SARGON SOUND
A line of wagons were unloading along a ridge of land that overlooked
the turbid yellow waters of the Sargon flood. One group of men were
stacking sacks of meat and meal, which had been lugged over the hill
road to help feed the stricken families that had lost everything.
Another group had already started for the woods with their saws and axes
to fell trees for rafts, on which to bring off the hundreds of refugees
huddled on ridges still showing above the water.
"Powerful heavy, and don't feel like nothing to eat," said Jed Prother,
giving a disdainful kick against some crates and a pile of metal pieces
wrapped in old sacking which he had just lifted off a wagon.
"Hi--don't! That's our radio! Might break something!" protested Renaud,
coming on the jump.
"Radio? Huh!" snorted Prother. "Better have brought meat and blankets
'stead of that thing! No time to tinker at toys down here!"
"He must allow to serenade the rabbits and the 'possums--give 'em a
little music, perhaps," broke out another of the workmen with a bitter
laugh.
Lee Renaud started to retort, then checked his words. These fellows had
a right to feel bitter, with all their possessions swept away in that
rolling ocean of muddy waters. It was an appalling disaster. A
cloudburst up in the hills had flooded a whole valley. Trees, houses,
dead animals rode the current in a procession of horror. And if help did
not reach out soon to the pitiful families marooned on tiny islands,
human bodies would be swirled off into that awful drift.
The need was great, yet there were so few to do the relief work, and the
equipment of homemade scows and lumbering log rafts was so inadequate.
Sargon district was peculiarly isolated--fourteen miles from a railroad,
not an automobile in the whole valley, no telegraph or telephone
connections. Starvation, sickness from exposure, any of a hundred other
ills could sweep in on the trail of the Sargon flood before the outside
world would be aware of it.
These facts stalked endlessly through Lee's mind as, with Lem Hicks to
help him, he began unpacking his crates and sackcloth bundles in a tiny
cabin on the edge of the flood. Here was wireless apparatus, a fearful
jumble of it! This stuff might work--and then again it mightn't.
"Two strong huskies! Better be rowing a boat 'stead o' tinkering!" was a
jeer that drifted in through the cabin door.
Maybe they ought to, and yet--with a sudden out-thrust of chin, Renaud
settled back to work. Jeering be blowed! He must carry on as best he
could.
Shades of all inventors! Lee Renaud had brought to Sargon Valley his old
Marconi model, with a wild scheme for hitching a receiving circuit on to
it. He had lugged down, also, his two crude little portables for field
radio use, but they were too unperfected as yet to depend on for any
distant use. And "distance" was what young Renaud had to get in an
emergency like this.
Lem Hicks thought that in all these months he had learned a bit about
wireless. But he was lost in trying to follow the complexities of the
improvised wiring plan Renaud was flinging into shape. Batteries,
induction coils, couplers, transformers seemed to fairly spring into
place. In his haste, Lee appeared to be rushing the work with incoherent
carelessness, but in fact he was following a wiring plan of rigid
exactitude, binding, twisting, tying wires with fingers that knew the
meaning of every move.
Lem, unskilled as he was, could only fetch and carry.
"Lively now! Let's get at the aerial! Where's the hammer, the chisel?"
Like one demented, Renaud drove himself and Lem Hicks, too.
Here was a bewildering tangle of coils and tubes hitched onto the little
old-fashioned Marconi "brass pounder" of electric wireless telegraph.
Then at a touch from Lee the spark began to sputter. Adjustments, and it
sputtered more.
"Now--now! It's hitting it up! And I'm going to CQ Mobile till the cows
come home!" muttered Lee between set teeth. "That's the nearest big city
and we got to have help out of 'em for down here--quick!"
To the crackle of the spark, the "urgent" call sped over watery waste
and land ridges towards civilization.
Every few seconds Lee eased up on his telegraphic tapping and switched
over to listen. "Ah, we've touched a station!"
"WDK talking! Point Hope Amateur Relay. Who are you, brother? New
station, eh? Glad you're on the air." On and on the string of Morse
rolled in.
"Idiot!" snorted Lee in disgust, switching his key back to transmission
with a vicious jab. "We've got to have action, not gab!" Then with
steady spark he hammered relentlessly, "S.O.S.--S.O.S.--S.O.S.--Help!
Help! Save!"
That brought Station WDK up to taw in a hurry, knocked the gab out of
him, and held him keyed for business. "Shoot! Who's in trouble? We stand
by to help!" flashed in the message.
Lee settled down to transmission. His code poured out in a steady stream
from the brass pounder. "RL Amateur Station calling. Sargon River
district flooded. Need immediate help. Cut off from everywhere--no
railroads--no telegraph. Need food, tents, doctors. Pass on the call!"
On through the day Lee Renaud stuck to his pounder, CQing up and down
the whole state of Alabama, sending word of the dire need. Mobile,
Anniston, Birmingham--the cities over the state were tapped into touch.
Yes. Help was coming. Red Cross was answering the S.O.S. of the lone
operator down in the flood country. "O.K. for you, Flood Station RL. On
the way with supplies, tents, doctors, couple more radios and relief
operators. Army Post sending emergency airplanes. Coast steamer at
Mobile wants to head up the Sound for rescue work. Can she make it?"
And so, hour after hour, Lee Renaud kept his old Marconi
sparking--taking innumerable calls, sputtering back directions in Morse.
Then his little portable radios had their inning. Lem Hicks, with one of
the fieldpack mechanisms on his back, traveled the return trail till he
was halfway between Sargon and King's Cove. From here he relayed the
flood reports from Lee on to Jimmy Bobb at the Cove. This was done to
ease the minds of the King's Cove folk who had plenty of kin all up and
down Sargon Valley, and were anxious for news.
It was a blessed thing, though, that young Renaud had pounded his old
Marconi on longdistance calls for aid through the day, for the night
hours brought a new and worse disaster. A great power dam, fifty miles
up the Sargon, broke under the pressure of water, and by early morning a
second flood rushed down and widened the first flood by miles.