"Ah, señors," said she, "I should want to do it—how? Why, shut up that lighthouse like flinging a blanket over it: so!"
"And," cried Gilbert, "that's just what we are going to do! Tell the men to be ready on the instant." As she departed he turned to me with dancing eyes.
"See?" he whispered.
"No; not an atom."
"No? Well, old man, she has struck the only plan possible! Observe the overhead traveling wire. It lands on the flat just outside the other opening, doesn't it? Well, suppose we hang a curtain—even Chloe's skirt, if it were big enough—on that wire, and run it out, and cut off the light from flashing out to seaward."
"But," I objected, "we can't make a screen big enough to intercept all the light at a hundred feet distance—it is impracticable."
He laughed in my face, and cried out:
"My boy, rays of light from lighthouses are parallel!"
I had forgotten this elementary fact. I cried "Eureka!" and then we faced our task: a race against time.
The men streamed up to us, heard, and set to work immediately. We requisitioned the tarpaulin covers from the bags of cement; even emptied the bags themselves. We stripped hundreds of yards of telephone wires in the galleries. We descended to a still lower level; we were all tailors, sailmakers, anything, everything. Some patched holes, while others sewed cover to cover until a sheet, fifty feet square, grew beneath our hands, sewn together with wire, and impervious to a single ray of light.