Reflecting on the astonishing information Don had conveyed, Phoebe went to her room and sat down at a small table near the window to which was fastened a telegraph instrument, the wire leading outside through a hole bored in the lower part of the sash.
A telegraph instrument is indeed a queer thing to be found in a young girl’s room, yet its existence is simple enough when explained. Riverdale was an out-of-the-way town, quite as unenterprising as many Southern towns of its class. Its inhabitants followed slowly and reluctantly in the wake of progress. They had used electric lights since only the year before, getting the current from Canton, ten miles away, where there was more enterprise and consequently more business. Canton also supplied telephone service to Bayport and Riverdale, but the cost of construction and installation was considered so high that as yet Riverdale had but three connections: one at the post office, a public toll station; one at Spaythe’s bank and one at the newspaper office. The citizens thought these three provided for all needs and so they did not encourage the Canton telephone company to establish a local exchange for the residences of their village.
Some were annoyed by this lack of public interest in so convenient a utility as the telephone. The Randolphs would have liked one in their house, and so would the Darings, the Camerons, the Fergusons and a few others; but these were obliged to wait until there was sufficient demand to warrant the establishment of an exchange.
The telegraph operator of the village was a young fellow who had been a schoolmate of both Phil and Phoebe Daring, although he was some few years their elder. Dave Hunter had gone to St. Louis to study telegraphy and afterward served as an assistant in several cities until he finally managed to secure the position of operator in his home town.
The Hunters were nice people, but of humble means, and Dave was really the breadwinner for his widowed mother and his sister Lucy, a bright and pretty girl of Phoebe’s age. Encouraged by her brother’s success, Lucy determined to become a telegraph operator herself, as many girls are now doing; but to avoid the expense of going to a school of telegraphy Dave agreed to teach her during his leisure hours. In order to do this he stretched a wire from his office to his home, two blocks away, and placed instruments at either end so that Lucy could practice by telegraphing to her brother and receiving messages in reply.
She was getting along famously when Phoebe Daring and Nathalie Cameron called on her one day and were delighted by her ability to telegraph to her brother.
“Why, it’s as good as a telephone, and much more fun,” declared Phoebe, and Nathalie asked:
“Why couldn’t we have telegraphs in our own houses, and get Dave to teach us how to use them? Then we could talk to one another whenever we pleased—rain or shine.”
The idea appealed to Phoebe. Lucy telegraphed the suggestion to her brother and he readily agreed to teach the girls if they provided instruments and stretched wires between the various houses. That would be quite an expense, he warned them, and they would have to get permission from the village board to run the wires through the streets.
Nothing daunted, they immediately set to work to accomplish their novel purpose. Marion Randolph, the eldest of the Randolph children, was home from college at this time and entered heartily into the scheme. They were joined by Janet Ferguson, and the four girls, representing the best families in the village, had no trouble in getting permission to put up the wires, especially when they had the judge to argue their case for them.