“Just look at that old Sickle Face, Cartoon!” laughed Una. “He thinks he’s a racehorse, a fast ‘darb’, as the caretaker, the farmer in charge of the horse-farm, says. But—but Revelation beats him to the fence—every time.”
“And the dear colts, all eyes,” murmured Lura. “The little, fluffy babies that run under their mothers; and the older ones, Blue Boy, Big Eyes, that kick so high; think they can kick—the—sky; don’t they?”
“Well! if we haven’t kicked the sky this morning, we’ve come pretty near it.” Dorothy’s chin was thrust out freakishly. “We will, when we really inhabit the shack corner—send out messages for ourselves and receive them. Oh! if we could only have a private code, like the Scout troops, some of them.”
“When you make your own of the ‘crutch’, then you can make it over.” Pemrose was fingering a code card. “Dot an’ dash—the crutch! The universal language! It requires ‘pep’ to handle it—the crutch.” Her blue eyes flashed. “Father made my radio ring as a prize for being able to tick off code calls and pick them up. He said that if I didn’t work hard at a discovery, to understand—and use it to the full—I was just a frothing-stick, whipping the cream that somebody else had made.” The girl’s eyebrows went up in laughter.
“And as none of us want to be that, I ordain a code lesson for this morning, instead of first aid or handcraft,” said the Guardian.
“We might have a private _sign_ of our own to begin a message with, anyway.” Pemrose was ticking off that signal, five minutes later, pressing the little lever that wagged the tongue of the “buzzer”, just an ordinary electric doorbell, with a little dry-cell battery attached, upon the camp table.
“How would this do? Six dots, four dashes, for our Group sign. And—and we might add to the ordinary radio abbreviations a few of our own: that mountain off there—” the blue eyes gazed remotely through the window—“Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, as we call it, would be ‘L. B.’ if we were sending a message dot an’ dash. Little Speckle—Little Sister would be ‘L. S.’ Oh! we may work out the whole private code in time ... then where will boy amateurs be?”
“We’ll have beaten them, to a frazzle,” purred Dorothy. “At least, they won’t be ahead. With the help of Cannie Nanny we’ll do it—this droning bumble-bee.”