Like a madman, Lee cranked at the generator arm, adjusted transmitter and receiver, shot the buzzer.
And like a miracle sweeping over that yellow torrent, a sound came to him in the receiver:
“Renaud? That you? Been searching all night. First buzz signal just hit us. Where are you?”
“Stand by, Lem!” Renaud cranked frantically for more power. “Out in an old cupola top house—sinking fast. That double sugarloaf mountain peak looms just to the west of us.”
“Airplanes searched there last night,” wirelessed young Hicks. “Must a missed you. Coming again, two of ’em!”
But it wasn’t an airplane that rescued them after all. To get an injured man out of a drifting house and aboard a ship of the air was beyond question. So Renaud stuck to his post till one of the rescue motor boats could thread the flood litter and circle in near enough to get a hawser to the derelict. Supporting the half-conscious Bartlot on life-preservers that had been flung to him, Lee kept his burden afloat till both could be drawn aboard.
In that night, when Lee had been swept adrift, the Sargon Sound district had seemed to progress a hundred years. Yesterday it had been a land on foot or on mule-back, without telephone or telegraph. Today on a height above the flood, a city of tents had sprung up. Motor trucks, muddy to the wheel top, showed how transportation had been accomplished. Supplies in stacks, a long hospital tent, doctors, nurses, a flotilla of seaplanes moored in the crescent-shaped harbor! A line of refugees filing into a field soup kitchen, and more refugees coming into safety aboard a bluntnosed steamer that had been scouring the islands!
Radio had done it! Radio had brought the assistance of a whole state to the relief of the flood sufferers down in this isolated district.
“Gosh!” Lee exclaimed as he stepped from the putt-putting little motor boat, “folks sure answered the call of that old Marconi ‘brass pounder’ in something like a—like a hurry!”