizing him.  One saw, now, the terribly keen and prehensile intellect at work under the mask of assumed foppishness and jesting indifference—­the quality, for the most part masked, which had earned Waldron the nickname of “Tiger” in Wall Street.

“What then?” repeated Flint, once more levelling that potent forefinger at the sweating Herzog.

“Well, sir, that gives a large reactive surface, through which the air is driven by powerful rotary fans.  At the high temperature of the electric arc in air, the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen dissociate into their atoms.  The air comes out of the arc, charged with about one per cent. of nitric oxide, and after that—­”

“Jump the details, idiot!  Can’t you move faster than a paralytic snail?  What’s the final result?”

“The result is, sir,” answered Herzog, meek and cowed under this harrying, “that calcium nitrate is produced, a very excellent fertilizer.  It’s a form of nitrogen, you see, directly obtained from air.”

“At what cost?”

“One ton of fixed nitrogen in that form costs about $150 or $160.”

“Indeed?” commented Flint.  “The same amount, combined in Chile saltpeter, comes to—?”

“A little over $300, sir.”

“Hear that, Wally?” exclaimed the Billionaire, turning to his now interested associate.  “Even if this idea never goes a step farther, there’s a gold mine in just the production of fertilizer from air!  But, after all, that will only be a by-product.  It’s the oxygen we’re after, and must have!”

He faced Herzog again.

“Is any oxygen liberated, during the process?” he demanded.

“At one stage, yes, sir.  But in the present process, it is absorbed, also.”

Flint’s eyebrows contracted nervously.  For a moment he stood thinking, while Herzog eyed him with trepidation, and Waldron, almost forgetting to smoke, waited developments with interest.  The Billionaire, however, wasted but scant time in consideration.  It was not money now, he lusted for, but power.  Money was, to him, no longer any great desideratum.  At most, it could now mean no more to him than a figure on a check-book or a page of statistics in his private memoranda.  But power, unlimited, indisputable power over the whole earth and the fulness thereof, power which none might dispute, power before which all humanity must bow—­God! the lust of it now gripped and shook his soul.