Stand By

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.