“Isn’t it the worst—teaser? I promised father I’d try to make something of it—but it just won’t stick!” Una ruefully tapped her forehead.
“There! Di-dit-di-dit! That’s a laugh—a radio laugh—if you only knew it!” chuckled the girlish operator on her high stool before the table—her black eyebrows meeting over the blue sky-beams in her eyes. “Father got off to me ‘Y. L.—Young Lady’—I told him I hated that; and he changed it to ‘O. W.—Old Woman.’ Well! there, we’re through our ‘hamfest’—gabfest—for this morning. Father’s rejoiced, tickled through, that we’re having such a wonderful time in camp—Camp Chicolee, as I told him we called it, from an Indian word meaning Horse; and he hopes I won’t try taking four-foot fences on Revelation—just yet.”
There was a general whoop of excited laughter at this, as girlish eyes turned through sun-framed camp windows to amber forms of scattered horses grazing upon the range, otherwise the Long Pasture down the mountainside, about a quarter of a mile from camp.
Pemrose was pulling all her switches as she spoke, the miraculous conversation ended, so that the bright bulbs, the incandescent vacuum tubes in transmitter and receiver gradually faded out from white-hot filament and grid, and cherry-red plate about them, to cool blindness.
“Oh! Revelation is—a prince of the Long Pasture!... But this!” She bowed her head upon the operating table. “It sometimes seems too big a Wonder. To think of hearing Father, his own dear, joking voice, a hundred and five miles off! I’m going to try and tune in on him morning and evening when he isn’t away, lecturing.”
For a minute she was held speechless by the thought, that blue-eyed girl, that never again, on land or sea, need she be hopelessly beyond the hearing of that adored voice of Pater and pal—of him who, with continents discussing his inventions, had bent his genius towards the manufacturing of a “listening” ring for her.
“Oh! it does make one’s heart slip around in one’s body, with the wonder—the miracle—of it,” whispered artistic Naomi, slipping an arm about her. “I, for one, don’t want to depend on somebody else to grind my music for me, tune in on my evening concerts and speeches—Sunday sermons—I want to do it for myself. Can’t you begin and explain it all now, Pem—tell us how wheels go round? Do!”
“If I try to understand how wheels go round, it sets my poor wits to woolgathering—so that the wool stops my ears: I’m not a bit technical,” protested Lura laughingly. “But I did—I did watch all you did, without moving an ‘eye-winker’,” merrily, “from the moment when you threw the lightning-switch outside the cabin.”
“Yes, that grounds the aërial, so that if lightning should strike—we’re likely to have big storms up here—it wouldn’t go through the set, through the camp.”
Toying lovingly with a knob here and there upon the dialed face of her receiver, the amateur’s blue eyes roamed off to the hills—still in curl papers of mist—she still gloating over that morning “hamfest” with her father.