“Now I’ll have you do what I’ve been aiming at. And remember always—my finger is constantly pressing the trigger!”
“Now then, feel just this side of the key button, below. The little button of a lever? Got it? Press it from you.”
There was a single sharp upward click of relay and sounder. The key was “open,” ready for operation.
“Now listen. I want you to make the letter X—a dot, a dash, then two more dots right together. And keep repeating till I stop you.”
Still under the spell of the fancied revolver and the boy’s unfaltering gaze, the renegade cowman obeyed, and the telegraph instruments clicked out a painfully deliberate, but fairly readable “X.”
It was an idle half-hour, and when the despatcher at Exeter heard his call he glanced up from a magazine, listened a moment, and impatiently remarking, “Some idiot student!” returned to his reading.
But steadily, insistently, the repetition of X’s continued, and at length he reached forward, struck open the key, and demanded, “Who? Sign!”
Clumsily came the answer, “B.”
“Bonepile! Now what’s happening down there? It doesn’t sound like the new operator, either.”
The wire again clicked open, and slowly, in the same heavy hand, the mystified and then amazed despatcher read: