CHAPTER IXSARGON SOUND
A line of wagons were unloading along a ridge of land that overlooked the turbid yellow waters of the Sargon flood. One group of men were stacking sacks of meat and meal, which had been lugged over the hill road to help feed the stricken families that had lost everything. Another group had already started for the woods with their saws and axes to fell trees for rafts, on which to bring off the hundreds of refugees huddled on ridges still showing above the water.
“Powerful heavy, and don’t feel like nothing to eat,” said Jed Prother, giving a disdainful kick against some crates and a pile of metal pieces wrapped in old sacking which he had just lifted off a wagon.
“Hi—don’t! That’s our radio! Might break something!” protested Renaud, coming on the jump.
“Radio? Huh!” snorted Prother. “Better have brought meat and blankets 'stead of that thing! No time to tinker at toys down here!”
“He must allow to serenade the rabbits and the 'possums—give ’em a little music, perhaps,” broke out another of the workmen with a bitter laugh.
Lee Renaud started to retort, then checked his words. These fellows had a right to feel bitter, with all their possessions swept away in that rolling ocean of muddy waters. It was an appalling disaster. A cloudburst up in the hills had flooded a whole valley. Trees, houses, dead animals rode the current in a procession of horror. And if help did not reach out soon to the pitiful families marooned on tiny islands, human bodies would be swirled off into that awful drift.
The need was great, yet there were so few to do the relief work, and the equipment of homemade scows and lumbering log rafts was so inadequate.
Sargon district was peculiarly isolated—fourteen miles from a railroad, not an automobile in the whole valley, no telegraph or telephone connections. Starvation, sickness from exposure, any of a hundred other ills could sweep in on the trail of the Sargon flood before the outside world would be aware of it.
These facts stalked endlessly through Lee’s mind as, with Lem Hicks to help him, he began unpacking his crates and sackcloth bundles in a tiny cabin on the edge of the flood. Here was wireless apparatus, a fearful jumble of it! This stuff might work—and then again it mightn’t.
“Two strong huskies! Better be rowing a boat 'stead o’ tinkering!” was a jeer that drifted in through the cabin door.
Maybe they ought to, and yet—with a sudden out-thrust of chin, Renaud settled back to work. Jeering be blowed! He must carry on as best he could.
Shades of all inventors! Lee Renaud had brought to Sargon Valley his old Marconi model, with a wild scheme for hitching a receiving circuit on to it. He had lugged down, also, his two crude little portables for field radio use, but they were too unperfected as yet to depend on for any distant use. And “distance” was what young Renaud had to get in an emergency like this.
Lem Hicks thought that in all these months he had learned a bit about wireless. But he was lost in trying to follow the complexities of the improvised wiring plan Renaud was flinging into shape. Batteries, induction coils, couplers, transformers seemed to fairly spring into place. In his haste, Lee appeared to be rushing the work with incoherent carelessness, but in fact he was following a wiring plan of rigid exactitude, binding, twisting, tying wires with fingers that knew the meaning of every move.
Lem, unskilled as he was, could only fetch and carry.
“Lively now! Let’s get at the aerial! Where’s the hammer, the chisel?” Like one demented, Renaud drove himself and Lem Hicks, too.
Here was a bewildering tangle of coils and tubes hitched onto the little old-fashioned Marconi “brass pounder” of electric wireless telegraph.
Then at a touch from Lee the spark began to sputter. Adjustments, and it sputtered more.
“Now—now! It’s hitting it up! And I’m going to CQ Mobile till the cows come home!” muttered Lee between set teeth. “That’s the nearest big city and we got to have help out of ’em for down here—quick!”
To the crackle of the spark, the “urgent” call sped over watery waste and land ridges towards civilization.
Every few seconds Lee eased up on his telegraphic tapping and switched over to listen. “Ah, we’ve touched a station!”
“WDK talking! Point Hope Amateur Relay. Who are you, brother? New station, eh? Glad you’re on the air.” On and on the string of Morse rolled in.
“Idiot!” snorted Lee in disgust, switching his key back to transmission with a vicious jab. “We’ve got to have action, not gab!” Then with steady spark he hammered relentlessly, “S.O.S.—S.O.S.—S.O.S.—Help! Help! Save!”
That brought Station WDK up to taw in a hurry, knocked the gab out of him, and held him keyed for business. “Shoot! Who’s in trouble? We stand by to help!” flashed in the message.
Lee settled down to transmission. His code poured out in a steady stream from the brass pounder. “RL Amateur Station calling. Sargon River district flooded. Need immediate help. Cut off from everywhere—no railroads—no telegraph. Need food, tents, doctors. Pass on the call!”
On through the day Lee Renaud stuck to his pounder, CQing up and down the whole state of Alabama, sending word of the dire need. Mobile, Anniston, Birmingham—the cities over the state were tapped into touch.
Yes. Help was coming. Red Cross was answering the S.O.S. of the lone operator down in the flood country. “O.K. for you, Flood Station RL. On the way with supplies, tents, doctors, couple more radios and relief operators. Army Post sending emergency airplanes. Coast steamer at Mobile wants to head up the Sound for rescue work. Can she make it?”
And so, hour after hour, Lee Renaud kept his old Marconi sparking—taking innumerable calls, sputtering back directions in Morse.
Then his little portable radios had their inning. Lem Hicks, with one of the fieldpack mechanisms on his back, traveled the return trail till he was halfway between Sargon and King’s Cove. From here he relayed the flood reports from Lee on to Jimmy Bobb at the Cove. This was done to ease the minds of the King’s Cove folk who had plenty of kin all up and down Sargon Valley, and were anxious for news.
It was a blessed thing, though, that young Renaud had pounded his old Marconi on longdistance calls for aid through the day, for the night hours brought a new and worse disaster. A great power dam, fifty miles up the Sargon, broke under the pressure of water, and by early morning a second flood rushed down and widened the first flood by miles.