asked Betty Miller to
come back down to the barn for a conference. She listened and asked
questions. At last she said, "Well, all right, if you promise me they
can't get out of their cages. But heaven knows what you'll do when fall
comes. They won't live in an unheated barn and you can't bring them into
the house."

"We'll be out of the mouse business by then," Doris predicted. "Every
pet shop in the country will have them and they'll be down to nothing
apiece."

Doris was right, of course, in spite of our efforts to protect the
market. Anyhow that ushered in our cage building phase, and for the next
week--with a few interruptions--we built cages, hundreds of them, a good
many for breeding, but mostly for shipping.

It was rather regrettable that, after the _Courier_ gave us most of the
third page, including photographs, we rarely had a day without a few
visitors. Many of them wanted to buy mice or kites, but Tommy refused to
sell any mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint those who wanted
kites. The Supermarket took all we had--except a dozen--and at a dollar
fifty each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather frightened me, but he set
the value of the mice at ten dollars a pair and got it without any
arguments.

Our beautiful stationery arrived, and we had some invoice forms printed
up in a hurry--not engraved, for a wonder.

It was on Tuesday--following the Thursday--that a lanky young man
disentangled himself from his car and strolled into the barn. I looked
up from the floor where I was tacking squares of screening onto wooden
frames.

"Hi," he said. "You're Donald Henderson, right? My name is McCord--Jeff
McCord--and I work in the Patent Section at the Commission's downtown
office. My boss sent me over here, but if he hadn't, I think I'd have
come anyway. What are you doing to get patent protection on Ridge
Industries' new developments?"

I got my back unkinked and dusted off my knees. "Well, now," I said,
"I've been wondering whether something shouldn't be done, but I know
very little about such matters--."

"Exactly," he broke in, "we guessed that might be the case, and there
are three patent men in our office who'd like to chip in and contribute
some time. Partly for the kicks and partly because we think you may have
some things worth protecting. How about it? You worry about the filing
and final fees. That's sixty bucks per brainstorm. We'll worry about
everything else."

"What's to lose," Tommy in