Then Charlie Paine, gaunt Cape Cod native, entered the scene. He had
been engaged to get the King’s message to the Wellfleet telegraph
office, whence it was to be dispatched to the White House. But,
Marconi’s horse-and-buggy courier, holding to an old Cape Cod trait,
showed not a twitch of emotion--“he wasn’t goin’ to kill his horse for
nobody.” Old Charlie Paine passed on about two years ago in his native
South Wellfleet. This is how he related his part in the big day of
excitement:
“The first message Marconi ever got through from the other side of the
ocean I took from his hand to carry to the telegraph office. I’d waited
about six days to get it, with Black Diamond hitched up in the buggy
most of the time. We jes stayed there, ready to go any minute.
“It was winter and colder’n Greenland. Dimey had two blankets over her
and I was wearin’ Steve Paine’s wolf coat that he shot up in Alaska.
All of a sudden I see Marconi come rearin’ out of the plant with both
hands full of tape. He was jes like a crazy man.
“‘You wait there, Paine, and I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he shouted,
and started for his office. I got my buggy turned around ready. The
nearest telegraph office was Wellfleet, four miles away. When he came
out again he had two big envelopes in his hand. They were messages to
be telegraphed to Washington and New York. I found out later that it
was a message from King Edward to President Theodore Roosevelt, for one
envelope was addressed to the White House and the other to a New York
newspaper.
“‘Drive like the wind!’ says Marconi. ‘If you kill your horse I’ll buy
you another.’
“Well, I started off for Wellfleet as fast as I could make Dimey go.
But when I got over the dunes, out of sight, I slowed down. I couldn’t
see any need of goin’ crazy over a telegraph message. ’Twas four miles
of hard goin’ and I wasn’t goin’ to kill my horse for nobody. Jim Swett
was telegraph operator at Wellfleet railroad station then and I gave
him the two envelopes. And that’s all there was to it.”