Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/695

1913.] thieves had whipped up their horses and disappeared down the road, A quarter of an hour later, the other police arrived, gathered up the wounded, and helped to restore Cy Hummer to his senses. Poor Cy was astonished to find that his only injury was a wounded trouser-leg.”

“But did n’t the police head off the thieves?” I asked.

“No, and I don’t quite understand it. ‘They did n’t follow the telephone-line out of town, but took another road, and then when they heard the shooting, they struck back into the meadow road, but from the Kearney end. However, we are on the track of the men now. We offered a reward at once, and only the other day a farmer reported to the Jersey City police that his neighbor's boys came in just before daybreak on the morning of the shooting with the horses all covered with perspiration, and they had two shot-guns with them. There was a man with them as well, who had a rifle, and, from the description, we have just about identified him as a lineman we ‘fired’ two years ago, We ‘ll have them before long, and send them up the river for a term. They won’t be the first, either. Those chaps have learned that it ’s dangerous to meddle with our lines. They are sure to be caught sooner or later. The same with our prepay stations. We used to have the cash-boxes tabbed every once in a while, until we began putting in automatic alarms, Then we caught so many of the thieves that they soon gave up that kind of work as unprofitable. Some of the tricks they played were mighty ingenious.”

We were anticipating another interesting story, when our new acquaintance suddenly looked at his watch.

“Great Scott! Lunch-time ’s almost up!” he exclaimed, “I ‘ll have to chase out of here. Say, if you want to know something about telephoning, come around to my office, But don’t turn up for a few days, until we get this mess of wiring all straightened out,” he said, handing us his card.

Will and I had a long argument as to how many days “a few” meant, Finally, we decided that it could not be less than three, and so, on the third day, we boldly invaded Mr, Burt’s office.

“Glad to see you, boys!” he said cordially. “I ‘m going to take you around myself, The best place to start in is at the bottom.” Mr, Burt led us out to the elevator. We stopped off at the ground floor, and went down a flight of stairs to the basement, and into the cable vault. There was nothing to see here but forty or fifty lead-covered cables.

“This is where the cables come in from the street,” explained Mr. Burt, “and run to the boards up-stairs. There are hundred pairs of wires in each cable, and they are just humming with talk.”

“What, those silent cables!” I ejaculated. It seemed absurd. The stillness in that vault was almost oppressive when its echoes were not disturbed by our voices and the scraping of our feet on the concrete floor.

“Yes, they are just throbbing with life, hundreds, even thousands, all talking at once. You know we Americans do more ‘phoning than any other people on earth, Why, last year, we held fourteen and a half billion conversations, and that is two thirds of the telephone talks of the whole world. A pretty big share of those conversations took place right here in New York. There are twice as many telephones in this city as in all of, and nearly as many as in the whole of. There is a phone in this country for every twelve people. If only your cars were electrical, and you could hear all the electrical vibrations passing through those cables,