by Lou Cameron
Telephones had been invented about the same time as Stringer, when one studied on it. But like most of his generation he’d grown up without the dubious joy of using one, much, until recently. As he spread the directory on the bed and picked up the Bell set from his bed table, it developed that the lady hired to help him at Colorado Springs Central had as much or more to learn about the way you got the infernal devices hooked up together. She sounded young. He idly wondered if she was pretty as that Western Union gal in Cripple Creek as she fiddled and fussed, and finally asked a more serious female voice at the far end if she felt up to jawing with anyone called Stuart MacKail of the San Francisco Sun. The obviously more mature Hotwire Hamilton, if that was her, laughed lightly in a way that made Stringer feel better about her and allowed she’d never know unless she talked to the gent, would she?
So the gal from Central horned out and Stringer got to introduce himself to the lady electrician. He said he was sorry if he’d called her at an inconvenient time, and started to explain his reasons. But she cut in with, “You must be the gent Sparks Fletcher was telling me about the other day. He asked if you’d been by my shop and when I said I didn’t know who you were he told me who you were. Is the San Francisco Sun really that interested in blown fuses here in Colorado Springs, for heaven’s sake?”
He assured her, “They sure are, when not even licensed electricians can explain it and international spies might be involved, ma’am!”
She laughed incredulously and said, “Sparks assured me you didn’t seem a drinking man, when I asked him that time. But international spies in Colorado Springs … ?”
He agreed it sounded wild to him, too, but added, “They do like to say that if Frisco is the Paris of the west, Colorado Springs can brag on being the London Town, and you did have yourself a real European count out here before you invited furriners like Nikola Tesla to settle, didn’t you?”
This time she really let out a hoot before she told him, “If we’re talking about Count Louie de Pourtales and his sweet wife, Bertie, I just wired their Broadmoor Dairy to light up their cows without risking any more straw fires. As for poor Nikola Tesla, he’s not an international spy, either. A little touched in the head, I fear, but an American citizen, now, and I’m pretty sure a loyal one.”
Stringer said, “My point is that you can get out here from most anywhere, these days, and Tesla was fooling about with mighty up-to-date scientific notions, ma’am. It’s my understanding you did some work for him whilst he was out here, trying to talk to Mars by short wave rays or whatever?”
She sighed and said, “Whatever indeed. I only did routine wiring for Doctor Tesla. It wasn’t easy. I had hardly any grasp on what he was really up to out here. I sometimes wonder if he did, either. Just what do you want from me, Mister MacKail?”
Stringer said, “I’m not sure. I know less about petting lightning than the rest of you. Ah, might you have any notion how on earth you can get a light bulb to burn when it’s not plugged into anything?”
He was braced for her to call him a drunk again. He was pleasantly surprised to hear her reply, “Sure, with an a.c. induction coil. That’s pretty basic, even if it did scare the heck out of Thomas Edison the first time he saw it. You see, current moving through any circuit has to set up at least a little magnetism and …”
“Hold it, ma’am,” he cut in with a weary chuckle, explaining, “What may sound basic to you and Thomas Edison is pure Greek to me. If I could may haps see some of this induction stuff at work, I might have a better notion what we were talking about.”
She didn’t hesitate as she replied, “Come on over, then. I live above my shop near Wahsatch and Fountain. Have you got a pencil?”
He said, “I have the directory open to your address, ma’am. Are you sure I won’t be a bother, showing up this late?” To which she answered with a sort of wicked chuckle, “I won’t know until you get here, will I? Shall we say twenty minutes, then?”
He said he’d try and hung up. Then he got to his feet, put on his hat and considered whether he wanted to wear his gun as well as a dab of bay rum. He decided he’d better wear it. Her quarters were fairly close to the center of town. On the other hand, that poor bastard who’d switched slickers with him that night had been back-shot smack in front of the railroad depot.
He thought about old boys dying in or close to depots as he headed downstairs. He doubted Harry Orchard could be within a hundred miles of here, right now. There was no law of nature saying the same son of a bitch had to get each and every victim near rail transportation in any case unless … “Son of a bitch!” he decided as he hit the lobby, “That’s how the rascal got out of there without leaving tracks for those bloodhounds! He just hopped aboard a trolley car!”
Then he heard someone call his name and forgot about murdering gents near depots, railroad or trolley, for the gal rising from that lobby chair all smiley-faced was the redhead, the pretty redhead, who’d been trying to stop that runaway pony cart, up in Cripple Creek, that time.
Stringer doffed his hat as they met ’neath a romantic palm with fake paper fronds. She kept her veiled boater on, of course, and he saw she was gussied up grander than him in a green summer-weight bodiced dress that made her hellfire green eyes shine like emeralds in her cameo-featured face. He said, “You seem to have the advantage on me, Miss … ?”
“Kirkpatrick, Fionna Kirkpatrick of Clan Colquhon, Stuart K. MacKail.” She replied with a roguish grin, adding, “What might the K. stand for, Kinlochiel, considering where your people flourished in the Glen Mhor?”
He laughed and answered, “Comair e tha thu, and I see you’ve done some homework, mo cridhe,” which inspired her to flutter her lashes under her veil and reply, “You don’t know me that well, yet. But I did want to thank you for saving me and my wee passengers that time and so I felt obliged to ask around Cripple Creek about you. When they told me you were a famous newspaperman, despite that hat, I assumed you’d gone on back to San Francisco. So fancy meeting you again, here in The Springs! I’m only here tonight, bound for Denver and a new teaching position in the morning, and you?”
“I may be heading for Frisco by way of Denver, ma’am. Right now I fear I have to go meet another lady, and old widow gal, on pure business. Ah, you didn’t say what your room number here at the Alta Vista might be, in case I get back soon.”
She glanced at the out-of-earshot desk as she sighed and told him, “Not hardly. This happens to be my home town, Stuart. But should we meet in the cold gray dawn aboard the seven fifteen for Denver and Cheyenne, well, I might just let you buy me a Coca Cola in Denver, where nobody’s as likely to gossip about such innocent pleasures.”
He nodded but told her, “I’d sure like to get innocent with you, for I’ve never met a Fionna I didn’t fall in love with. But don’t bet the farm on it, mo cridhe. If the lead I’m checking out right now doesn’t lead anywhere, I’m sure heading out on a fool’s errand indeed! You wouldn’t like to give me some Denver address I might want to look up, when and if I get out of this fool town, would you?”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully, they sure pursed swell under that veil, and told him, “I don’t think so, Stuart. I mean, a sudden impulse is one thing, while premeditation seems so, ah, premeditated.”
He said he followed her drift, put his hat back on, and left to see what old Hotwire Hamilton might have to say for her fool self or at least Doc Tesla. Even if she was as impulsive as that frisky Highland lass he’d just struck out with, and even if she was half as pretty, she didn’t have any call to feel half as grateful to him, cuss her self-sufficient hide!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
But once he got there, Stringer forgave the lady electrician for making him pass on yet another lovely lass named Fionna, a habit he’d been trying to break since the love of his pimple-picking days had wed another goddamn Scotchman. For, while the widow Hamilton was somewhat older, somewhat plainer, and inflicted with a damned old Lowland name besides, she had a nice handsha
ke and served swell cake and coffee in her kitchen, upstairs, while they got to know one another better. The willowy but surprisingly firm-fisted blue-eyed brunette didn’t seem too interested in knowing him in the Biblical sense, judging from the bib overalls she’d slipped on over a man’s wool workshirt. She failed to pick up on a few inside ethnic jests he tried and it soon developed that her real name was Nelly, that her people had been Connecticut Yankee, and that while she’d heard Hamilton was a Scotch name she wasn’t all that worried about it. He told her she hadn’t missed much, explaining, “I was raised in legends of blood and slaughter in the glens, but since I was growing up in cattle country at the time I still picture the Massacre of Glencoe as a sort of Miwok raid in the chaparral of the coast ranges. My Uncle Donald told me the Sierras we grazed were a mite high for the West Highlands.”
She smiled uncertainly and said she couldn’t picture Glencoe at all. He knew better than to bore even lowlanders with such tales and said, “You were going to show me how to light Edison bulbs without electricity, right?”
She sighed and said, “Oh, dear. We do seem to be starting from scratch. Of course you need electricity to make anything that runs on electricity work. It’s just that wires aren’t as important as they teach you children in General Science in high school, even this late in the game. Finish your coffee and we’ll go downstairs to my workshop.”
He did and they did. She left her shop dark, out front, as she switched on the gooseneck over her stout and well-nicked but neatly-kept workbench. He asked if he could roll a smoke. She asked him not to and stared about in the gloom, muttering, “Let’s see, now, where could I be keeping that induction coil I made for that damned teacher that time?”
As she hauled a box over to the back wall to get at the bewildering junk stacked on shelves to the pressed tin ceiling, Stringer asked if they might be talking about a redheaded teacher of the female persuasion. Hardwire shook her darker head and replied, “Male, sort of gray and balding as a matter of fact. Said he taught at the high school and wanted to demonstrate induction to his kids. Never came back for it and when I asked at the high school they’d never heard of him. I think he was just out to pick my brains.”
He asked what they were talking about as she got down what looked to be a small wheel of fortune until one noticed there were no numbers on the wheel of artificial amber or whatever. She put it on the work bench and plugged it into the bank of outlets running along the back rail of the bench, against the plaster wall. She said, “This isn’t what I was after, but it can be fun and we may as well. When I said that other gent was out to pick my brains I meant that, like you, he perhaps had some basic knowledge of the subject but was way over his head when it got to magnetic radiation. Like a fool, I drew up a set of plans to show him what I meant to make for him. He said he wanted a copy for his own files, and they only charge a nickle for each blueprint, so …”
“He only wanted to know how you did, ah, whatever you do with one of those, ah, induction coils?” asked Stringer as she flipped a small switch on her amber-wheeled whatever. She said, “I suspect he built one bigger and more powerful by far than what I’d like to show you, if only I could recall where I put the blamed thing.”
He asked what the thing she’d just switched on was meant to do. She told him to just watch. Then the telephone on the wall near the back door rang, making her jump, as well. She frowned at him and said, “This seems to be my night.” Then she answered it and stared at him even more thoughtfully. He heard her say yes a couple of times and then she told him, “It’s for you, Stuart.” To which he replied, firmly, “Impossible. I never told anyone I was coming here tonight.”
But he took the receiver from her, anyway, and even tried to find out who’d called and how come. But even as he spoke into the mouthpiece he heard someone hanging up at the far end. So he hung up as well, muttering, “That’s odd. You sure they asked for me, by name, not just the man of the house or whatever?”
She said, “There hasn’t been a man of this house for quite a spell. Aside from which they asked for Stringer MacKail, by name. A stringer is some sort of newspaperman, right?”
He nodded and said, “The Massacre of Glencoe would take less time to explain. You sure have that wheel spinning like anything, now, Hotwire. How come?”
She opened a drawer and took out some metal thimbles, smiling down wistfully as she slipped them on over the fingers of one hand, saying, “Kids love this. I haven’t done it for some time. Learned it working with Doc Tesla out to the dairy farm that time, only his electrostatic generator was way bigger, of course.”
Then she put her bare hand on a sort of silvery ball attached to the stand her wheel spun on, saying, “These things only spin with a hand crank in high school classes. Watch the voltage we can get with even a small motor whipping things up to some real speed!”
He started to ask another question. Then his jaw simply dropped as every black hair on her head commenced to stand straight up, with tiny blue sparks crackling off the ends, like she was fixing to catch fire. Then it got worse. She raised her hand, as if reaching for the tin ceiling with those thimbles on her finger tips. She couldn’t reach that high, of course. She didn’t have to, if scaring him was what she had in mind. He gasped, “Kee-rist! Are you trying to fry your fool self alive?” as hair-thin but no-shit lighting bolts commenced to crackle louder than popping popcorn off her fingertips to the tin ceiling.
She removed her bare hand from the ball and admitted it tingled a mite as her hair, having come unpinned by her sorcery, floated down around her shoulders. She added, “The voltage was way up there, but I wasn’t taking enough wattage to harm a flea. Doc Tesla must have built up tolerance to a good tingle, though. He used to put on quite a show at his electric circus up the slope. Scared me a time or two and I knew it was basic whiz-bang blown to majestic proportions.”
She’d removed the thimbles and hunkered down to peer under the bench by the time Stringer had digested enough of that to say, “Hold on. Are you saying Doc Tesla was some sort of confidence man?”
She hauled out a massive object that resembled a length of drain tile wrapped in shiny black silk thread and despite its apparent weight, seemed to have no trouble getting it up atop her work bench beside the electrostatic generator. On closer examination the creation was mounted sideways on a wooden stand with a rheostat knob as well as a double-blade switch to make it do whatever it was supposed to do. The handy gal who’d put it together plugged it in, then said, “Watch this,” and turned off the gooseneck lamp to plunge them into total darkness. But then he saw a dull orange glow in the darkness, and as it grew bright enough to make out the outline of the lamp she’d just turned out, he nodded but still asked, “Are you doing that with the lamp switched off all the way?” So she reached out to unplug it as well, saying, “No wires up my sleeves, even if I do have this handy-dandy little device plugged in. You can’t see it. You can’t feel it, but it’s giving off magnetic waves, a.c. magnetic waves, sixty one way and sixty the other way, every single second.” She moved her rheostat knob further and as the lamp got as bright or even brighter than before, she explained, “I could burn the bulb out, long distance, but they cost too much, so take my word for it.”
He grinned and said, “I do. I think I may even know what you’re doing, now that I study on how Edison’s bulbs work. The magnetic tingle heats the filament up, the same as if the wall current was flowing through, right?”
She nodded and he asked, “What about other electricated devices?” to which she replied, “Have a gander at my other toy, just as close to the coil as the lamp,” and when he whistled at the madly spinning wheel of the electrostatic generator, she said simply, “It wouldn’t work with a d.c. motor. Since I used an a.c. motor to spin the wheel its little magnets are naturally in phase with the sixty cycle pulses of the induction coil and the rest you should be able to figure out, you well-read thing.”
Stringer laughed and said, “I’m smart enough now t
o see we’re getting said sixty cycles from the Electric Company’s bigger a.c. generator. But tell me this, could you turn that lamp and motor off with your magic coil if they were really plugged in and switched on?”
She sighed and said, “I wish you hadn’t asked that. The answer is no. Poor old Sparks Fletcher and I have wracked our brains and cussed Nikola Tesla’s name in vain, trying to figure out what’s been going on here in town for the better part of a month. You asked if I thought Tesla was a confidence man. I think it would be fairer to call him a dreamer with a flair for showmanship and a need for backing. As I’ve told Sparks and other troubleshooters working for the Electric Company, more than once, there just wasn’t anything out at the Tesla labs that could make the juice flow so odd as it has of late. The dear man’s dreams were way beyond me and even the technicians working closer with him. But the equipment we helped him build was little more than lab curiosities writ large. Let me stretch this induction coil three hundred feet and I’ll show you some sparks indeed, but as his Colorado backers decided, after getting nothing for their bucks but big blue bangs, there was no practical application for the expensive toys he made us build and wire up for him.”
Stringer asked, “What about the night he blew out all the lights in Colorado Springs and set fire to the power plant, miles away?” asked Stringer, only to be told, “Kid stuff on a grand scale. Self-taught electricians are always blowing fuses and starting fires in the attic by overloading the circuit or inviting a lightning strike with ungrounded wireless masts. Not many can afford to poke steel and copper thirty stories into a sky famous for summer lightning, but he did, and had it plugged into the town’s electric grid without the grounding it should have had. Enter thunderbolt and goodbye lots and lots of more mortal wiring. Everything we put together for Doc Tesla was heavy-gauge and the first thing they teach you in Electric Shop Basics is that an overloaded circuit burns out where the wire’s thinnest. Then they teach you that real voltage, say, from a lightning bolt or two, can leap small gaps, such as those left by thrown switches and burned out fuses, to heat things hotter than they were ever meant to heat, so …”