CHAPTER IIIHOT WIRES
Lee’s screech and the crashing clatter of glass and tin brought old Pompey on the run to see what the “devils in the jar” had done now to Marse Lee.
From the next room sounded the pounding of Uncle Gem’s cane as he thumped the floor to summon someone to tell him what was happening.
Lee hurried to his uncle, looking rather sheepish, and rubbing his elbow where the “prickles” still tingled.
“No, sir, not hurt; just got kicked a little,” he reassured the old man. “That thing I made looked mighty innocent, but it had power to it—more’n I thought for.”
Lee Renaud’s first experiment lay smashed all over the floor, but he didn’t care. He could make another Leyden Jar, for he still had the shaped pieces of tin, the knob, and the rest of the necessities. In spite of the smash, he was terrifically thrilled—he had tapped power, real power that time! He had learned something important too: electricity was not anything to be played with. It was as dangerous as it was powerful.
With his next Leyden Jar, Lee went forward more carefully. There was a contrivance of his own that he wanted to try out this time, too.
And a very crude contrivance it was—nothing more than a length of wire and two long slivers of a broken window pane.
The boy gave the wire a twist around the outer tin and left one end free. Then he charged the inner tin negatively at the friction machine, and the outer tin (wire and all) positively, at the positive pole of the mechanism.
Next, oh so carefully, gripping the free end of the wire between the two strips of glass—he didn’t crave any more shocks like that first one—he brought the wire close, and closer up towards the brass knob.
Before he could ever touch wire to knob—Wow! There it came! Snap, crackle, across the air-gap shot a spark an inch long!
Lee’s hands trembled a little as he laid aside his glass pincers. Sure enough, he had done something this time. That was such lively electricity he had gotten penned up in the glass jar that it couldn’t wait for any connecting metallic pathway to be made but had to go leaping across the air-gap.
Power! Power! He was tapping it—and getting a wild excitement out of the job.
It was all true! True! Just like the old book said!
And the musty, ancient volume was full of queer diagrams and elegantly stilted descriptions of other strange experiments. As he turned the pages, Lee Renaud longed to try out more of these things—all of them, if possible.
“Think of it!” Lee muttered admiringly. “That old fellow, Volta, without any friction wheel at all, just piled up some metal and wet cloth and got an electric current! By heck, I want to try that! I want to make a 'Voltaic Pile,’ too!”
The makings of the Voltaic Pile sounded simple enough. Just some discs of iron and copper piled up with circles of wet flannel placed in between. Volta had connected his iron discs and his copper discs with two different wires. Next he touched the ends of the two wires together, and—hecla! He found that electricity began to flow between the copper and the iron.
But when he started out on the hunt for this material, Lee soon ran aground. He got some pieces of iron all right, and as for flannel, a moth-eaten wool shirt in an attic trunk would do for that. But the copper—there seemed to be none anywhere on the whole Renaud place.
Finally old Pompey came to the rescue.
“I don’t know nothing 'bout copper, but you might find it down in Marse Sargent’s junk pile. He’s been dead a long time, but he sho must a throwed away a heap of stuff in his day. Folks been carrying off what-not-and-everything from that junk pile in the gully for years—and there’s still yet junk left there smothered down in the weeds and the bushes.”
Following Pompey’s directions, young Renaud strode along the little woods path that the old darky had pointed out to him. At first he went forward whistling gayly, but after a while the spell of the forest laid its silence upon him. Sometimes the narrow trail wound through the piney woods where a little breeze soughed mournfully in the tree tops and the afternoon sun slanted downwards to cast a weaving of shadows upon the ground. Then again the little path dipped into close glades of live oak where the long gray moss dripped down from the branches, and where the sunshine could scarce penetrate to dapple the shadows. It was eerie out here in the woods, and silent—no, not exactly silent either. Now and then a bird call drifted on the air. And occasionally there came a slight crackle of brush. Now Lee heard it off to the side of him, now directly behind. Was that a stealthy padding, a footstep—was he being followed?
Time and again the boy whirled around quickly, but never could catch sign of any movement whatever, or of any hulking form lurking back in the shadows.
He was being foolish, that was all. He kept telling himself that it was just the soughing of the pine boughs, the ghostly, shaking curtain of the long moss that had gotten on his nerves. Best thing for him to do was to keep his mind on what he had come for, and wind up his business out here in the woods.
It was all as old Pomp had said. Just beyond the scarred snag of the lightning-blasted pine, a flat-hewn log lay across the gulch for a foot-bridge. Then a “tollable piece” on down the gully, where it wound in close behind what had once been a rich man’s house, Lee found a fascinating tangle of cast-offs partly buried in matted vegetation and drift sand. One wheel and the metal skeleton of what once must have been a dashing barouche, debris of broken china and battered kitchen utensils, rusted springs, a splintered table leg—a little of everything reposed here!
As Lee dug into the tangle of junk and vines, there came again the cautious crackle of a twig. Someone was watching him. He was sure of that. But why—what did it mean?
It was after he had started home that the mystery solved itself somewhat for him. Lee was stepping along in the dusk, rather jubilant over having unearthed an old copper pot. Its lack of bottom didn’t matter—all he wanted was copper. And he hoped a bent strip of metal was zinc. Volta had used zinc in another experiment.
Lee strode forward, full of plans of what he was going to try next. Then a tingle of fear knocked plans out of his head as the bushes parted and a hand reached out and grabbed him by the pants leg.
All manner of things flashed through Lee Renaud’s mind. Remembering how loungers at the store had looked their dislike of him, and how Poolak had carried prejudice further and had taken a shot at his friction-wheel experimenting, Lee had full reason to tingle with fear at that clutching hand. Stealthy footsteps had dogged him all up and down these woods, and now he was being dragged off.
The boy stiffened and tightened his grip on the copper pot. He’d put up a fight against whatever was happening to him!
Then as the bushes parted more fully and Lee saw the owner of the clutching hand, he almost dropped the pot in his surprise. A wizen-faced, shock-headed youngster stood before him, one arm uplifted as if to shield his face.
“You—you don’t look so turrible,” said the child. “I bin following you all evening, and you don’t look so harmful. Anyhow, Jimmy Bobb allowed he wanted to set eyes on you, and I come to take you to him—”
“Jimmy Bobb, who’s he? What does he want with me?” queried Lee.
“Jimmy’s my older brother, only he ain’t near so big as me. He had infantile para—para something—”
“Paralysis, was it?” put in Lee.
“Yeah, that’s what a doctor what saw him one time said it was. But Johnny Poolak, him that preaches when the spell gets on him, said it warn’t nothing but tarnation sin what twisted Jimmy all up. I dunno. But Jimmy, he can’t move by himself, just got to sit one place all the time. He heard ’em talking 'bout you. He don’t never see nothing much and he wanted to see you. But promise you won’t conjure up no imps, no nothing and hurt him.”
Lee Renaud felt a wave of pity for the bleak existence of the crippled one, though caution stirred in him too. He didn’t exactly like to mix in with these Cove people. In every meeting with them, he had sensed their antagonism toward him. If he happened to tread on the toes of their ignorance and superstition, why, like as not they’d fill him full of buckshot! He turned back into the path that led toward home.
“Say, you, ain’t you coming?” The child clung to him with desperate, clutching hands. “Jimmy, he’s so powerful lonesome. He said to me, 'Mackey, you go git that there furriner and bring him down here. Folks tell how he’s got store-bought clothes and slicks his hair and looks different an’ all. And I ain’t never seen nothing different in all my life.’ And I promised Jimmy I’d get you. Please, mister, you—you—”
“I—yes.” The child was so insistent that Lee Renaud found himself following down the path. This by-trail twisted in and out through some thickets and suddenly came out before the clean-swept knoll whereon was perched Mackey Bobb’s home.
Lee Renaud may have thought he had seen poor folks before, but now he found himself face to face with real poverty. The dwelling was a square log cabin with a log lean-to on behind. Inside was bareness save for a homemade bedstead spread with a faded old quilt and one chair set by the window opening that had no glass but merely closed with a heavy shutter of wooden slabs. Although it was summer, a fire blazed up the mud-and-wattle chimney. Before it knelt a lanky woman in a faded wrapper and a sunbonnet, frying something in a skillet.
Lee had met these Cove women now and then out on the road, as they carried eggs or chickens to the store to barter for store-bought rations. Always they had on wide aprons and sunbonnets. He hadn’t known they wore these flapping bonnets in the house too.
The woman rose languidly from her supper cooking and came across the room. She looked worn out and old without being old. Her clothing was awkward and her hands were work-roughened, yet she held to a certain dignity.
“Howdy. I’m right thankful to you for coming,” she said. “Jimmy here has been pining for a sight of you. He don’t never get to see much.”
Then Lee saw Jimmy, the prisoner of the old homemade armchair by the window opening. The boy’s limp, twisted legs told why he was a prisoner. The body was undersized, and the face was old with pain, but Jimmy Bobb’s dark blue eyes were eager, interesting eyes.
“You, Mackey,” ordered the woman, “draw out the bench from the shed room. And now, mister,” extending her hand, “lemme rest your hat, and you set and make yourself comfortable.”
When he had first stood on the threshold of this house of poverty, Lee Renaud had thought he was going to be embarrassed with people so different from any he had ever known. But here he found genuine courtesy to set him at ease. More than that, the terrible eagerness in Jimmy Bobb’s eyes turned Lee Renaud’s thoughts entirely away from Lee Renaud. This Jimmy Bobb knew so little, and he wanted to know so much.
“Is it rightly true,” burst from Jimmy before Lee had hardly got settled on the bench, “that you got a whirling glass contraption up at the big house what pulls the lightning right down out of the sky?”
“Well,” Lee tugged at his chin in perplexity. How in Kingdom Come was he, who knew so little about electricity, going to explain it to a fellow who knew even less? “Well,” Lee made another start, “it’s kind of this way. The glass wheel when turned very, very fast between some fur pads, or rubbers, generates a spark of power called electricity. Smart men have proved that this electricity that we generate and the lightning that flashes in the sky are full of the same kind of power. Lightning, you know, shoots through the air in zigzag lines.”
“I know. I’ve watched it often. It goes like this,” and the excited listener made sharp, jerky motions with his hand.
“That’s it. And the electrical discharge from a man-made battery shoots out jagged, too, like the lightning. Lightning strikes the highest pointed objects. Electricity does that too. Lightning sets fire to non-conductors, or rends them in pieces. Lightning destroys animal life when it strikes, and electricity acts just that way—”
“It sounds turrible powerful,” muttered Jimmy Bobb. “What and all you going to do with this here power you are getting out of the air?”
“Nothing in particular,” said Lee ruefully. “I haven’t managed to get any too much of it. But back in the town where I have always lived, there are plenty of folks brainy enough to make electricity do lots of work for them. It makes bright lights and runs telephones and street cars and talking machines—”
“How might a street car look? Tele—telephone, what’s that?”
So the eager questioning went. Lee Renaud found himself leaping conversationally from point to point, drawing word-pictures of a host of everyday conveniences that had seemed so commonplace to him but that seemed almost like magic when recounted to this boy who had never seen anything.
In the midst of all this talk, Sarah Ann Bobb, Jimmy’s mother, still in the flopping sunbonnet, came forward bearing a tin platter set with the usual Cove meal of corn pone and fried hog-meat. “Set and eat,” she said hospitably.
“I—thank you, ma’am, no—” Lee leaped up in confusion. He hadn’t known he was talking so long. Night had dropped down upon him. “Uncle Gem—he’ll be worried—doesn’t know where I am, or what might have happened to me. I—I reckon I better trot along,” Lee stammered, as he reached for his cap that was “resting” where the woman had hung it on a wall peg.
“You, Mackey,” said Sarah Ann Bobb with her kind, crude courtesy, “draw out one of these here pine knots from off the fire so you can light him down the path.”
As Lee said his hasty good-byes, crippled Jimmy Bobb sat in his prison chair like one dazed.
“Street cars, 'lectric lights, talking contraptions!” he muttered to himself. “If,” shutting his eyes tightly, then opening them wide, “if I could only see something myself, oncet, anyway!”