A PENCIL LINE
Lee did not know just what had happened in that brief interval when he
nodded at his post, but he awoke to find himself sprawled in the midst
of radio wreckage on the floor of his cabin, which was reeling and
rocking, adrift in the flood. Water swishing over his face had brought
him around. It was coming in fast now, and the cabin was sinking. He
would have to get out.
Something must have struck him when the flood swept off the cabin, for
his head throbbed dizzily. Nevertheless he managed to climb to the
rafters, dragging with him his little shoulder-pack radio though he
feared the fall had ruined it. Hacking with his pocket-knife, he tore
off enough shingles to let himself out on the roof.
All about him stretched a horrible yellow sea. On its drift were other
flood-loosed buildings, tangle of house furnishings, swollen dead
animals, bellies up, and now and then a human corpse.
Like some frail skiff sucked into the wake of a great ocean liner, Lee's
sodden little roof rolled smashingly against a big two-story cupolaed
dwelling that was careening magnificently on its way to the Gulf of
Mexico. The boy was catapulted into the air, then down into the flood,
and came up, swimming for life. When the waves flung him against the big
derelict again, he clung desperately to the ragged planking of what once
must have been the porch, caught his breath, and began to draw himself
up into this new haven of doubtful safety.
Heavy with weariness and the weight of water, it was a momentous matter
to inch himself up the house wall to gain a high window sill and to
crawl over. Half-fainting from exhaustion, he fell inside on the
slippery floor.
A voice beat in his ears. It was startling to have words come out of
that shadowy corner across the room.
"Hi, stranger! A perilous ride we're having!" Lying on the floor was a
heavy-built man with iron-gray hair, and skin bronzed almost to
mahogany. His face was drawn with pain and one leg was stiffly bound in
crude splints made of broken chair slats. "Captain Jan Bartlot,
explorer, welcomes you to his home." A hand was extended as Lee crawled
across the floor. "Devil of an exploration we're on now! Looks like our
last one, though I've been in worse fixes and come out--once in Egypt,
another time in Borneo."
Lee felt that this was some mysterious dream he was having. The flood,
the drifting, this man with bronzed face and queer accent--all seemed
part and parcel of the dream. It was too strange to be true.
But it was true. And this did look to be the last voyage in this life
for the man and the boy unless rescue came to them. But how could they
get help--how let people know of their perilous position?
His radio could do it! If only he could make it work.
Lee's whole body was a mass of weariness; his head was still dizzy. But
as his senses cleared, he mechanically set to work to repair his little
shoulder-pack radio. On the wave-rocked floor he spread out the parts.
The heavy little cogwheels, the crankshaft, the coil of stout
wire--these could be patched together. Lee rummaged through the derelict
house for repair material. He smashed open the swollen doors of closets
and cupboards and found glass jars, some tins, nails and pieces of wire.
With these he went forward with his task. But it was hopeless! He could
find nothing to replace the delicate network of minute wiring that had
crossed the little selenized sheets in the transmitter and receiver. The
blow that had torn this fragile meshwork away had destroyed all
usefulness of the radio. There was nothing for Lee to do except wait and
watch the flood wastes for some rescue boat.
Meantime he would try to keep the stranger with the broken leg as
comfortable as possible on that dipping, careening house floor. It is
remarkable how, in times of dire stress, two utter strangers can be
drawn together. In a short time they are as old friends. Friendship made
and cemented by danger! Lee Renaud and Captain Bartlot talked of many
things.
One could almost forget present danger in listening to Captain Bartlot,
mining explorer, tell of the weird, out-of-the-way places of the world
where he had gone in search of the rare stones and minerals that were
his hobbies. He had prospected down in tropic jungles, where one had to
dodge the poison darts of black head-hunters, where one encountered
monster animals and reptiles. He had gone into the Arctic wastes, into
the underground treasure-houses of buried cities, into the tombs of the
ancients.
"If this ark of ours would only stop pitching so, why, boy, I'd show you
some of the specimens I have in this case," Bartlot said, his hand
touching a leather roll that lay beside him on the floor. "There's one
of those rare green fire-diamonds from out of an Aztec king's tomb, and
a piece of nickel-iron star stone from a meteor that fell in frozen
Greenland. Rather far extremes, eh? A New York museum wants to buy my
collection. I came back to my old home where I could catalog my
specimens in peace and write up their histories for museum records. And
after all my travels and close calls, here I am in my own living-room,
my leg smashed by a cabinet sliding across the floor, and the whole
house adrift on the flood tide of my native Alabama River."
The lurching of the drifting house ended the sentence in a groan, as the
injured man, despite Lee's efforts, rolled across the floor.
"The water is coming in fast now," said Lee. "Do you think I could help
you upstairs?"
With a bed slat for a crutch, Bartlot labored up the stairway, young
Renaud lifting and tugging to the limit of his strength. Somehow they
accomplished it though Bartlot fell unconscious when the last step was
achieved. Diamonds in their leather roll and some useless radio junk had
no particular value in a crisis like this. Nevertheless, Renaud returned
to the first floor and carried these possessions, some tins of food, and
a couple of soggy blankets up the slippery stair. Step by step, the
hungry waters crept up and up behind him.
What would the end be? Would this sagging, sinking building last much
longer? A booming detonation hurled a negative answer to the question.
A floating mass of logs and uprooted trees had crashed into a portion of
the old house. Lower and lower in the flood tide rode the battered
derelict. The water was coming up to the second floor.
There was still the cupola tower above the roof. If they could reach
that! With a blanket knotted under the unconscious man's arms, Lee began
to drag him up the narrow, ladder-like stair that led into this turret.
His heart was sick at the horrible jolting he had to inflict on the
injured man. A blessing on his unconsciousness! It must hold him in its
pall until--until--now they were up!
Lee carried their belongings up this second flight, and wedged the
trapdoor down between them and that creeping flood below. Here was
safety until the house battered to pieces in the torrent.
Jan Bartlot came out of his stupor and lay very still, clenching his
teeth against groaning.
Death lurked near. To keep his mind off the boom and thunder of the
flood, off the lap of water creeping, creeping up toward their last
refuge, Lee Renaud bent over his wrecked radio. His fingers straightened
a loop of aerial here, made a connection there, cranked at the motor
shaft for power. It was all no use. Too much of the selenized plate
wiring missing! But he had to be doing something.
Crouching in this last lift of floor space, he idly drew his pencil
point back and forth across the tiny receiver plate, outlining the mesh
of missing wires--and almost screamed as a faint buzzing seemed to
follow in the path of the pencil lines.
Extraordinary! Out of all reason! Electricity following a pencil line as
though it were a wire!
A faint hope burned!
Like a madman, Lee cranked at the generator arm, adjusted transmitter
and receiver, shot the buzzer.
And like a miracle sweeping over that yellow torrent, a sound came to
him in the receiver:
"Renaud? That you? Been searching all night. First buzz signal just hit
us. Where are you?"
"Stand by, Lem!" Renaud cranked frantically for more power. "Out in an
old cupola top house--sinking fast. That double sugarloaf mountain peak
looms just to the west of us."
"Airplanes searched there last night," wirelessed young Hicks. "Must a
missed you. Coming again, two of 'em!"
But it wasn't an airplane that rescued them after all. To get an injured
man out of a drifting house and aboard a ship of the air was beyond
question. So Renaud stuck to his post till one of the rescue motor boats
could thread the flood litter and circle in near enough to get a hawser
to the derelict. Supporting the half-conscious Bartlot on
life-preservers that had been flung to him, Lee kept his burden afloat
till both could be drawn aboard.
* * * * *
In that night, when Lee had been swept adrift, the Sargon Sound district
had seemed to progress a hundred years. Yesterday it had been a land on
foot or on mule-back, without telephone or telegraph. Today on a height
above the flood, a city of tents had sprung up. Motor trucks, muddy to
the wheel top, showed how transportation had been accomplished. Supplies
in stacks, a long hospital tent, doctors, nurses, a flotilla of
seaplanes moored in the crescent-shaped harbor! A line of refugees
filing into a field soup kitchen, and more refugees coming into safety
aboard a bluntnosed steamer that had been scouring the islands!
Radio had done it! Radio had brought the assistance of a whole state to
the relief of the flood sufferers down in this isolated district.
"Gosh!" Lee exclaimed as he stepped from the putt-putting little motor
boat, "folks sure answered the call of that old Marconi 'brass pounder'
in something like a--like a hurry!"
"Sho did!" Lem Hicks' voice was fervent. "And, boy, when you brought
radio down here, you done something!"