“Gracious! I’m on the back of a carrier wave now—carried away. I’m riding a winged horse—and not old King.” Lura glanced down at the Long Pasture.
“But who wants to really ‘dig’?” laughed the girl amateur, pulling her switches to disconnect the sets again. “If any one does, there’s a buzzer on the table—code cards. About two-thirds of the stuff that’s sent out is in dot and dash. You can hear twice as far with it.”
“Yes, laugh in dots, cry in dashes, eh,” said Naomi. “Well—I’m ‘game’; I’ll try to be, although I do want to be out on the mountain, sketching—as it’s only our fourth morning here.”
“How—how about you, ‘Jack’?” Pemrose glanced at Una. “Fair play—your father!”
“Revel—Revel is waiting for her morning lump of sugar,” said the latter, pointing archly through the window at the amber shape and floss-silk mane of a dainty little thoroughbred, down in the Long Pasture.
Out there—out there, on the range, all was gayety, irresponsible idleness, for the moment: horses madly racing automobiles that glided by, on a mountain road below, snorting deliriously when brought up by a fence.
“Just look at that old Sickle Face, Cartoon!” laughed Una. “He thinks he’s a racehorse, a fast ‘darb’, as the caretaker, the farmer in charge of the horse-farm, says. But—but Revelation beats him to the fence—every time.”
“And the dear colts, all eyes,” murmured Lura. “The little, fluffy babies that run under their mothers; and the older ones, Blue Boy, Big Eyes, that kick so high; think they can kick—the—sky; don’t they?”
“Well! if we haven’t kicked the sky this morning, we’ve come pretty near it.” Dorothy’s chin was thrust out freakishly. “We will, when we really inhabit the shack corner—send out messages for ourselves and receive them. Oh! if we could only have a private code, like the Scout troops, some of them.”
“When you make your own of the ‘crutch’, then you can make it over.” Pemrose was fingering a code card. “Dot an’ dash—the crutch! The universal language! It requires ‘pep’ to handle it—the crutch.” Her blue eyes flashed. “Father made my radio ring as a prize for being able to tick off code calls and pick them up. He said that if I didn’t work hard at a discovery, to understand—and use it to the full—I was just a frothing-stick, whipping the cream that somebody else had made.” The girl’s eyebrows went up in laughter.