The Experimental Radio Station of 1853

• Chapter 1 First Light and Copper Wire
• Chapter 2 The Ledger of Debts
• Chapter 3 Galvanic Dreams
• Chapter 4 The Smell of Wet Straw
• Chapter 5 Striking the Ground
• Chapter 6 The Arcane Coil
• Chapter 7 A Murmur in the Zinc
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Clay
• Chapter 9 The Messenger from Town
• Chapter 10 Spilled Acid, Sullen Smoke
• Chapter 11 The Spectral Needle
• Chapter 12 Midday Static
• Chapter 13 The Weight of the Diaphragm
• Chapter 14 Bread and Solder
• Chapter 15 Harmonics of the Rust
• Chapter 16 A Phantom Syllable
• Chapter 17 The Clock Above the Hayloft
• Chapter 18 Shivering Resonators
• Chapter 19 Voices in the Well
• Chapter 20 The Patron's Shadow
• Chapter 21 The Final Battery
• Chapter 22 Lightning on the Ridge
• Chapter 23 The Frequency of Earth
• Chapter 24 A Single Spoken Word
• Chapter 25 The Dissolving Signal
• Chapter 26 Silence at Sunset

The cockerel belonged to a German named Hauer whose farm lay half a mile down the turnpike toward Catonsville, but its crowing carried through the morning mist as clearly as if the bird sat directly on the hayrack outside.

Samuel Abbott did not move his feet from the wooden crate where they had rested since three in the morning. He kept his palms cupped around a stoneware mug of chicory that had grown stone-cold two hours ago, watching the eastern wall of the barn turn from the color of wet slate to the gray of greasy tin. There were gaps between the pine siding—some wide enough to slide a butcher’s knife through—and each gap now held a thin, pale seam of dawn.

"The wind has dropped," Thomas said from the shadows near the grain bin.

"The wind was not our problem," Abbott replied. His throat was stiff with lime dust and coal smoke from the small stove in the corner. "The wind never bothered anything except the chimney draft, and that only because you cut the tin collar three inches too wide."

"It took three hours to beat that tin out of an old lard bucket," Thomas said, not unkindly. He was twenty-two, had spent three years at the university in Philadelphia before his father’s tannery failed, and possessed the sort of large, raw-boned wrists that seemed perpetually in danger of snapping laboratory glassware. He emerged from behind the grain bin carrying a lantern whose flame was turned down to a yellow nub no larger than a pea. "Shall I blow it out?"

"Save the whale oil. We may need it to see what we are eating by noon, assuming we have anything left to eat."

Thomas blew into the chimney. The smell of scorched wick mingled with the damp smell of old oat straw, dry rot, and the sharp, sour tang of the chemical troughs arranged in double rows down the center threshing floor.

The barn was forty paces long, built thirty years earlier by an elder of the German Reformed congregation who had since died in the almshouse. Its oak rafters were the thickness of ship timbers, bowed slightly in the middle under the weight of three decades of summer hay, though at present the lofts stood mostly bare. Abbott had rented the place in March because it possessed three things impossible to find within the city limits of Baltimore: utter seclusion from the telegraph companies' lines along the railroad, four hundred feet of uninterrupted earth floor, and a landlord whose paralysis kept him permanently confined to an armchair two miles away on the Frederick Road.

Abbott stood up, his knees cracking like dry pine sticks. He was forty-six, possessed an unbrushed spade of black beard threaded with silver, and wore a frock coat that had once been decent black broadcloth but had suffered so many splashes of sulfuric acid that the skirts looked as though they had been peppered with buckshot. He walked over to the center table—two hemlock planks laid across a pair of salt-pork barrels—and picked up the spool.

It was red copper, twenty-two gauge, drawn at the mill in Reisterstown to his exact and frantic specifications. There were four miles of it wound onto three wooden drums, each drum turned on a lathe from green ash that had already begun to check and warp in the Maryland damp.

"Did you test the continuity through the second drum before you slept?" Abbott asked.

"I didn't sleep," said Thomas.

"That is not what I asked."

"The second drum is sound. Three ohms, perhaps three and a quarter. The seam where the wire-drawer brazed the break at the eighteen-hundred-foot mark is rough, but the gutta-percha wrap held. I scraped it clean with my thumb-nail and bound it with silk twist from my mother's sewing basket."

"Your mother will want that back," Abbott said, his finger tracing the bright, cold rim of the uppermost coil.

"My mother is in Lancaster, Mr. Abbott. She has other spools."

"She will want it back regardless. Women have an instinct for diverted thread. They can smell gutta-percha through two layers of ticking." Abbott set the drum down with a hollow thump that resonated through the floor planks. "We begin at the north corner. The ground is wetter there because the eaves have rotted away. Water is everything today, Thomas. If the soil dries before midday, the resistance will climb until we might as well be shouting into a brick wall."

They worked without speaking for the next half hour, falling into a routine they had rehearsed three times during the dry week before.

First came the iron rods. There were sixteen of them, forged by a smith in Ellicott’s Mills who had cursed Abbott roundly for demanding low-phosphorus scrap rather than good horse-shoeing stock. Each rod was six feet long, octagonal, and tapered to a dull chisel point. They carried them two by two to the corners of the threshing floor, where the bare dirt had been cleared of chaff down to the hard, gray clay.

Thomas took the sledge. He swung it with a slow, mechanical rhythm, his coat off, his suspenders straining against the coarse linen of his shirt. At each blow, a dull thug echoed up into the rafters, disturbing the barn swallows that had begun their nervous chattering among the cobwebs of the ridgepole.

Clank. Clank. Thunk.

The sound changed as the iron found the underlying strata of rotten stone that lay two feet beneath the loam throughout Baltimore County.

"Hold," Abbott said, kneeling in the dirt. He smelled of tobacco and damp wool. He pressed his palm against the top of the rod. It was warm from the friction of the descent. "Pour the brine now. Don't let it run off toward the sill. Pour it right down the shank."

Thomas reached for a wooden piggin filled with saturated salt solution—rock salt he had spent two days dissolving in rain-barrel water until the liquid would float an egg. He tipped the lip of the pail against the iron. The brine foamed gray where it met the dry ring of earth, then vanished into the hole with a faint sucking hiss.

"Again," Abbott said.

"That is four gallons already this morning."

"The earth is thirsty, Thomas. The earth has been drinking lightning since the Creation, and it does not give up its capacity for a pint of kitchen pickle. Give it the whole bucket."

While Thomas drove the remaining rods into the perimeter, Abbott began the unspooling.

The wire was stiff from the morning chill. It uncoiled with a dry, metallic whispering, like a snake dragging itself through dried leaves. He walked backward toward the great double doors of the barn, feeding the copper through his gloved left hand while his right manipulated the wooden axle on its grease-smeared trestle. The metal was bright—too bright, almost luminous in the blue dawn that was now filling the yard.

Every twelve paces, he stopped, dropped his knee to the ground, and whipped a three-inch binding of bleached cotton tape around the conductor to insulate it from the damp grass. He had forty yards to lay before he reached the stone well-curb near the ruined dairy house.

The well was the key to the whole business.

It was sixty feet deep, dug through solid gneiss fifty years before the war with the British, and though the pump gear had long since fallen into the pit, the water at the bottom remained black, cold, and connected by a thousand subterranean seams to the Patapsco River three miles south. If a galvanic impulse could be urged into the crust of the earth anywhere on this side of the Chesapeake, it would find its footing in that well.

As he reached the well-curb, Abbott paused and looked back at the barn.

From here, the building looked like what it was: an old, failing shelter for beasts, its shingles moss-grown, its red paint faded to the color of dried liver. Nothing about it suggested that inside its walls sat sixteen thousand feet of insulated copper wire, forty-eight cells of Grove batteries containing sixty pounds of pure mercury and thirty quarts of fuming nitric acid, and two men who had not eaten a warm meal since Tuesday.

A red-tailed hawk hung over the orchard across the lane, perfectly motionless against the pale gray sky, waiting for field mice.

"Abbott!"

Thomas's voice was muffled by the heavy timber of the siding.

Abbott did not run; running broke wire and frayed connections. He walked with long, deliberate strides back across the dew-silvered orchard grass, his boots blackening with wet.

Thomas was standing beside the instrument table, the sledgehammer leaning against his thigh. He was pointing down at the galvanometer—a delicate thing under a bell glass, consisting of a silk-suspended sewing needle magnetized by stroke-work against a loadstone Abbott had bought in London ten years before.

The needle was not at rest.

It did not point north toward the pole, nor did it swing with the easy, pendulum rhythm of an instrument disturbed by a heavy footfall on the threshing floor. It was shivering. It made tiny, erratic leaps of half a millimeter to the left, hung there as if held by a hair, and then flicked back against the brass zero-peg with a faint, dry tink that could only be heard by pressing an ear near the glass.

"Has the railroad run a morning train?" Abbott asked softly.

"The six o'clock from Relay is not due for twenty minutes," Thomas said. "Besides, Relay is five miles off. The rails don't ground into the limestone; they're laid on cedar ties."

"The telegraph, then. The Morse line along the turnpike."

"It has been quiet all morning. I walked down to the gate before you woke. The wire was dead as hemp. Not even the hum from the wind."

Abbott removed his hat, revealing a high, yellow-white forehead marked across the middle by the red welt of his hatband. He bent over the glass. His breath fogged the surface, and he wiped it clear with the cuff of his acid-burned sleeve with a quick, irritable jerk of his wrist.

The needle jumped again. Three short twitches, then a long, sluggish crawl to the westward side of the card, where it remained for three seconds before collapsing back to zero.

"It is not Morse," Abbott muttered. "Morse has a rhythm like a cooper hooping a barrel. This has no beat. It is soft. It is like someone blowing through a reed."

"It could be the atmosphere," Thomas suggested, though he did not sound convinced. "The sun is up behind the clouds. The heat expands the upper air."

"The air does not expand in three-second pulses, boy. Not unless God has developed an intermittent pulse." Abbott reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out his watch—a heavy silver turnip made by Tobias in Liverpool. The crystal was cracked across the face from an accident with an air pump three winters ago. "Sixteen minutes past six. Our friend Mr. Gittings will be sitting down to his kidneys and claret in his house on Mount Vernon Place in two hours."

Thomas looked away, toward the line of carboys standing under the hayrack. "Did he send another note?"

"He did not need to send a note. He sent his attorney on Friday. The man had gray whiskers and yellow teeth, like an old sheep. He smelled of almond soap. He told me that twelve thousand dollars was a great deal of money to spend on copper wire to bury in the cabbage patches of Baltimore County. He asked if we had managed to signal to Philadelphia yet."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him Philadelphia was an uninteresting town full of Quakers and that we were aiming for something larger."

"Which was?"

"The truth," Abbott said. "A general communication through the crust of the globe. A voice spoken into the dirt at one place rising out of the dirt at every other place simultaneously, without the intervention of Mr. Morse’s poles, Mr. Morse’s keys, or the permission of the United States Congress."

Thomas picked up a pair of iron pliers and tightened a square nut on the terminal board. "Mr. Gittings does not care about the crust of the globe. He owns two hundred shares of the Magnetic Telegraph Company."

"Which is precisely why he wants to see if we can kill it," Abbott said. "He wants to be the man holding the knife, or he wants to sell his shares before someone else finds the throat. He is a banker, Thomas. Bankers do not believe in natural philosophy; they believe in priority."

He tapped the rim of the bell glass with his fingernail. The needle settled. The twitching had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the little steel sliver pointing dead north, its blue-tempered surface catching the cold light from the open doorway.

"The wire from the well," Abbott directed, his tone changing from the philosophical to the sharp, dry cadence of the workshop. "Bring it through the auger hole beneath the sill. Don't touch the lead flashing. If the gutta-percha is cracked, bind it with the oiled linen. We must have the circuit completed before the ground mist burns off."

Thomas nodded and went out.

Abbott remained by the table. He took a small bottle of sweet oil from his pocket, dipped the tip of a goose quill into it, and touched the pivot of the balance beam that held the heavy secondary coil above the primary. The drop was no larger than a cabbage seed, but it smoothed the motion of the brass rocker.

Everything in the barn was crude, massive, and yet absurdly fragile.

The batteries—forty-eight gallon-sized stone jars—stood in their wooden troughs like an army of small, leaden soldiers. They were not yet charged; the carboys of acid sat behind them, stoppered with clay and tied down with straw, their vitreous sides sweating in the humidity. To fill them would take an hour of foul, coughing work that would leave their eyes watering and their skin yellowed with nitric fumes. Once filled, the batteries would live for eight hours, perhaps nine, before the zinc plates were eaten into gray spongy lace and the power died into a greasy scum of sulfate.

Those eight hours were all they had left of Gittings’s money.

Twelve thousand dollars. It had sounded like an empire when they began eighteen months ago in the small machine shop behind the dry dock in Fell’s Point. It had gone for pure copper from the Lake Superior mines; for gutta-percha imported from Singapore through a merchant in Salem who had cheated them on the tare weight; for three hundredweights of zinc cast into plates by a brass-founder who didn't understand why they had to be free of arsenic; and for the rent of this drafty barn, six miles from the nearest paved street.

Outside, the mist was beginning to lift from the bottoms. The tops of the chestnut trees on the ridge showed yellow against the dull gray sky—the first touch of October, though it was only the third week of September.

A wagon rumbled somewhere out on the turnpike, its iron-shod wheels grunting against the limestone ruts. It would be a market wagon from Westminster, laden with late cabbages, butter tubs covered with wet cabbage leaves, and jars of peach preserves for the Lexington Market. The driver would be sitting on the box with a wool blanket over his knees, half-asleep, letting the horses choose their path through the fog, completely ignorant that forty feet below his wagon tires, through the limestone and the clay, the invisible nervous fluid of the earth was being drawn toward an old stable like water toward a drain.

Thomas returned, his hands black with the tallow he had used to lubricate the wire through the timber.

"The well is connected," he said. "The water level is up three feet since the rain on Sunday. It's as cold as well-water ever gets."

"Did you drop the copper plate to the bottom?"

"It went down sixty-two feet. Hit the silt with a soft chunk. I pulled it back six inches so it hangs clear in the water, just as you said."

Abbott took a deep breath. His nostrils flared, taking in the dust, the cold horse-droppings, the faint metallic sharpness that always seemed to precede the activation of a great circuit.

"Very well," he said. He reached for the wooden spanner that fit the acid carboys. "Get your leather apron, Thomas. And put the grease on your lips. If the fumes catch you this morning, you’ll be spitting blood by sunset, and we have too much talking to do to waste our lungs on coughing."

The boy didn't answer. He reached behind the door for the apron of stiff, oil-cured ox-hide that hung from a rusty harness peg. As he threw it over his neck, his face was pale, his eyes wide and dark in the gathering daylight.

"Do you think it will be a voice?" Thomas asked suddenly, his hands paused on the apron strings behind his back.

"What else would it be?"

"I don't know. A tone. A hiss. The sound of water running through rocks."

"We didn't spend twelve thousand dollars of a Baltimore merchant's money to hear water running through rocks, Thomas. The earth has been listening to men since the first spade went into the ground. It has heard every word spoken into a cellar, every prayer groaned into a ditch, every shout down a mine shaft. It is saturated with human speech. We are simply providing the needle to drop into the groove."

Abbott set the spanner onto the neck of the first carboy. With a sharp, dry crack, the seal of potter's clay gave way. A thin wisp of orange smoke, no thicker than a knitting needle, coiled up into the air of the barn, curling toward the rafter where the swallows sat waiting for the sun.

The ledger lay on the corner of the dry goods chest, bound in sheepskin that had mildewed along the spine until it smelled like a forgotten cellar. It was an ordinary mercantile blank book, ruled in faint blue feint-lines by a stationer on Pratt Street, but within its leaves Samuel Abbott had recorded every grain of zinc, every foot of silk thread, and every shilling advanced by the syndicate of Baltimore gentlemen who now regretted their curiosity.

Abbott wiped his spectacles with a scrap of flannel that left tiny yellow specks of sulfur dust on the lenses. He did not need to open the book to know what the final column contained; the total was burnt into his memory like a maker's mark on an iron kettle. Yet he turned the pages anyway, his thumb leaving a faint gray smudge of graphite on the margin of page forty-four.

The first entries dated back eighteen months to a March afternoon when William Gittings had believed in miracles. There was an item for twenty-four glass carboys from the Cumberland glassworks, listed at twelve dollars each, followed immediately by freight charges on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Then came three gross of porous ceramic cups from Trenton, nine hundred pounds of spelter from New Jersey, and six kegs of commercial sulfuric acid hauled out from the chemical works at Canton. In those days, Gittings had signed the sight drafts with an elegant, flourishing stroke of his quill, convinced that he was buying a mortgage on the future of the continent.

Thomas stood by the open door of the granary, tying the strings of his leather apron with jerky, impatient movements. His fingers were stiff with the early chill, and he kept blowing into his palms to keep the blood moving.

"He will come himself," Thomas said, his voice flat against the hollow background of the barn. "He won't trust the attorney to look at the machinery. A lawyer doesn't know the difference between an induction coil and a sausage stuffer. Gittings will want to see where the twelve thousand went with his own eyes."

"Let him look," Abbott replied, without raising his head from the ledger. "A banker looking at a physical battery sees only stone jars and foul water. He has no organ of sense for potential. He looks at a horse and understands horsepower because he can count the legs and observe the manure. But an electric current has neither legs nor manure, and therefore to Mr. William Gittings it represents an evasion of the laws of banking."

He turned another page. Here were the smaller, more desperate disbursements of the midsummer. Five dollars to a blacksmith in Relay for drawing iron collars to an odd dimension. Two dollars and forty cents to an ostler who had helped them hoist the great secondary bobbin into the rafters when the block and tackle snapped. And then, written in the cramped, defensive script Abbott used when he was ashamed, three entries for household flour, dried beans, and salt herrings from the corner grocery in Calverton.

They had lived off the credit of the apparatus for four months. When the baker asked for coin, Abbott had explained the principles of terrestrial conduction, and the baker had given him two loaves of rye on the condition that Abbott never explain anything to him again.

"He has the sheriff behind him," Thomas noted. He had walked over to the table and was staring down at the columns of numbers as if they were lines of hostile infantry. "The attorney said as much on Friday. If the instruments do not produce an intelligible effect before the banks close at three o'clock, the paper is protested. That means an attachment on the apparatus. They will sell the wire for scrap copper to the brass foundry in Fell's Point."

"They will get five cents on the pound," Abbott murmured. "The wire-drawer charged me twenty-two. They'll break the carboys to get the acid out for the tanners, and the Grove cells will end up holding apple butter in some farmer's pantry. It is the natural tendency of natural philosophy in America: everything returns to the kitchen or the scrap yard."

He picked up an ink horn and a steel pen whose nib was encrusted with dried iron-gall ink. Beside the entry for thirty-six rolls of cotton ribbon, he made a small cross. That ribbon was now buried under eight inches of wet soil between the north sill and the old well, already soaking up the red clay water that would ruin it for any Christian dressmaker forever.

"We have sixty-four dollars left in the Lancaster account," Thomas said softly. "My father sent it before the tanyard went under the hammer. He thought I was using it to pay for board at the academy in Catonsville."

Abbott closed the sheepskin cover with a solid, leathery slap that sent a pair of barn spiders scuttling up the rough siding. "Your father is an honest man who makes leather for honest men’s boots. We will not spend his sixty-four dollars on sulfuric acid. If we fail by three o'clock, you will take that money, buy a ticket on the accommodation train to Harrisburg, and tell your mother that natural philosophy is a disease that only attacks men who have too much leisure and not enough hay to harvest."

"And you?"

"I have no mother in Lancaster," Abbott said. He set the ledger back into the dry goods chest and pushed the wooden latch down with his thumb. "And Mr. Gittings knows precisely where to find me. A man who owes twelve thousand dollars cannot run away on foot; he is anchored to the earth by his paper. The sheriff will find me sitting on this salt-pork barrel, reading the Philosophical Magazine, and he will be very welcome to the furniture."

He stood up, tall and slightly stooped, his long arms hanging loosely from shoulders that had spent too many years bent over workbenches. The light was growing stronger now, revealing the full extent of the poverty that surrounded their magnificent enterprise. The hemlock planks of the work table were stained with dark circular rings where beakers of copper sulfate had boiled over during the hot days of August. In the corner, beside a stack of old agricultural journals, lay their two blankets, gray with dust and stiffened by the damp night air. A three-legged iron spider held the remnants of yesterday's hominy, cold and yellowed like tallow.

Yet on the long bench that ran parallel to the threshing floor, the apparatus gleamed with the terrible, costly perfection that only real money could purchase. The brass was English, turned on the finest sliding-rest lathes in Manchester; the hard rubber was vulcanized under Goodyear’s own patent, black and smooth as polished jet; and the two hundred pounds of mercury in the stoneware jug had been refined three times through chamois leather until it reflected the timbered ceiling without a single flaw.

"It is all there," Abbott said, his voice dropping into that strange, dry tenderness he reserved for inanimate matter. "Every dollar Gittings ever skimmed from the flour trade or shaved off a bill of exchange. He thinks he has lost it, but he hasn't. It has merely changed its state. It was cotton and pork when he held it; now it is potential and capacity. A very superior form of property, if he had the sense to see it."

"He cannot spend an induction coil at the card table," Thomas remarked.

"A limitation of the card table, not of the coil," Abbott snapped. He reached into his coat and produced a small pair of iron-framed spectacles, swapping them for the broad lenses he used for reading. "Enough of the ledger. Bookkeeping is an exercise for clerks who lack the courage to look at the universe without a column of double entries to protect them. Bring the zincs out of the sawdust."

Thomas went to the rear of the barn, where four wooden crates lay half-buried in dry pine shavings. The plates were heavy—three-eighths of an inch thick, cast with lugs at the corners to fit the grooved porcelain supports. As he lifted them, the dull, greasy gray of the metal caught the morning light. They were clean, scraped with steel wool until the oxide was gone, but they were monstrously heavy, and each lift made his boots creak on the dry threshing floor.

"How many hours will they give us?" Thomas asked, setting an armload of eight plates onto the edge of the battery trough.

"If the acid is four parts water to one of oil of vitriol, they will hold their face for five hours before the hydrogen begins to blanket the surfaces. If we crowd them with the strong fuming acid from the carboys, we may get two hours of immense force, and then nothing but froth and boiled salt. We must be economical with our destruction, Thomas. Like an army that has only fifty rounds of ball cartridge, we cannot afford to shoot at crows."

Abbott walked along the line of forty-eight cells, his fingers trailing along the earthenware rims. Each cell was a little world of latent violence. On one side stood the heavy amalgamated zinc, hungry for the acid that would dissolve it into liquid salt; on the other, the thin, costly leaf of platinum foil, waiting to receive the liberated charge without yielding an atom of its own substance to the fury of the bath. Between them, only an inch of empty air and the silence of the barn.

"When Gittings gave us the first installment," Thomas said, his hands deep in the pine shavings as he fished for the smaller connectors, "he said he wanted to be able to talk to his factor in New Orleans before the cotton market opened at ten. He thought we could just run a wire down the Mississippi and shout through it."

"He is a fool," said Abbott. "The Mississippi is full of mud, snags, and catfish. A current would no more follow the water of the Mississippi to New Orleans than a hound would follow a trail through a lime kiln. The earth is not a wire, Thomas. A wire is a prison for the fluid; it forces it into a single line, like a canal. The earth is an ocean. When you put a charge into the crust at this spot, it does not travel toward New Orleans like a messenger boy with a carpetbag. It expands as a sphere. It goes through the granite beneath us, it goes through the water-bearing sands under the bay, it goes through the roots of the pines on the mountains, all at the same instant, growing thinner and thinner until it is no thicker than a single thought in a lunatic’s head."

"And that is what we are to catch?"

"That is what we are catching," Abbott said, nodding toward the bell glass on the table.

The needle had moved again. It had not swung; it had tilted slightly on its agate cup, as if an invisible breath had pressed against the north-seeking point. It was an impossible movement for an ordinary magnetic instrument, which should have been dead to anything except the iron of the sledgehammer or the great ironstone deposits three miles north on the ridge.

"It is seven o'clock," Thomas said, looking through the pine slats toward the turnpike. The mist was almost gone now, burnt off by a flat, yellow sun that offered no warmth to the red clay yard. "The market wagons have all passed. If the bailiff comes, he’ll come by the nine o’clock stage as far as the toll-gate, then hire a livery horse from Miller’s."

"Then we have two hours before the law discovers what we are about," Abbott said. He picked up the heavy stoneware pitcher they used for transferring the acid. "Go to the carboys, Thomas. Don't drop the stoppers in the dirt; a grain of loam in the Grove cell is like an ember in a powder magazine. And keep your face to the windward. If you take a full lung of the red gas, you’ll never live to see whether Mr. Gittings gets his twelve thousand dollars back or not."

Thomas didn't answer. He turned to the line of jars, his jaw set, his young face hardened by the knowledge that outside this timber shell lay a world of ledgers, sheriff's sales, and angry fathers, while inside was only the cold iron, the red copper, and the vast, dumb belly of the earth waiting to be struck.