[Illustration: Shoulders squared, head up, young Renaud stood beneath
his 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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 clutter
of an old outhouse filled with broken chairs, moth-eaten strips of
carpet, and a tangle of ancient harness. Lee Renaud, spider webs draping
his black hair and the dust of ages prickling at his nose, persisted in
his 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 a
framework of brass and wood. Held against the wheel by slips of wood
were pads of some kind of fur, now worn to a few stray hairs and bits of
hide. The circle of glass turned on an axis of wood which passed through
its center, and attached to this was a series of cogwheels and a handle
for cranking the whole affair--at considerable speed, it appeared.
Lee Renaud backed off a bit as he stared at the thing. Glittering in the
dim 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 and
outlandish. King's Cove! It sounded rather elegant. Instead, it
consisted of a handful of shacks that housed a little village of farming
and fishing folk, an ignorant people given over to poverty and
superstition. King's Cove had been aristocratic in its past. A fringe of
rotting, semi-roofless "big houses" up beyond the cove testified to the
long-gone past when a settlement of rich folk had set out great orange
orchards and camphor groves in that strip of South Alabama that touches
the Gulf of Mexico. All had gone well until the historic freeze of 1868
had 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-tropic
climate, the great oaks swathed in Spanish moss, the bit of sea that
indented his land. He preferred remaining in poverty to moving elsewhere
and beginning life over again. So he lived on in a white-columned old
house that year by year got more leaky and more warped.
Then Gem Renaud had slipped and injured his leg. And Lee Renaud had been
sent down by his family to look after his Great-uncle Gem.
Lee's home was in Shelton, a pleasant and progressive town. Lee's mother
was a widow. Her two older boys were already at work. This vacation, Lee
had counted on his first steady job, work at a garage. But because he
was not already working and could be spared most easily, the lot had
fallen 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 the
past a hundred years or more--the queer ignorant villagers; no
electricity, only candles and little old kerosene lamps; no automobiles,
only wagons drawn by lazy, lanky mules or by slow oxen; homemade boats
on the bay and bayou; Uncle Gem's great tumble-down old house where
Pompey, the negro that cooked for him, lighted homemade candles in
silver candlesticks and served meager meals of corn pone and peas in
china 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-clipped
black hair, knickers, and sport cap usually swinging in his hand. Lem
Hicks, the storekeeper's boy, Tony Zita, one of the fishing folk, and
other lanky youths, barefooted and in faded overalls, seemed to have no
particular interest in life save to lounge on boxes in front of the
store and spit tobacco juice into the dust. Sometimes when Lee passed
the line of loafers, he caught remarks muttered behind his
back--"Stuck-up! Thinks he's citified, ain't he!" Once when Lee got
home, he found mud spattered on his "store-bought" clothes--and he
hadn't remembered stepping in a puddle either!
Uncle Gem was a queer figure himself. The tall, stooped old man with his
sideburns, 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, his
questions about the strange crystal wheel woke a gleam of excitement in
the old man's eyes.
"The glass wheel--you never saw anything like it before, eh?" Uncle
Gem's long fingers tapped the chair arm. "Gadzooks! That was our
old-time 'lightning maker.' My brothers and I had a tutor, one Master
Lloyd, a Welshman, and a very conscientious, thorough little man. He
used this mechanism to prove to us boys that electricity, or 'lightning
power,' 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 for
granted--electricity for lights, cars, telephones. And yet here was a
man in whose childhood it had been a mere theory, a something to be
gingerly 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 hitch
it up right. I could show you--ouch! Confound that leg!" In his interest
in electricity, the old man had forgotten his injury and had tried to
put 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 steps
and out to the dusty, cluttered storehouse. Then Pompey departed for his
kitchen, muttering under his breath, "Glad to get away. Pomp don't mix
in with no glass wheel and trying to conjure lightning down out of the
sky."
"Pomp's not very progressive," old Gem Renaud smiled wryly. "Lots of
other folks around here too that are superstitious about this business
of 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 of
renovating the strange old wheel went forward. There was more to be done
than 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 crude
material as he could in the cast-off junk about the place, tried to
carry out his orders.
A brass tube, set in a standard of glass and branching forward so that
its two arms nearly touched the crystal plate, had once been set with
rows of sharp wires like the teeth of a comb. Most of these were missing
now, and Lee spent the better part of one day resetting the empty
sockets with metal points patiently hacked from a bit of old barbed wire
fencing.
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 back
into 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 glass
well rubbed with silk or fur or leather begets this electrica.'"
"Why, there seem to be all kinds of rubbers or exciters. I reckon
though, since fur was used on this contraption at first, fur is what we
better use again." Lee Renaud got up and stretched his legs, then went
outside.
He had remembered seeing some squirrel skins tacked to old Pomp's cabin
door. And now he was going forth to do some bargaining.
"Hey, Pompey," the boy held out his best silk necktie, "how about
trading me those skins for this?"
The bright silk was most beguiling. The negro hesitated a moment, then
capitulated.
"Yas, sir, I'd sho like to swap. I--I reckon I might's well trade. You
take along them skins, but please, sir, don't connect me in no way with
any 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 the
fur and nailed these on the four blocks of wood that had held the
original fur pads. Then he fixed the blocks back in their places on the
frame so that the revolving glass would brush between the two pairs of
pads, 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 old
one that had rotted. It was dusk of day before Lee Renaud was ready to
test out the ancient "lightning maker." Great-uncle Gem sat erect and
eager in his chair. Pompey stood in a far corner, holding a candle for
light, rolling his eyes in something of a fright, but sticking by to see
after 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 of
metal points set so close to the revolving disc. His hand was still a
space 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 little
room, dwarfing every other sound. So close it was that Lee Renaud felt a
bullet almost scorch across his face, and heard it thud viciously
against a wall. Pomp's candle clattered to the floor, went out. There
came a sound as though Great-uncle Gem had slumped across his chair.
Outside, stealthy footsteps made off into the darkness.