Lee’s hands trembled a little as he laid aside his glass pincers. Sure enough, he had done something this time. That was such lively electricity he had gotten penned up in the glass jar that it couldn’t wait for any connecting metallic pathway to be made but had to go leaping across the air-gap.
Power! Power! He was tapping it—and getting a wild excitement out of the job.
It was all true! True! Just like the old book said!
And the musty, ancient volume was full of queer diagrams and elegantly stilted descriptions of other strange experiments. As he turned the pages, Lee Renaud longed to try out more of these things—all of them, if possible.
“Think of it!” Lee muttered admiringly. “That old fellow, Volta, without any friction wheel at all, just piled up some metal and wet cloth and got an electric current! By heck, I want to try that! I want to make a 'Voltaic Pile,’ too!”
The makings of the Voltaic Pile sounded simple enough. Just some discs of iron and copper piled up with circles of wet flannel placed in between. Volta had connected his iron discs and his copper discs with two different wires. Next he touched the ends of the two wires together, and—hecla! He found that electricity began to flow between the copper and the iron.
But when he started out on the hunt for this material, Lee soon ran aground. He got some pieces of iron all right, and as for flannel, a moth-eaten wool shirt in an attic trunk would do for that. But the copper—there seemed to be none anywhere on the whole Renaud place.
Finally old Pompey came to the rescue.
“I don’t know nothing 'bout copper, but you might find it down in Marse Sargent’s junk pile. He’s been dead a long time, but he sho must a throwed away a heap of stuff in his day. Folks been carrying off what-not-and-everything from that junk pile in the gully for years—and there’s still yet junk left there smothered down in the weeds and the bushes.”
Following Pompey’s directions, young Renaud strode along the little woods path that the old darky had pointed out to him. At first he went forward whistling gayly, but after a while the spell of the forest laid its silence upon him. Sometimes the narrow trail wound through the piney woods where a little breeze soughed mournfully in the tree tops and the afternoon sun slanted downwards to cast a weaving of shadows upon the ground. Then again the little path dipped into close glades of live oak where the long gray moss dripped down from the branches, and where the sunshine could scarce penetrate to dapple the shadows. It was eerie out here in the woods, and silent—no, not exactly silent either. Now and then a bird call drifted on the air. And occasionally there came a slight crackle of brush. Now Lee heard it off to the side of him, now directly behind. Was that a stealthy padding, a footstep—was he being followed?