“Stop. Was this particular dodge-hole where the safety switch is placed ever used for dynamite storing?”
“Yes; there are a lot of empty boxes in it now. In the arching, the timber-setters had covered them in, I suppose, and they were overlooked in the cleaning out.”
“You are sure they are empty?”
“Oh, yes; they’re empty all right. Stribling called my attention to them this morning, and I kicked over two or three of them, at his suggestion, just to make sure that they were empty.”
“I see; he called your attention to them, did he? That is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as this oil-switch you’ve been trying to describe for me. Go over it again, will you?”
The young chief engineer was evidently disappointed. The scientist of whose gifts he had heard so much seemed to have a brain in which pertinacity, the pertinacity which clings helplessly to trivial and perfectly obvious things, was the over-shadowing faculty.
“I don’t know that I can make it any plainer,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “It’s just an ordinary electric circuit-breaker, the same as they use on street-cars, and it is buried in oil to keep it from arcing—as all switches are when they’re under voltages as high as ours will be. The mechanism is suspended in a tank by its own wires, and the tank is filled with oil. I was there when they were filling the tank this morning, and Stribling poured a queer sirupy mess in on top of it—some patent stuff to keep the oil from thickening under exposure, he said.”
“A patent mixture, eh? I’m interested in patents,” said the listener, going off at another of the blind tangents. “How did it come—in a can?”
“Yes; in four square cans, holding about a gallon or so each, I should say. They were packed in a box—like varnish cans, you know—only they were taller and not so big in section.”
“I suppose you weren’t near enough to notice any name or advertisement on these cans, were you?”