The Shack Corner
“Q. S. O. Increase your power, O. M.—Old Man!”
In what had come to be known as the “shack corner” of the cabin on the
sidehill—the radio shack—Pemrose Lorry uttered the challenge into the
microphone, small mouthpiece, making merry with her father, a hundred
miles away.
“Ha! That’s better. Your signals are coming in strong now. I have you
tuned O. K.” Yet, still, she fiddled with the knob upon the dial on the
face of the radio receiver; the knob which, beginning with zero upon the
dial-scale, she had gently turned, varying the capacity of her
condenser, the steel plates for storing up current, until she got her
wavelength—the wavelength of the distant station sending.
In the hazy, morning sunlight stealing into the mountain camp, the camp
upon Mount Pocohosette, seventeen girls and a Guardian watched her,
bewitched by this new talking game, as she alternately threw the aërial
switch to the receiving side, thus connecting her receiving set to
aërial and ground wires, and then to the transmitter, forming a like
connection.
“You’re coming in like a ton of bricks now,” she informed her distant
father. “I could hear you with the phones on the table,” with a merry
wink.
“Radio Amateur, thy middle name is Exaggeration!” laughed the Guardian.
“Always tell the other fellow what _he’s_ doing, not what you’re doing
yourself—then, if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on him—even if
he is your most blessed Dad ... first principle of radio transmission!”
She winked again—the amateur.
“Oh! if I were only—only—mistress of it, as you are.” Lura clasped her
hands, her radiant “copper nob” shining like the bronze coils.
“I’m going to give you all a lesson presently, a lesson in
radio—transmitting and receiving. But, first, I’m going to ‘parlez-vous’
Dad in code, a little.” The first and second fingers of the girlish
amateur’s right hand now attacked the steely telegraph key upon the
operating table, as the radio shelf was called, ticking off endless
combinations of dots and dashes—a sealed book to most of the girls.
“Goodness! That code is as bad as the Hindenburg line; ’twould be as
hard for me to work through it,” panted Lura, whose brother had been a
soldier.
“Isn’t it the worst—teaser? I promised father I’d try to make something
of it—but it just won’t stick!” Una ruefully tapped her forehead.
“There! Di-dit-di-dit! That’s a laugh—a radio laugh—if you only knew
it!” chuckled the girlish operator on her high stool before the
table—her black eyebrows meeting over the blue sky-beams in her eyes.
“Father got off to me ‘Y. L.—Young Lady’—I told him I hated that; and he
changed it to ‘O. W.—Old Woman.’ Well! there, we’re through our
‘hamfest’—gabfest—for this morning. Father’s rejoiced, tickled through,
that we’re having such a wonderful time in camp—Camp Chicolee, as I told
him we called it, from an Indian word meaning Horse; and he hopes I
won’t try taking four-foot fences on Revelation—just yet.”
There was a general whoop of excited laughter at this, as girlish eyes
turned through sun-framed camp windows to amber forms of scattered
horses grazing upon the range, otherwise the Long Pasture down the
mountainside, about a quarter of a mile from camp.
Pemrose was pulling all her switches as she spoke, the miraculous
conversation ended, so that the bright bulbs, the incandescent vacuum
tubes in transmitter and receiver gradually faded out from white-hot
filament and grid, and cherry-red plate about them, to cool blindness.
“Oh! Revelation is—a prince of the Long Pasture!... But this!” She bowed
her head upon the operating table. “It sometimes seems too big a Wonder.
To think of hearing Father, his own dear, joking voice, a hundred and
five miles off! I’m going to try and tune in on him morning and evening
when he isn’t away, lecturing.”
For a minute she was held speechless by the thought, that blue-eyed
girl, that never again, on land or sea, need she be hopelessly beyond
the hearing of that adored voice of Pater and pal—of him who, with
continents discussing his inventions, had bent his genius towards the
manufacturing of a “listening” ring for her.
“Oh! it does make one’s heart slip around in one’s body, with the
wonder—the miracle—of it,” whispered artistic Naomi, slipping an arm
about her. “I, for one, don’t want to depend on somebody else to grind
my music for me, tune in on my evening concerts and speeches—Sunday
sermons—I want to do it for myself. Can’t you begin and explain it all
now, Pem—tell us how wheels go round? Do!”
“If I try to understand how wheels go round, it sets my poor wits to
woolgathering—so that the wool stops my ears: I’m not a bit technical,”
protested Lura laughingly. “But I did—I did watch all _you_ did, without
moving an ‘eye-winker’,” merrily, “from the moment when you threw the
lightning-switch outside the cabin.”
“Yes, that grounds the aërial, so that if lightning should strike—we’re
likely to have big storms up here—it wouldn’t go through the set,
through the camp.”
Toying lovingly with a knob here and there upon the dialed face of her
receiver, the amateur’s blue eyes roamed off to the hills—still in curl
papers of mist—she still gloating over that morning “hamfest” with her
father.
“This is a wonderful set which Mr. Grosvenor has had installed for
us—isn’t he a prince, Una’s father—but not quite powerful enough to talk
with _him_ overseas.... We ought all to learn to use it perfectly—just
to thank him!”
Patiently she began to “handle” her recent message, or the method of it,
all over again, going from switch to switch, throwing the two-bladed
aërial switch to one side to send, to the other to listen.
“It’s a ‘slow-thumbed’ business; one has to be careful of one’s bulbs,
so that they’ll live long.” She was turning the rheostat knob, to light
those bulbs—having re-started her generator, with its powerful
current—moving that rheostat knob very gently, as when she had called
“1—V. Z. M.” her father’s distant laboratory station, so that those
shining vacuum tubes glowed slowly from dim to bright—with an
incandescent eloquence that sent its poetry right into the enchained
girls’ souls.
She was glancing at ammeters and radiation meter, the first to see if
she was forcing those shining tubes too much, the second to determine
whether she was putting enough power into the antennæ running around the
raftered ceiling of the log cabin, above her.
“But explain it to us—more—Pemrose; how the message goes out! I’m
beginning to love the radio shack—this shack side of the cabin,” cried
various voices in tuneful keys and different pleading words.
“‘How it goes out!’” The inventor’s daughter wrinkled her brows, trying
to meet the tax levied upon her—her matchless inheritance. “Well! father
explained it first to me with the hackneyed illustration of throwing a
stone into a pond, showing how the waves spread out, at first strong,
growing weaker—and how they may be intercepted in various ways; so it is
with the radio sound-waves. He illustrated it in the laboratory, too,
with a pair of tuning forks, how if one is struck, the other, if it is
in tune, will echo the sound at a little distance. If they are not in
tune, there must be a magnet between, for them to vibrate, answer each
other, with a funny, ‘surgy’ sound; we’ve tried it—”
“Oh! but tuning forks are an old song; and that does not tell all the
story about radio. Go on—it’s fascinating.” Dorothy picked up the
microphone from the table against the log wall.
“Well! when your voice goes into that it passes along the wire
connecting it with the transmitter at the rate of a few hundred
vibrations a second.” The girlish radio fan touched the two-foot cabinet
containing the sending set. “But that is not speed enough to send a
message out into the air, so my blessed Dad says—strength depends upon
the rapidity of the vibrations, so the voice passes into this
incandescent tube—bulb—where the vibrations are increased, but still not
enough to send them out. But they pass on into this other vacuum tube,
called the oscillator, where the vibrations are a thousand—and more—a
second.”
“Whe-ew!” It was a prolonged whistle-whistle of awe.
“But that, again, would be too high frequency—beyond audibility. But,
somehow, the shining bulbs strike an average between them—Dad says it’s
a sort of grab game—between them—very difficult for any but the Wizard
to understand,” Pem’s black eyebrows went merrily up. “But they do hit
it off and the voice goes out into the ether in audio-frequency waves;
waves that can be picked up—heard—on the back of an electric carrier
wave.”
“Gracious! I’m on the back of a carrier wave now—carried away. I’m
riding a winged horse—and not old King.” Lura glanced down at the Long
Pasture.
“But who wants to really ‘dig’?” laughed the girl amateur, pulling her
switches to disconnect the sets again. “If any one does, there’s a
buzzer on the table—code cards. About two-thirds of the stuff that’s
sent out is in dot and dash. You can hear twice as far with it.”
“Yes, laugh in dots, cry in dashes, eh,” said Naomi. “Well—I’m ‘game’;
I’ll try to be, although I do want to be out on the mountain,
sketching—as it’s only our fourth morning here.”
“How—how about you, ‘Jack’?” Pemrose glanced at Una. “Fair play—your
father!”
“Revel—Revel is waiting for her morning lump of sugar,” said the latter,
pointing archly through the window at the amber shape and floss-silk
mane of a dainty little thoroughbred, down in the Long Pasture.
Out there—out there, on the range, all was gayety, irresponsible
idleness, for the moment: horses madly racing automobiles that glided
by, on a mountain road below, snorting deliriously when brought up by a
fence.
“Just look at that old Sickle Face, Cartoon!” laughed Una. “He thinks
he’s a racehorse, a fast ‘darb’, as the caretaker, the farmer in charge
of the horse-farm, says. But—but Revelation beats him to the fence—every
time.”
“And the dear colts, all eyes,” murmured Lura. “The little, fluffy
babies that run under their mothers; and the older ones, Blue Boy, Big
Eyes, that kick so high; think they can kick—the—sky; don’t they?”
“Well! if we haven’t kicked the sky this morning, we’ve come pretty near
it.” Dorothy’s chin was thrust out freakishly. “We will, when we really
inhabit the shack corner—send out messages for ourselves and receive
them. Oh! if we could only have a private code, like the Scout troops,
some of them.”
“When you make your own of the ‘crutch’, then you can make it over.”
Pemrose was fingering a code card. “Dot an’ dash—the crutch! The
universal language! It requires ‘pep’ to handle it—the crutch.” Her blue
eyes flashed. “Father made my radio ring as a prize for being able to
tick off code calls and pick them up. He said that if I didn’t work hard
at a discovery, to understand—and use it to the full—I was just a
frothing-stick, whipping the cream that somebody else had made.” The
girl’s eyebrows went up in laughter.
“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.
Cannie Nanny, in the midst, became a center of gravity.
An hour later, when a riding party swung down the mountain, it was with
a gay switching of crops, a new _esprit de corps_, the sense of a leap
taken to keep abreast of bold boy amateurs—a leap in grace and growing.