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And with that sixth sense of instinct which rises to a faculty when dangers thicken about a resolute man, the lineman found what he sought. He caught at the root of a rock-bound cedar, swung himself over the cliff, and called to Bucks to follow. Bucks acted wholly on faith. The blackness below was impenetrable, and perhaps better so, since he could not see what he was undertaking.
He fixed his camera to the lower wires carefully avoiding possible short-circuitings and having focused it for the center of the road, pulled a pair of pliers from his pocket and endeavored to simulate, the actions of a lineman at work. By the time these preparations were complete it was close on one o'clock. Some half-hour later a large blue lorry came in sight bearing down along the lane.
But with my scheme the leak is blown forward, away from the lineman. It's a perfectly sound scheme, but I can't make them see it." "Sounds reasonable," observed Keith, examining perfunctorily a device to which later he was to owe his life.
Then it flashed on Bucks that the lineman was signalling Morse to him, and that the dot-and-dash squeezes meant: "Half-way down. Half-way down." Bucks answered with one word: "Hurrah!" But he squeezed it along the nerves and muscles like lightning. He could hear the labored breathing of his companion as he strained at intervals every particle of his strength to reach a new footing of safety.
The district messenger, the telegraph operator, the typewriter, the stenographer, the bookkeeper, the canvasser, the salesman, the commercial traveler, the engineer, the car driver, the hackman, the conductor, the gripman, the brakeman, the electrician, the lineman, the elevator boy, and a host of others, follow trades and occupations which had no existence in the middle of the eighteenth century.
"Oh, hell!" burst out Neale as he strained hard on a knot. Again he looked at his lineman, this time with something warmer than curiosity in his glance. Larry Red King was tall, slim, hard as iron, and yet undeniably graceful in outline a singularly handsome and picturesque cowboy with flaming hair and smooth, red face and eyes of flashing blue. From his belt swung a sheath holding a heavy gun.
"It'll take a lineman half a day to fix 'em up again, and we'll be twenty miles away by that time. Now we'll put the hobbles on the youngster, and git." Often Alex had longed for just such an adventure as this. The final disenchantment was anything but glorious.
One typical tragic scene was that in New York, where, within sight of the City Hall, a lineman was killed at his work on the arc light pole, and his body slowly roasted before the gaze of the excited populace, which for days afterward dropped its silver and copper coin into the alms-box nailed to the fatal pole for the benefit of his family.
"Who said you could go?" exclaimed the lineman. "You can't. Go back!" Bucks stood his ground. "Do you want to get killed?" thundered Dancing hotly. "Two are better than one on a job like this," returned Bucks, without giving way. "Go on, will you?"
Dancing, emerging presently from the batteries, greeted Scott again, this time boisterously. The Indian only smiled, but his face reflected the warmth of his friendship for the big lineman. And at this juncture Dancing, slapping him on the shoulder, turned to introduce him to Bucks.
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