“Help yourself,” it said. “Save—yourself! There must be something you can do. Think—hard!”
And the light fell full upon needle and dial on the face of the radio transmitter, against a log wall, eight feet distant.
She cowered in the bunk, cowered, as if she had been struck, looking up in a ghastly way at the familiar antennæ running round the logs above her head.
“I never—could!” Yet, somehow, she was out of the gray bunk where she had lain, coffined—the girl who would have to be wheeled through life in a cushioned chair.
“Master of the Hidden Fire! Now! Now!” She tottered, gripping its side—but she reached that shining “shack corner”, the shelf with its wireless litter.
Amid a medley of plugs and jacks, used for connecting varied circuits, amid shining brass and bakelite, was a little telegraph key. Study, practice, at Camp Chicolee, had made it a pal—almost a pal.
“If—I only ... could! But I never could—remember! But Master of the Hidden Fire!” She tumbled on to a high stool against that shelf, the table nailed to the log wall, dropping her head amid the litter. “We—we had a private sign we always used, we girls. She has a little receiver in that umbrella, I know; if I speak, she’ll pick it up ... dot an’ dash, maybe, she can’t! Oh-h! what first: light the bulbs, start the generator.”
Mechanically, with a glance at that dark generator under the table, garner of power, she was throwing the switch, turning the rheostat knob in the panel of the transmitting set, not slowly, carefully, as she had been taught to do, to prolong the life of the bulbs to which she was turning on the strong current.
Much did a girl in her kidnapped plight care about bulbs—bulbs that talk overseas!
She slammed the rheostat on full, so that the fairy filaments in those electric bulbs—the sending vacuum tubes of the powerful transmitter—just leaped from dim to brightest—almost in a moment to white heat, the grids and plates about them glowing cherry red.