STAGE V.—IN WHICH CRICKET MOUNTS ONE OF GOD'S HORSES
HOSE days they were stringing wires through the North, and even there human thought had begun to move faster. Now one could fling his words far over the distant hills in a moment. Men gathered in groups and talked of the wonder of it, and looked with awe upon the operator; for had not tidings of far capitals come to him out of the sky, and news of death which had made the strong tremble?
Pearl had been helping to install a new line. For a time—a long time, as it seemed to me—the shop door was locked.
The night of his return I found him overhauling instruments at his bench, but as I came in he dropped his work and his face brightened.
“How goes it?” I asked.
“Swift,” he answered. “I've been helping 'em lay a track for lightning. A stream o' power is flashing over the hills to Merrifield this minute. Do you see that wire that goes by the window there? Well, it's a nerve out o' the brain o' the universe, an' we're connected. It makes us a part o' the great body o' the world, as ye might say.
“There's goin' to be a war between life an' death in this country. In Heartsdale you an' I will lead the new army. Boggs an' Crocket will command the old.”
That little shop was for me “the House of the Interpreter,” and there I began to get the drift of things.
He gave me a book which contained the Morse alphabet, and taught me to make the letters on a telegraph key, and showed me how it checked the current and so produced the dots and dashes.
“I'll run a wire to your house,” he promised, “an' we'll string our thoughts on it an' learn some useful knowledge. I can get a place for you as soon as you can read an' send the current, I never liked the headstone business. It's at the wrong end o' the line. If it was the cradle business, I'd like it better. Life is the thing for you an' me, not death.
“There's four churches and two cemeteries in this little town. Life here has been a kind o' preparation for the grave, an' not much else. Death has done most o' the business. It's time we had a change.”
I was to help the swift, mysterious current of power to quicken the minds of the people.
Pearl lent me a telegraph key, and I stayed at home with my mother and sister for a few weeks, learning how to sound the letters on it. I went often to Pearl's shop of an evening and talked with him by telegraphy, and he was pleased with my progress, and within a month said I was good enough for any place on the line. We felt his kindness deeply there in the Mill House, and my mother wrote her thanks to him, and begged him to come and sup and spend the evening with us any day.
“My friend and fellow-citizen,” said Mr. Pearl, when I saw him again, “nothing would please me better than to sit by your fireside and enjoy all that exalts and embellishes civilized life. But, firstly, I am not decent enough; and, secondly, my clothing is fit only for the 'sacred precinks' o' my own shop, as Mr. Boggs would say; and, thirdly, I have a lot to do an' only sixteen hours a day to do it in.”
So he never came to the Mill House, and, although my mother had called twice at his shop to tell her gratitude, she had not been able to find him.
One day he gave me glad news in this manner: “How would ye like a job?”
“What kind of a job?” I inquired.
“To jerk lightnin'.”
That was his way of describing the work of an operator.
“I'd like it very much.”
“You're to take the office in Heartsdale at forty dollars a month on trial,” he said.
It staggered me—the prospect of such opulence—and that very day I began my work. I have been lucky and prospered rather handsomely since then, but I have never received a sum so enduring and massive as that which came to me at the end of every month. I always hurried home with the roll of bills and flung it into my mother's lap proudly. Oh, what a lavish hand was mine those days! About the best happiness of all my life was in the few moments of sublime generosity at the month's end when I renounced the money and saw the look in my mother's face and hurried away to my chores. And when I saw the splendor of my sister's hats and gowns, and the neatness of her shoes, and heard people speak of her beauty, I was about as happy as one may be.
I had “jerked lightning” some eight months and had become a figure in the life of Heartsdale, for I guided the flying horse of God that sped in and out of the village on its slender highway, and I was looked upon as a kind of sorcerer. Moreover, I—a boy of seventeen—received the princely income of forty dollars a month!
In all this time, although I had written to Jo about the loss of the horruck and my ignorance of its secret and my growing curiosity, no word of her had come to me save a letter from Sam, which told me that Jo was well and hoped those few lines would find me the same.
One afternoon my call came clicking into the sounder with the letters M. F. behind it. I knew that M. F. stood for the office at Merrifield.
The operator said that he would have an important message for me at eight that evening, and, asked if I could be at the key to take it. The request was not unusual, for mine was the repeating office at the junction of two lines. I promised to be on hand, and went to the office at eight o'clock.
Soon I got the call and answered it, and these words flashed into the sounder:
“Is this Mr. Heron?”
And I answered, “Yes; who are you?”
“I am the operator at Merrifield, and I have a message for you.”
“Well, go ahead,” I clicked, impatiently. I could see it was a new operator with a rather timid hand. So the message ran:
To Jacob Ezra Heron:
Do you still care to hear from an old friend?
Jo.
I answered that very moment:
To Jo:
I am dying for news of you. Answer.
Cricket.
Then I asked, “Can you deliver the message to-night?”
“Yes; it has been delivered. I am Jo,” the sounder clicked. “This is confidential. See if any one is on the line.”
I rang off the calls of the hill circuit and got no answer, and knew we had the wire to ourselves.
“Are you an operator?” I asked.
“Yes. I had to have a talk with you, and so here I am, at last.”
“I'd rather talk face to face than with lightning,” I said. “Why can't I go and see you?”
“Not now. Wait a little while,” she answered.
“Why?”
“Well, it's a long story. There's a young man who came here from New York last summer. He's a friend of father's, and knows you. Since they met, my father has asked me not to see or write to you until he could get some information.”
“Who is the young man?”
“Mr. Bonaparte Squares.”
“Oh, it's Bony Squares!” I clicked. “I know him very well.”
“And I know him better than I ever wished to,” she went on. “He has tried to make love to me.”
“Tried to make love to you!” I exclaimed, with indignation. “I cannot believe it. Your father had better get some information about him. Tell him to write to the postmaster of Heartsdale. Any one here or at Mill Pond could tell him all about Bony. He couldn't marry you!”
There was a pause of two or three seconds, and then the sounder answered, timidly:
“Why?”
“Because I wouldn't let him,” I said.
“There's no danger,” she answered.
“Except for Bony,” I flashed back.
I held my ear close to the sounder for fear of missing a word.
“I am too young to think of marriage.”
“Until you have consulted me,” I said. “I know things that you must know before then.”
“I will ask father to write to your postmaster about his friend,” she continued, as if she thought I had things to tell about Bony.
“Don't let them turn you against me,” I urged.
“Don't fear. If I had another horruck I would send it to you.”
“I was never able to read the horruck's riddle,” I said.
“Oh, you didn't know!” she exclaimed. “I thought you meant it for me.”
“I cannot say until I know the message.”
“But I wouldn't dare tell you. It's one thing to say it yourself, and another to speak with the horruck. You must find and study it. Goodnight! My dear old father is dozing here beside me, and doesn't dream that I am talking to you. I feel guilty, but I was afraid that you would come here.”
“Don't say good-night. I'm not half through talking.”
“But we mustn't say everything at once, and he is tired. We'll have another talk. Goodnight!”
I closed the office, and started for my home. As I walked alone in the darkness under the singing wires, I got my first broad view of their mission. My sweetheart and I were miles apart, but that rushing power on the string of metal had almost removed the distance and helped us to understand each other. Would it not, by-and-by, remove seas and continents and make all the races of one mind, and keep them in peace and good-will?