Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/693

Rh at a telephone directory, that will give you some idea of the enormous extent of New York's telephone system, Do you know, we print carloads of those directories every year, and, would you believe it, they use up seven tons of ink! Why, you have no idea of what a lot of telephone wires there are buried in these streets. New York is a regular copper-mine, There are over seventeen million pounds of it and forty-four million pounds of lead in our cables.”

“1 suppose it is worth something, too.”

“Well, ] should say so! Something like twelve million dollars, all told.”

“It is lucky you have it all buried underground, for people would he stealing it,” I remarked.

“Unfortunately it is n't all buried. Only our city wires run in conduits, and we have an underground long-distance line running from Boston to Washington. All the rest of our wires are out in the open, and now and then some of the copper is stolen; but that does n’t happen very often now, not since our experience with the wire thieves on the Jersey meadows. I suppose you read about it in the papers.”

We scented a good story, and urged the man to tell us all about it, which he did very willingly.

“Well, it was the most exciting time we ever had with wire thieves. ‘Cy’ Hummer earned his money that trip anyway,” he said, laughing heartily. “There had been a gang of thieves at work on that lonesome spot for some time. They had given us a lot of trouble, and we realized that something would have to be done. We knew just about where those fellows were most liable to play their little game, so we fixed up a little game of our own to match theirs. We have a private detective that beats any you ever heard of, and does n’t cost anything like as much. It is an innocent-looking little mahogany box that we put on the line when we suspect trouble. The box contains a telegraph relay, a dry-battery cell, and an electric bell, We ran a current of electricity from Newark over one of our bare copper wires to this detector, which was placed in Jersey City. Then we knew that, if the wire was cut, or if any other wire crossed it, or if there was any meddling whatever, the alarm would go off in our Jersey City central, and immediately the news would be telephoned to the police at and at. At each place there was an automobile standing ready to make a dash upon the thieves and head them off, no matter in which direction they tried to escape. We had some trouble in getting an automobile at Kearney, but a friend of mine finally located a farmer near by who had an old touring car, 1 went around with him to make the bargain. Cy Hummer, his namewas, and he was a typical hayseed, a long, lanky fellow, chewing a straw when I saw him, just the kind of a chap that you see in the comic papers, but the queerest combination of nerve and timidity I ever ran up against. I did n’t believe that he could ran a car until he took us out for a spin. Well, sir, the way he sent us around corners on two wheels, shot into town, dodged around the traffic, and then raced back to the farm at a fifty-