6 The hunt

Chapter 6 The hunt "It was DeLay," gasped Sarah. "The first guy in the blazer and the straw hat!" Luke was furious with himself for not figuring it out sooner. They had to get back that part so Tesla could do his demonstration!

Tesla pointed at Thomas Edison. "It was YOU!" he thundered. "YOU sabotaged me! You and your silly blazer striped like a child's lollipop!" Thomas Edison looked confounded. "Have we met?" he said. Tesla was working himself up into a terrible rage. "You pretend not to know me because you are jealous of my genius!"

Susan B. Anthony looked very pale. No wonder, thought Luke. The smoke in the room was still thick, and ladies wore their corsets very tight in the 1890s. "Enough, Mr. Tesla!" said J. P. Morgan, swelling up like a big-bellied toad. "I demand that you leave at once!" Bessie tried to calm things down. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Morgan, he gets very upset you see..." Tesla was almost purple with fury. "No, Bessie! I have had enough. You have won, Mr. Edison. I am going back to Europe, where I will get a job at a telephone exchange and lead a quiet life away from you ALL!" "Don't speak like that, Mr. Tesla," said Sarah anxiously.

"We're going to fix this!" Luke promised. "We know who broke your machine, and we're going to find him and make it right!" "Cuckoo!" cried Tempo from her perch on a large bronze figure standing in the corner of the room. She shot toward the giant front door in a flurry of striped feathers. "Bessie, try to keep Mr. Tesla from doing anything he might regret," said Luke. "We're going to fix this."

Luke and Sarah ran past the footman and through the great front door, following Tempo. "DeLay can't have gone far," said Luke. "He was inside only a few minutes ago." "Cuckoo!" shouted Tempo, zooming away up Madison Avenue. "Cuckoo!" Luke glimpsed a striped blazer among the crowds on the Madison Avenue sidewalk. "I can see him!" he said. "Let's go!"

It was difficult to dodge all the crowds. The chase was made harder by the long skirts that the ladies wore, which billowed and tangled around Luke and Sarah's legs. Every now and then, they had to jump into the street-being especially careful to avoid the bicycle messengers who darted around in all directions. "Yuck!" groaned Luke, as he slipped in a pile of horse muck left by one of the trolley-car horses. DeLay kept his head down. Luckily, his striped blazer was hard to miss. "Hey!" someone objected as Luke shoved past. "Watch where you're going, kid!" said someone else.