Page 33 - 1926 Gleaner

THE GLEANER
heard it. Then the music stopped and a hard, nasal, yankee voic~ enlightened them.
"This is station KDKA at East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."
They listened through- the evening at different concerts, mostly broadcasted by American stations. Finally about 12 o'clock they all went to bed. Gerry, however, had another plan. He lay in bed until about 2 o'clock when he knew all the family to be asleep. Then he wrapp·ed a dressing gown about him and crept silently downstairs to the corner of the room where the radio was.
He turned it on and tuned carefully, but nothing was forth- coming. For a.bout ten minutes he tried and was just going to give up in disgust when a voice came clear from rather far- away. At :first Gerry could not make head or tail of what he was saying, but it gradually resolved itself into:
Down by the Eagle Cove,
To-morrow as the clock midnight goes, Three men stand three lights burn;
As a ship is about to turn."
Gerry had just about decided that it was a bedtime story from Brazil when the voice stopped. Although he listened for fully :fifteen minutes afterwards, Gerry heard nothing else. So he went to bed and after much tossing finally fell asleep.
In the morning he could not contain himself so he went to his father and told him that he had been un at 2 o'clock in the morning and what he had heard. His father scolded him, of course, but not too severely as he understood how Gerry must have felt.
Gerry fell to repeating the verse in school and he certainly was stupid that morning. At noon he rushed up to his father and told him what he had been thinking. Now, the town in which the Honeyfords lived, Cathing by name, is situated in Canada on the border of the U. S. A., along the Detroit River. Smuggling, Qf course, goes on apace across this river and it is an extreme- ly difficult problem to stop it. The river at this point has numer- ous curves and consequently many sheltered coves. These afford perfect protection as you may imagine. Now, Gerry's idea was this, that smugglers on the other side of the river were broad- casting their plans by rhyme on the radio early in the morning so that, if anyone happened to be listening in at that hour, they would not be able to make anything of it. As it was it was very unlikely that anyone would be listening in at 2 a.m. within the small area that a low power station would cover. Besides Eagle's Cove is the name of a particularly well sheltered cove near Cathing.
Mr. Honeyford laughed at Gerry at first, then began to think it over. That afternoon while Gerry was at school Mr.
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