The need was great, yet there were so few to do the relief work, and the equipment of homemade scows and lumbering log rafts was so inadequate.
Sargon district was peculiarly isolated—fourteen miles from a railroad, not an automobile in the whole valley, no telegraph or telephone connections. Starvation, sickness from exposure, any of a hundred other ills could sweep in on the trail of the Sargon flood before the outside world would be aware of it.
These facts stalked endlessly through Lee’s mind as, with Lem Hicks to help him, he began unpacking his crates and sackcloth bundles in a tiny cabin on the edge of the flood. Here was wireless apparatus, a fearful jumble of it! This stuff might work—and then again it mightn’t.
“Two strong huskies! Better be rowing a boat 'stead o’ tinkering!” was a jeer that drifted in through the cabin door.
Maybe they ought to, and yet—with a sudden out-thrust of chin, Renaud settled back to work. Jeering be blowed! He must carry on as best he could.
Shades of all inventors! Lee Renaud had brought to Sargon Valley his old Marconi model, with a wild scheme for hitching a receiving circuit on to it. He had lugged down, also, his two crude little portables for field radio use, but they were too unperfected as yet to depend on for any distant use. And “distance” was what young Renaud had to get in an emergency like this.
Lem Hicks thought that in all these months he had learned a bit about wireless. But he was lost in trying to follow the complexities of the improvised wiring plan Renaud was flinging into shape. Batteries, induction coils, couplers, transformers seemed to fairly spring into place. In his haste, Lee appeared to be rushing the work with incoherent carelessness, but in fact he was following a wiring plan of rigid exactitude, binding, twisting, tying wires with fingers that knew the meaning of every move.
Lem, unskilled as he was, could only fetch and carry.
“Lively now! Let’s get at the aerial! Where’s the hammer, the chisel?” Like one demented, Renaud drove himself and Lem Hicks, too.
Here was a bewildering tangle of coils and tubes hitched onto the little old-fashioned Marconi “brass pounder” of electric wireless telegraph.