“Bravo!” cried Uncle Jeff. “Three cheers for our inventor, Blunt!”
“Nonsense, uncle! I didn’t invent that. It’s only what one has read in books on electricity. Now you can see, of course, that there is no danger at the battery end of the wire.”
“If you tell me there is no danger, Stan, of course I am bound to believe it; but I don’t quite see why the wire should not carry us the message of the blow-up, and blow us up into the bargain.”
“Ah! but that would be outside the bargain, uncle,” said Stan, laughing. “It would be a good bargain for us.”
“And a horribly bad one for the Chinamen,” said Uncle Jeff.—“Look here, Blunt, this seems to be quite feasible.”
“Quite,” was the reply. “There is only one risk in it that I see.”
“And that is—”
“Making a mistake: some one connecting the wire at the wrong time for the friendly junk instead of an enemy. It wouldn’t do to blow up Mao or old Wing.”
“No, uncle,” said Stan quietly; “and it wouldn’t do to take down rifles and shoot either of them. There would be no danger so long as we took care of the electric battery; nothing else would fire the canister.”
“All right,” cried Uncle Jeff in his cheeriest way. “Then the next thing to be done is to get so many tins.”