Right here under his hand, experimental stuff such as he had never even hoped to buy! He touched one prize, then another.
“It’s too much! You don’t really mean to leave it?”
“Leaving it! By heck, of course I am. My wife would skin me alive if I brought that box back home to just sit and catch dust and spider webs again. Never fool with it any more, myself,—no time.”
“I—I—how will I ever thank you?” Lee couldn’t keep his hands from straying over the old sounder and the bits of real copper wire.
“Do something with it!” roared Pendexter, backing off testily from any further thanks. “Do something with it, that’s what!”
CHAPTER VI
AMAZING THINGS
“Just wonder if’n I’ll ever get it right! Wisht I’d paid more attenshun to teacher that year we had one!” Lem Hicks ran a tragic hand through his sandy hair till it stood out like a bottle brush.
He sat at the table in Lee’s workshop. Before him stood a homemade contraption young Renaud fondly hoped bore enough resemblance to a telegraphic outfit to work. Spread open beside the instrument was the code book, and spread open beside the code book was an old Blue-backed Speller. Lem, with a finger poised above the telegraph key, frantically studied first one book, then the other. It was no use! The excitement of the occasion had driven all the “book larnin’” out of Lem’s head. For days he had been planning on this, the first telegraphic message to be sent in King’s Cove. But the final effort of “putting words into spelling” and then “putting spelling into code” was too much for him. He just had to tap something, though. Lee, waiting at a similar instrument down in the old storage house, which was the end of their telegraph line, was all set to see if the thing really worked. In desperation Lem clickety-clicked at the only piece of the code he could seem to remember—three quick taps, three long taps, then three quick taps again.
And before he had hardly finished, there came a bang of doors downstairs, a gallop of feet on the stairs, and Lee Renaud shot breathless into the room.
“In trouble? What’s the matter?” he yelled. “Short-long-short, three times each, that’s S. O. S., the distress signal of the world. I thought this thing must have blown up or busted or electrocuted somebody.” Lee dropped limply on a bench.