“And as none of us want to be that, I ordain a code lesson for this morning, instead of first aid or handcraft,” said the Guardian.
“We might have a private sign of our own to begin a message with, anyway.” Pemrose was ticking off that signal, five minutes later, pressing the little lever that wagged the tongue of the “buzzer”, just an ordinary electric doorbell, with a little dry-cell battery attached, upon the camp table.
“How would this do? Six dots, four dashes, for our Group sign. And—and we might add to the ordinary radio abbreviations a few of our own: that mountain off there—” the blue eyes gazed remotely through the window—“Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, as we call it, would be ‘L. B.’ if we were sending a message dot an’ dash. Little Speckle—Little Sister would be ‘L. S.’ Oh! we may work out the whole private code in time ... then where will boy amateurs be?”
“We’ll have beaten them, to a frazzle,” purred Dorothy. “At least, they won’t be ahead. With the help of Cannie Nanny we’ll do it—this droning bumble-bee.”
She laughed, putting out a finger to stroke the green buzzer, with its tireless hum, doing duty, for instruction, as a telegraph key.
“What—what a thing an electric battery is!” Pemrose was muttering whimsically. “You can run everything with it—from a train to a burglar alarm,” merrily, “and a little one-cell buzzer. What do you think—Una?”
“Eh—what?” gasped the latter—her eyes had been turning listlessly to the Long Pasture and Revel, as she counted the minutes until the morning ride.
“When—when we go away to school, to an Academy, this year, Unie, we could have radio rigged up between our rooms,” put forth the blue-eyed amateur, “and talk to each other with our own private signs—as Treff and his chum do at college.”
The bait worked—the challenge in the name of her aviator cousin, that cock-o’-pluck.
Una’s pencil, like the others, began to show no less grit than lead in taking down hieroglyphics from the buzzer’s tongue.