Lee Renaud’s own black eyes lighted with excitement, too. Electricity! Why, he was so used to it that he had always just taken it for granted—electricity for lights, cars, telephones. And yet here was a man in whose childhood it had been a mere theory, a something to be gingerly toyed with.
But that old wheel must hold power—or rather man’s groping after power.
“Wonder if I could make electricity with it?” Lee was thinking aloud.
“Umph, of course, if there’s enough left of the old mechanism to hitch it up right. I could show you—ouch! Confound that leg!” In his interest in electricity, the old man had forgotten his injury and had tried to put his foot to the floor.
“Wait, wait, Uncle Gem! Pompey and I can carry you, chair and all.”
The darky and Lee finally did achieve getting Mr. Renaud down the steps and out to the dusty, cluttered storehouse. Then Pompey departed for his kitchen, muttering under his breath, “Glad to get away. Pomp don’t mix in with no glass wheel and trying to conjure lightning down out of the sky.”
“Pomp’s not very progressive,” old Gem Renaud smiled wryly. “Lots of other folks around here too that are superstitious about this business of trying to get electricity out of the air with a piece of glass.”
For the rest of that day and for other days to come, the work of renovating the strange old wheel went forward. There was more to be done than one might think for, and so little with which to do the repairing. Propped in his chair, old Gem directed, and Lee, scraping up such crude material as he could in the cast-off junk about the place, tried to carry out his orders.
A brass tube, set in a standard of glass and branching forward so that its two arms nearly touched the crystal plate, had once been set with rows of sharp wires like the teeth of a comb. Most of these were missing now, and Lee spent the better part of one day resetting the empty sockets with metal points patiently hacked from a bit of old barbed wire fencing.
Next, the moth-eaten pads of fur must be replaced.