Of all the old-timers only Gem Renaud remained. He loved the semi-tropic climate, the great oaks swathed in Spanish moss, the bit of sea that indented his land. He preferred remaining in poverty to moving elsewhere and beginning life over again. So he lived on in a white-columned old house that year by year got more leaky and more warped.
Then Gem Renaud had slipped and injured his leg. And Lee Renaud had been sent down by his family to look after his Great-uncle Gem.
Lee’s home was in Shelton, a pleasant and progressive town. Lee’s mother was a widow. Her two older boys were already at work. This vacation, Lee had counted on his first steady job, work at a garage. But because he was not already working and could be spared most easily, the lot had fallen on him to be sent down to King’s Cove.
And here at King’s Cove the boy felt that he had stepped back into the past a hundred years or more—the queer ignorant villagers; no electricity, only candles and little old kerosene lamps; no automobiles, only wagons drawn by lazy, lanky mules or by slow oxen; homemade boats on the bay and bayou; Uncle Gem’s great tumble-down old house where Pompey, the negro that cooked for him, lighted homemade candles in silver candlesticks and served meager meals of corn pone and peas in china that had come from France three-quarters of a century ago.
When Lee went down to the shack of a country store for meal or kerosene, the village loafers looked “offishly” at the tall boy with close-clipped black hair, knickers, and sport cap usually swinging in his hand. Lem Hicks, the storekeeper’s boy, Tony Zita, one of the fishing folk, and other lanky youths, barefooted and in faded overalls, seemed to have no particular interest in life save to lounge on boxes in front of the store and spit tobacco juice into the dust. Sometimes when Lee passed the line of loafers, he caught remarks muttered behind his back—“Stuck-up! Thinks he’s citified, ain’t he!” Once when Lee got home, he found mud spattered on his “store-bought” clothes—and he hadn’t remembered stepping in a puddle either!
Uncle Gem was a queer figure himself. The tall, stooped old man with his sideburns, his chin-whiskers, his long-tailed coat of faded plum color, was a prisoner of his chair now.
As Lee, all dusty and cobwebby, burst in from the storage room, his questions about the strange crystal wheel woke a gleam of excitement in the old man’s eyes.
“The glass wheel—you never saw anything like it before, eh?” Uncle Gem’s long fingers tapped the chair arm. “Gadzooks! That was our old-time 'lightning maker.’ My brothers and I had a tutor, one Master Lloyd, a Welshman, and a very conscientious, thorough little man. He used this mechanism to prove to us boys that electricity, or 'lightning power,’ as he dubbed it, could be tapped by mankind.”
“And did he—could he?”
Great-uncle Gem nodded emphatically.