“We—we allowed we’d carry Jimmy over for you.”
Lee stood like one rooted to the ground. He couldn’t believe he’d heard aright. There must be some trick in it. This rough gang was up to something.
His fists, that had relaxed, tightened up again. Another was stepping out of the group, the one they called Big Sandy. He was a tall fellow, but he grasped a couple of poles taller than himself.
“Done cut some hickory saplings for to slide under Jimmy’s chair for handles, like. Jimmy, he ain’t so big, but I allow he’d be quite a tote for just you two. Us four can do it more better—”
“Sure—fine!” Lee Renaud’s voice surprised himself. He blurted it out almost before he knew it. But there was a something in the eyes of these boys that made him say what he did. It was that same terrible eagerness—like in Jimmy Bobb’s—that hunger after something of interest in their meager lives.
Little dark Tony Zita (one of those lowlife fishing folk, old Pomp had once dubbed him) darted up close to Lee, a new light in the black eyes beneath his tousled black locks. “You gonner let us see it all—what you gonner show to Jimmy? We ain’t never seen no 'lectricity, nor nothing!”
It was a lively procession that went forward down the little woods trail between the log cabin and the warped and leaking elegance of the old Renaud mansion. Jimmy Bobb, almost hysterical with excitement, rode like a king in the wheelless chariot of his old armchair. Lem and Big Sandy, being the strongest in the bunch, handled a pole end on either side where the weight was heaviest. The Zita boy and Joe Burk put a shoulder to the other ends of the poles. Mackey, who went along too, and Lee took their turns at carrying.
Class feeling had been swept away. The antagonism of these secluded backwoods folk for a “city dude what slicked his hair,” the antagonism of an educated fellow toward the narrow, suspicious ignorance of country louts—a new feeling had suddenly taken the place of all this. This group was now just “boys” bound together by an interest.
Up in the littered second-story room that served as Lee’s workshop, young Renaud didn’t need to press very strongly his warning against “folks mixing too much with the dangers of electricity.” The great glass wheel, with its strange gearing of wood and brass and fur, laid its own spell of warning on the boys. The old thing did look queer and outlandish. One almost expected some black-robed wizard to step out of the past and “make magic” on it.
Well, electricity was a sort of magic, it was so wonderful and powerful, thought Lee, only it wasn’t the “black magic” of evil; it was a great power for good.