CHAPTER VIAMAZING THINGS
“Just wonder if’n I’ll ever get it right! Wisht I’d paid more attenshun to teacher that year we had one!” Lem Hicks ran a tragic hand through his sandy hair till it stood out like a bottle brush.
He sat at the table in Lee’s workshop. Before him stood a homemade contraption young Renaud fondly hoped bore enough resemblance to a telegraphic outfit to work. Spread open beside the instrument was the code book, and spread open beside the code book was an old Blue-backed Speller. Lem, with a finger poised above the telegraph key, frantically studied first one book, then the other. It was no use! The excitement of the occasion had driven all the “book larnin’” out of Lem’s head. For days he had been planning on this, the first telegraphic message to be sent in King’s Cove. But the final effort of “putting words into spelling” and then “putting spelling into code” was too much for him. He just had to tap something, though. Lee, waiting at a similar instrument down in the old storage house, which was the end of their telegraph line, was all set to see if the thing really worked. In desperation Lem clickety-clicked at the only piece of the code he could seem to remember—three quick taps, three long taps, then three quick taps again.
And before he had hardly finished, there came a bang of doors downstairs, a gallop of feet on the stairs, and Lee Renaud shot breathless into the room.
“In trouble? What’s the matter?” he yelled. “Short-long-short, three times each, that’s S. O. S., the distress signal of the world. I thought this thing must have blown up or busted or electrocuted somebody.” Lee dropped limply on a bench.
“Naw,” said Lem, flushing shamefacedly. “Every bit of the code 'cept that went clean out of my head. I wanted to get something to you—”
“It got me, all right!” Lee burst out laughing. “But say, man, it worked! We’ve made us something here. That set of taps clicked through to me as clean as anything. When we get some more code in our heads, we can really talk to each other over the wire.”
Lee Renaud’s experimenting with the telegraph set in motion a strange surge for King’s Cove, a surge of educational longings. For the first time in their drab lives, some young Coveites “wisht they had sat under a teacher more.”
In the past these tow-headed youngsters had looked upon the few months of schooling that occasionally came to them as something to be dodged as manfully as possible. Now with the hunger upon them to enter the grand adventure of sending one’s thoughts, clickety-click, far away across a wire, the mistreated reading books and dog-eared spellers were dug out and actually studied. “Great snakes! A fellow railly had to know sump’n if he was goin’ to put his thoughts into spellin’, and then put spellin’ into code,” remarked one lank youth as he lolled in front of the village store, and Tony Zita mournfully allowed it was “more worser than tryin’ to scramble eggs, then tryin’ to unscramble them.”
Great-uncle Gem could hobble around now with his stick. He began taking as lively an interest as the youngsters in Lee’s “tapping machine.” Quite often he would come limping up to sit in the workshop, his black eyes twinkling beneath bushy white brows at the electrical chatter going on around him.
“Just think,” Lee was day-dreaming, “if I had wire enough, I could make my battery send a telegraph signal all the way to Mr. Akerly in Tilton, on to Birmingham, maybe on to my home folks in Shelton—”
“Wait there, wait there! Hold your horses, young man!” Uncle Gem interposed, not wanting this dreamer to dream too big a dream and then have it crash. “Maybe some day you’ll progress enough to send far messages by this wireless we read about, but as long as you’re still talking about telegraph wires, just remember that it would cost some few thousand dollars just to string wires from here to Tilton—”
“A thousand dollars—um, and some more thousands! Gosh, I didn’t know wire cost like that!” Lee’s face fell. “I’d been hoping, anyway, that we could stretch a wire on to Jimmy Bobb’s so he’d be sort of in touch with folks. He’s so—so—”
“From here to the Bobb place is more than half a mile. Half a mile of wire is a considerable bit. Here, give me a pencil; let me do some figuring.” Great-uncle Gem bent his head above a scrap of paper. “There’s the horse lot and the cow pasture—we don’t have any cattle on the place these days. All that was fenced once, four strands high. You might as well take what you can find of it and put it to some use.”
“Hurrah for the famous Renaud-Bobb Telegraph Company!” shouted Lee, leaping up and letting out a whoop like a wild Indian. “Uncle Gem can be president. Who wants to join this mighty organization?”
It seemed that everybody did, or at least all the young crew in King’s Cove. Taking stock in this booming concern consisted merely in contributing all the labor and man-power you had in you.
Stringing up even a half mile of telegraph wire turned out to be a vast task; especially since the wire had to be yanked down from old fences, and some of it was barbed, from which the barbs had to be untwisted. But whenever a Cove youth could be spared from hoeing 'taters and corn or pushing the plow, he rushed off to the Renaud place to work ten times harder. Only this new labor was interesting work—work with a zest to it. One crew logged in the woods for tall, strong cedar poles that were to carry the wires, another crew de-barbed old fencing, still another dug the line of post holes. A great search went on for old bottles to be used as glass insulators.
Then the actual stringing up began to go forward.
“Mind, you boys,” warned Uncle Gem, “don’t let anybody’s clothesline get mixed up in this. We don’t want to stir up any hard feeling round here against our project.”
Which very likely was the reason why the stringing up halted for a time while more old fencing was de-barbed, and why, in the dark of a night, Nanny Borden’s clothes wire miraculously reappeared on its posts.
It was hard for untrained hands to set the posts firm and in a straight line, harder still to string the much-spliced wire taut.
At last, though, the great day came when the Renaud-Bobb Telegraph Line reached from station to station.
The lonely little Bobb cabin suddenly became a center of interest. There was always some youngster happening along who wanted to send a message over the line. Jimmy Bobb’s eager mind picked up the code quickly. His long fingers learned to click the key with real speed. The cripple began to know happiness. For the first time in all his starved, meager years, he was getting in touch with life.
Then one day while Lee Renaud was away from his workshop, a frantic message came clicking over the crude wires.
“That thing’s banging like fury up there!” Uncle Gem waved his stick ceilingwards as Lee dashed into the house.
The boy hesitated a moment. He had come for a bag, and was going out to the old junk heap in the gully. Right now something new was surging in his brain and there might be some metal on that old carriage frame that would help him.
The stuttering of the telegraph clicked on again.
“Just some of the gang wanting to gab,” Lee muttered, turning away.
Then the insistent note of the click caught his ear.
“That’s—that’s S.O.S.!”
Up the stairs he leaped, taking two at a time.
Sharp and loud came the tap-tap-tap, three short, three long, three short! S.O.S.! Save! Save! Save! Again three short, three long—a little crashing thump of the key—then blankness.
“What is it? What is it?” pleaded Lee’s clicking key.
No answer.
“Something’s happened! Can’t get any answer from Jimmy!” he shouted as he left the house on the run. “Send Pomp for help to Ray’s meadow—”
Great-uncle Gem, for all his injured leg, must have put some speed into his search for Pomp. For, as Lee sped down the woods path, he could hear the old darky somewhere behind him hallooing, “Help! Help!” and clanging the dinner bell as he headed across the village towards the open hay fields where everybody was cutting grass while the weather held.
With that racket Pomp would stir up somebody, never a doubt! But Lee wasn’t wasting time waiting on reinforcements. With that last insistent tap-tap call of the telegraph still beating in his ears, he stretched his long legs down the path.
Hurtling through bushes, dodging swishing limbs, he burst panting into the clearing of the Bobb hilltop. Here no human sound greeted him. Instead, the awful crackle of flames filled the air. Whorls of smoke curled up from almost every part of the old shingle roof. As he looked, the smoke whorls began to burst into tongues of flame.
Lee raced to the door and flung himself inside, shouting, “Jimmy, Jimmy, where are you?”
There was no answer.
The heat and smoke were nearly overpowering. Lee dropped to the floor and crawled across the room. Yes, here by the ticker was Jimmy’s chair, and Jimmy in it, slumped in a huddle. Lifting the limp form to his shoulder, Lee staggered back to the door and out into the fresh air.
As he laid Jimmy down in the shelter of the trees on the side off the wind, shouts greeted him. The whole woods seemed alive with people. Pomp and his dinner bell had done their work.
While Lee revived Jimmy Bobb, an impromptu water-line formed. Like magic, buckets and tubs and even gourds of water passed up from the spring under the hill to the flaming hell of the roof. Cove women, not being given to style, wore plenty of clothing. Here and there, a wide apron or a voluminous Balmoral was shed, wetted and wielded as a weapon to beat down the flames. Crews of howling small boys broke pine brush for brooms and swept out any creeping line of flame that caught from sparks and headed for the fence, the slab-sided chicken house, or the cow shed.
Then it was over. The fire was out. Blackened rafters and a pall of smoke told what a fight it had been. The roof was gone, but the cabin walls stood, and the meager homemade furniture was safe.
Sarah Ann Bobb, stirred for once out of her habitual calm, stood near Jimmy, waving her hands and weeping.
One of the Cove men detached himself from the smoke-stained group and went up to her. “Don’t take on so, Miz Bobb,” he consoled awkwardly. “Hit war that old no 'count chimney what must've done it. We aims to build you a new one, and set on another roof. Done plan to start tomorrow, the Lord sparing us!”
“I ain’t crying sorrowful.” Sarah Ann’s knees let her down on the ground. “I’m so happy Jimmy ain’t dead!”
“I’m all right, maw,” Jimmy assured her, “but I bet the telegraph’s all busted.”
“Yep, considerably busted, I suppose.” Lee sounded inordinately cheerful. “But all the real stuff we need is still here, and we’ll be building her over again, good as new, maybe better.”
“Oh,” Jimmy Bobb settled back down, “I’m right thankful you saved hit. Hit sho saved me!”