“Naw,” said Lem, flushing shamefacedly. “Every bit of the code 'cept that went clean out of my head. I wanted to get something to you—”
“It got me, all right!” Lee burst out laughing. “But say, man, it worked! We’ve made us something here. That set of taps clicked through to me as clean as anything. When we get some more code in our heads, we can really talk to each other over the wire.”
Lee Renaud’s experimenting with the telegraph set in motion a strange surge for King’s Cove, a surge of educational longings. For the first time in their drab lives, some young Coveites “wisht they had sat under a teacher more.”
In the past these tow-headed youngsters had looked upon the few months of schooling that occasionally came to them as something to be dodged as manfully as possible. Now with the hunger upon them to enter the grand adventure of sending one’s thoughts, clickety-click, far away across a wire, the mistreated reading books and dog-eared spellers were dug out and actually studied. “Great snakes! A fellow railly had to know sump’n if he was goin’ to put his thoughts into spellin’, and then put spellin’ into code,” remarked one lank youth as he lolled in front of the village store, and Tony Zita mournfully allowed it was “more worser than tryin’ to scramble eggs, then tryin’ to unscramble them.”
Great-uncle Gem could hobble around now with his stick. He began taking as lively an interest as the youngsters in Lee’s “tapping machine.” Quite often he would come limping up to sit in the workshop, his black eyes twinkling beneath bushy white brows at the electrical chatter going on around him.
“Just think,” Lee was day-dreaming, “if I had wire enough, I could make my battery send a telegraph signal all the way to Mr. Akerly in Tilton, on to Birmingham, maybe on to my home folks in Shelton—”
“Wait there, wait there! Hold your horses, young man!” Uncle Gem interposed, not wanting this dreamer to dream too big a dream and then have it crash. “Maybe some day you’ll progress enough to send far messages by this wireless we read about, but as long as you’re still talking about telegraph wires, just remember that it would cost some few thousand dollars just to string wires from here to Tilton—”
“A thousand dollars—um, and some more thousands! Gosh, I didn’t know wire cost like that!” Lee’s face fell. “I’d been hoping, anyway, that we could stretch a wire on to Jimmy Bobb’s so he’d be sort of in touch with folks. He’s so—so—”
“From here to the Bobb place is more than half a mile. Half a mile of wire is a considerable bit. Here, give me a pencil; let me do some figuring.” Great-uncle Gem bent his head above a scrap of paper. “There’s the horse lot and the cow pasture—we don’t have any cattle on the place these days. All that was fenced once, four strands high. You might as well take what you can find of it and put it to some use.”
“Hurrah for the famous Renaud-Bobb Telegraph Company!” shouted Lee, leaping up and letting out a whoop like a wild Indian. “Uncle Gem can be president. Who wants to join this mighty organization?”