Tales of Old Brigands Key Read Online Free

to
come, and insider talk was that FDR was going to nationalize all the
lighthouses and turn ' em over to the goddamn Coast
Guard.
    What
then? McConklin saw no way them military boys would
let him keep his job.
    He
eyed the transformer housing. Where was Roy and all his training now?
    Mary
Shelley meowed and watched him curiously.
    "Shut
up." McConklin said.
    For
his six weeks of training, Roy knew bunches of diagrams and whatnot. McConklin had gotten the six-hour training, and that seemed
like plenty. He knew the shutoffs, the shunts, the routine maintenance, which said basically, "call an expert." That was
an insult to a man who'd kept the beacon on without fail for three decades.
    The
transformer was a hulk of steel, bolted to a concrete floor. McConklin held up his light, inspecting it. In his
training, they'd hauled out one that had blown, a blackened, smelly wreck. This
one was as slick as the day it was installed. Not a whiff of burned wires and
insulation. He looked at the row of arrestors, three glass mushrooms attached
to a beam alongside the transformer. Pretty little things, kind of like
miniatures of the Fresnel lens up top in the lighthouse. They were supposed to
protect the transformer from power surges, like if lightning struck the lines
somewhere. They'd explode if that happened, but they were intact and shiny.
    So
the town lights were on, the arrestors looked good, and the transformer, too.
That meant the problem was in the line between the transformer and the lantern
room.
    This
electric stuff wasn't so danged hard.
    He
checked the conduit out from the transformer, and went outside the shed. He
followed the conduit to the base of the lighthouse, where it disappeared into a
hole that'd been drilled just for this purpose. Chest-high above it was another
steel housing box, the shutoff for the lighthouse. He opened the door with a
squeak, checked it, and shoved the heavy switch lever to the off position. If
the power came back, he'd be safe.
    He
went to the lighthouse door, unlocked it, pulled it
open with a metal groan. He held up his lantern and located the conduit again
on the inside. He began ascending the spiral ladder, holding aloft the lamp and
checking the conduit as best he could.
    Minutes
later, huffing just a bit, he reached the lantern room. The conduit and cable
running up the lighthouse shaft had been intact the whole way, as far as he
could tell.
    The
beautiful old Fresnel lens, the finest in all the Southeast, sat there
motionless, useless. Since the upgrade, he couldn't even manually add a lamp to
it.
    He
opened the outer glass door to the encircling catwalk and stepped through. He
hung his lighted kerosene lamp on the railing and fixed it there with a few
twists of baling wire. He lit the two remaining lamps and attached them
similarly to the railing, spaced equidistantly around the catwalk. He turned
the wicks bright as they would go, and studied them for a moment. They were
pitiful excuses for a beacon, but they'd have to do until power came back on.
    He
leaned gently against the glass panes and stared out to sea, watching for
boats. He figured that was all he could do. If there weren't no electricity,
there weren't nothing else for it.
    His
thoughts returned to Roy, and that damn girl that lured him away. What was her
name? Melissa? Little pie-faced Melissa. A life wrecker, that one, like his own wife, Georgette, had been. Georgette had left them all, left
the boys when they were little, on account of the fights and the discipline.
    You
couldn't warn a boy about a girl when his pecker was doing all the thinking.
When Melissa tried to talk Roy into leaving, McConklin got after her and told the little conniver to stay away, to mind her own
business, to sink her claws into someone as trashy as herself. She left in
tears, and told Roy all about it, tarting up the
facts. She left town, which was what he'd hoped, but with an unplanned side
effect; Roy left a week later.
    McConklin reentered