Produced by Roger Frank and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Shoulders squared, head up, young Renaud stood beneathhis wireless aerial.]
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STAND BY
The Story of a Boy's Achievement in Radio
_by_
HUGH MCALISTER
_Author of_
"A VIKING OF THE SKY," "FLAMING RIVER" "STEVE HOLWORTH OF THE OLDHAM WORKS" "THE FLIGHT OF THE SILVER SHIP" "CONQUEROR OF THE HIGHROAD"
THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY
AKRON, OHIO NEW YORK
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STAND BY
Copyright, MCMXXX _by_ The Saalfield Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
I THE CRYSTAL WHEEL II STRANGE EXPERIMENTS III HOT WIRES IV THE GANG TAKES A HAND V TAPS VI AMAZING THINGS VII HARNESSING LIGHTNING POWER VIII COMPRESSED POWER IX SARGON SOUND X A PENCIL LINE XI A MYSTERIOUS CALL XII THE NARDAK XIII WITHIN THE SILVERY HULL XIV DANGER AHEAD XV SHAGUN XVI QUEST FOR CAMP XVII BESIEGED XVIII PROSPECTING XIX IN THE GONDOLA XX F-O-Y-N XXI KILLERS OF THE ARCTIC XXII HOPE AND DESPAIR XXIII FIGHTING THROUGH XXIV ON TO GLORY XXV FROM THE DESERT OF ICE
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Stand By
CHAPTER I
THE CRYSTAL WHEEL
There it stood--a great glass wheel, half submerged in the dusty clutterof an old outhouse filled with broken chairs, moth-eaten strips ofcarpet, and a tangle of ancient harness. Lee Renaud, spider webs drapinghis black hair and the dust of ages prickling at his nose, persisted inhis efforts to clear this strange mechanism of its weight of junk.
At last it was freed, a three-foot circular sheet of glass mounted on aframework of brass and wood. Held against the wheel by slips of woodwere pads of some kind of fur, now worn to a few stray hairs and bits ofhide. The circle of glass turned on an axis of wood which passed throughits center, and attached to this was a series of cogwheels and a handlefor cranking the whole affair--at considerable speed, it appeared.
Lee Renaud backed off a bit as he stared at the thing. Glittering in thedim sunlight that filtered into the storage shed, it looked strange,almost sinister.
But then the boy had found everything here at King's Cove strange andoutlandish. King's Cove! It sounded rather elegant. Instead, itconsisted of a handful of shacks that housed a little village of farmingand fishing folk, an ignorant people given over to poverty andsuperstition. King's Cove had been aristocratic in its past. A fringe ofrotting, semi-roofless "big houses" up beyond the cove testified to thelong-gone past when a settlement of rich folk had set out great orangeorchards and camphor groves in that strip of South Alabama that touchesthe Gulf of Mexico. All had gone well until the historic freeze of 1868had ruined the tropic fruits and emptied the purses of the settlers.After that, the population steadily drifted away from King's Cove.Squatters came in to fish and to scratch the soil for a living.
Of all the old-timers only Gem Renaud remained. He loved the semi-tropicclimate, the great oaks swathed in Spanish moss, the bit of sea thatindented his land. He preferred remaining in poverty to moving elsewhereand beginning life over again. So he lived on in a white-columned oldhouse that year by year got more leaky and more warped.
Then Gem Renaud had slipped and injured his leg. And Lee Renaud had beensent down by his family to look after his Great-uncle Gem.
Lee's home was in Shelton, a pleasant and progressive town. Lee's motherwas a widow. Her two older boys were already at work. This vacation, Leehad counted on his first steady job, work at a garage. But because hewas not already working and could be spared most easily, the lot hadfallen on him to be sent down to King's Cove.
And here at King's Cove the boy felt that he had stepped back into thepast a hundred years or more--the queer ignorant villagers; noelectricity, only candles and little old kerosene lamps; no automobiles,only wagons drawn by lazy, lanky mules or by slow oxen; homemade boatson the bay and bayou; Uncle Gem's great tumble-down old house wherePompey, the negro that cooked for him, lighted homemade candles insilver candlesticks and served meager meals of corn pone and peas inchina that had come from France three-quarters of a century ago.
When Lee went down to the shack of a country store for meal or kerosene,the village loafers looked "offishly" at the tall boy with close-clippedblack hair, knickers, and sport cap usually swinging in his hand. LemHicks, the storekeeper's boy, Tony Zita, one of the fishing folk, andother lanky youths, barefooted and in faded overalls, seemed to have noparticular interest in life save to lounge on boxes in front of thestore and spit tobacco juice into the dust. Sometimes when Lee passedthe line of loafers, he caught remarks muttered behind hisback--"Stuck-up! Thinks he's citified, ain't he!" Once when Lee gothome, he found mud spattered on his "store-bought" clothes--and hehadn't remembered stepping in a puddle either!
Uncle Gem was a queer figure himself. The tall, stooped old man with hissideburns, his chin-whiskers, his long-tailed coat of faded plum color,was a prisoner of his chair now.
As Lee, all dusty and cobwebby, burst in from the storage room, hisquestions about the strange crystal wheel woke a gleam of excitement inthe old man's eyes.
"The glass wheel--you never saw anything like it before, eh?" UncleGem's long fingers tapped the chair arm. "Gadzooks! That was ourold-time 'lightning maker.' My brothers and I had a tutor, one MasterLloyd, a Welshman, and a very conscientious, thorough little man. Heused this mechanism to prove to us boys that electricity, or 'lightningpower,' as he dubbed it, could be tapped by mankind."
"And did he--could he?"
Great-uncle Gem nodded emphatically.
Lee Renaud's own black eyes lighted with excitement, too. Electricity!Why, he was so used to it that he had always just taken it forgranted--electricity for lights, cars, telephones. And yet here was aman in whose childhood it had been a mere theory, a something to begingerly toyed with.
But that old wheel must hold power--or rather man's groping after power.
"Wonder if I could make electricity with it?" Lee was thinking aloud.
"Umph, of course, if there's enough left of the old mechanism to hitchit up right. I could show you--ouch! Confound that leg!" In his interestin electricity, the old man had forgotten his injury and had tried toput his foot to the floor.
"Wait, wait, Uncle Gem! Pompey and I can carry you, chair and all."
The darky and Lee finally did achieve getting Mr. Renaud down the stepsand out to th
e dusty, cluttered storehouse. Then Pompey departed for hiskitchen, muttering under his breath, "Glad to get away. Pomp don't mixin with no glass wheel and trying to conjure lightning down out of thesky."
"Pomp's not very progressive," old Gem Renaud smiled wryly. "Lots ofother folks around here too that are superstitious about this businessof trying to get electricity out of the air with a piece of glass."
For the rest of that day and for other days to come, the work ofrenovating the strange old wheel went forward. There was more to be donethan one might think for, and so little with which to do the repairing.Propped in his chair, old Gem directed, and Lee, scraping up such crudematerial as he could in the cast-off junk about the place, tried tocarry out his orders.
A brass tube, set in a standard of glass and branching forward so thatits two arms nearly touched the crystal plate, had once been set withrows of sharp wires like the teeth of a comb. Most of these were missingnow, and Lee spent the better part of one day resetting the emptysockets with metal points patiently hacked from a bit of old barbed wirefencing.
Next, the moth-eaten pads of fur must be replaced.
"Glass and fur," puzzled Lee. "That's a strange combination."
Gem Renaud tugged at his chin-whisker while his mind went searching backinto the past. "That book of science, we studied as boys, explains it,if I can just remember. It was something about 'a portion of fair glasswell rubbed with silk or fur or leather begets this electrica.'"
"Why, there seem to be all kinds of rubbers or exciters. I reckonthough, since fur was used on this contraption at first, fur is what webetter use again." Lee Renaud got up and stretched his legs, then wentoutside.
He had remembered seeing some squirrel skins tacked to old Pomp's cabindoor. And now he was going forth to do some bargaining.
"Hey, Pompey," the boy held out his best silk necktie, "how abouttrading me those skins for this?"
The bright silk was most beguiling. The negro hesitated a moment, thencapitulated.
"Yas, sir, I'd sho like to swap. I--I reckon I might's well trade. Youtake along them skins, but please, sir, don't connect me in no way withany glass wheel conjuring you might be using those squirrel pelts for."
Restraining his laughter, Lee solemnly agreed and soon departed,carrying four good pelts with him. He cut out good-sized pieces of thefur and nailed these on the four blocks of wood that had held theoriginal fur pads. Then he fixed the blocks back in their places on theframe so that the revolving glass would brush between the two pairs ofpads, one pair at the top, and one pair at the bottom.
Cogwheels had to be geared up and a new handle made to replace the oldone that had rotted. It was dusk of day before Lee Renaud was ready totest out the ancient "lightning maker." Great-uncle Gem sat erect andeager in his chair. Pompey stood in a far corner, holding a candle forlight, rolling his eyes in something of a fright, but sticking by to seeafter Marse Gem, no matter what happened.
Lee's heart half smothered him with its excited pounding.
Creak of rusty cogs, whirl of the wheel, fast, faster!
All in a tremble, young Renaud brought his knuckle near to the row ofmetal points set so close to the revolving disc. His hand was still aspace from the metal when with a sharp crackle a spark leaped across.
He had done it! He was making electricity--like those old experimenters!Lee burst into a wild shout.
With a sudden booming detonation, a gunshot roared across the littleroom, dwarfing every other sound. So close it was that Lee Renaud felt abullet almost scorch across his face, and heard it thud viciouslyagainst a wall. Pomp's candle clattered to the floor, went out. Therecame a sound as though Great-uncle Gem had slumped across his chair.
Outside, stealthy footsteps made off into the darkness.