"Our young townsmen Tom Dailey and Harry Barker and Joe Bailey," the Eagle said, "have added materially to the comfort and safety of their respective families by putting up a telegraph line and burglar alarm between their houses. It is a regularly equipped line, with an office in each house. Td is the office call of young Dailey, Hb of Barker, and Jb of Master Bailey. The instruments are in the boys' sleeping-rooms, except Barker's; he uses his workshop for the purpose, and an electric bell gives warning when he is wanted. Burglars will give those three houses a wide berth in the future."
"Give us a wide berth!" Tom exclaimed. "Well, I guess they will! They wouldn't have any chance at all. Father always keeps a revolver in his room, and I have my baseball bat. Now mind, fellows, if we hear a burglar at night, we send an alarm first thing, and the minute we get an alarm we call our fathers. I guess a burglar would soon wish he was somewhere else."
"I have a baseball bat all ready at the head of the bed too," said Harry. "Do you suppose it would kill a man to hit him over the head with it, Tom? I shouldn't like to kill a man, not even a burglar. I guess I'd give him a rap over the shoulders. But I'm afraid father would fire some bullets into him before I had a chance."
"I almost wish we'd have a chance," Joe put in. "But, of course, there won't be any burglars around, now that we're all ready for them."
However, burglars are a little uncertain in their ways, and it is not well to feel too secure. Perhaps it was even while the boys were talking that two rough-looking fellows had their heads together in the back room of a disreputable saloon in Westbridge making plans. One was older than the other, and the younger had a copy of the Westbridge Eagle in his hands, occasionally reading a little here and there. These two fellows were burglars in a small way; and burglars, like other people, get a great deal of information out of the newspapers. When they see that "John Smith and family have gone to the Catskills; the house is closed for the summer," they find it more interesting news than the latest election returns.
"Oh, pshaw!" the younger burglar exclaimed, as his eye fell upon the paragraph about the boys' telegraph line—only he used language better suited to a burglar sitting in a saloon; "those fellows have put up a burglar alarm."
"What, at the three houses!" the other exclaimed. "Let me see;" and he snatched the paper rudely from the younger man's hand. "Oh, my, my, my!" he went on, after he had read the paragraph; "that's the neatest thing I ever saw in my life." And he leaned back in his chair, and chuckled as merrily as if he had been an honest man.
"I don't see anything to laugh about," said the younger. "We've spent over a week getting the lay of the land out there, and now all that labor is lost. We'll have to try somewhere else."
"Will we?" said the older man, chuckling again. "You only think so because you're young at the business. Jest leave this thing to me, my child. I know'd we'd have an easy job out there, but I didn't think they'd take so much trouble to make it easier for us."
The rest of their talk was in too low a tone to be overheard; but about one o'clock the next morning Tom Dailey and Harry Barker were both aroused at the same moment by the furious clicking of their sounders. "Td," "Hb," the instruments were calling, and in a second or two both boys were sending back the answering,