White Lightning

An auburn-haired boy of twelve stood looking in at the door of a blacksmith shop and wondering why the smith sprinkled water on the fire. He stood with two girls and had an arm...

Three years passed, and Marvin was in the high school without having blown his eyes out. He was distinctly tamer now, though still afflicted with excess of leisure because his m...

He had chosen Yale in the hope of sometime studying under Boltwood, the chemist who first perceived that the metal radium slowly changes into lead. As a mere freshman he present...

When he went to Boltwood to inquire further about Moseley, he was heartily received. The discoverer of ionium even admitted that it might be possible some day to unlock the ener...

The great factory to which Jimmy had been invited lies to the west of Chicago, and at sunset its multitudinous windows make it look like a low long crystal, flaming.

At commencement time Marvin’s father happened to be in South America, but his mother came on to New Haven, where she met not only Mrs. Hogg and Jimmy, but also Gratia. Her son s...

When Dr. Rich had broken his news to his wife, they both breathed easier. And Mrs. Rich could feel still more relief coming. She had said nothing about her occasional shortness...

Marvin finally accepted Grein’s invitation and abandoned the study of fuels. He was getting nervous about the achievements of German chemists. Those laborious beasts, themselves...

The Riches began the winter cozily, in blissful lack of chemical consciousness. It would not greatly have interested Dr. Rich to be told that his teeth contained fluorine, or th...

April came, and though snow still covered most of the soil, the air smelled sweeter. And the noble gas, neon, discovered in the year of Jean’s birth, stood apart in the air and...

Down by the salt sea Marvin was resuming his drives. He talked to Gratia about the war, and found her agreeing with him. He expressed his conviction that America ought to go in....

If ever a girl had need of courage, it was Jean during the spring of 1916, for her father sat by the hour staring at that old haircloth sofa, and sometimes at a tiny gunboat mad...

About the time that Jean began to worry concerning population, Marvin was preparing to reduce the population of Germany. He handed in his notes on lead, sold his car, went home,...

Jean had not received any journals about lead, but she knew the look and feel of silica. And she knew that the surface of her star was mostly like that of her island—very hard s...

The last day of 1917 came, but she did not attend the grange party to see the old year out. At nine o’clock she lighted her candle, wished daddy a happy New Year, and went to bed.

On that same first day of 1918, Lieutenant Mahan was commanding a machine gun company composed of men chosen by himself. Down in Carolina he had picked them for their sinews and...

Captain, lieutenant, and guide slipped out of camp and struck into the road that leads northward along the brook. The high ground to the right was dim with yesterday’s smoke. A...

Having determined to be an old maid, Jean worked at it as hard as she knew how. All the conditions were favorable. She came of the oldest New England stock, and nobody can deny...

Marvin lay in the hospital, trying to realize what had happened to him. Never again could he hope to stir a solution with one hand while he regulated a stopcock with the other....

Fully prepared to take his medicine, Marvin escaped from the hospital and took account of stock. Somewhere near Mezy his good left hand was depositing its calcium, or was at lea...

Late in May, having landed in New York and been granted a month’s leave, he went on Sunday morning to call on Dr. Grein. The landlady said the gentleman was not in, that he had...

A morning or two later the shadow called Marvin reached Chicago. Millions remember how it was in their own homes. Sometimes the whole boy came, sometimes only his shadow, someti...

Having accepted this commission from a sense of his general uselessness, the mutilated man said good-night and went to his room. How carefully comfortable it had been made by lo...

Kate looked at them and did not quite believe it. This was just their merry way of putting off their marriage until Marvin had established himself, so as not to be dependent on...

Next evening, having been invited to come to dinner and bring some blueprints, Jimmy Hogg quietly expressed his deep delight at his chum’s safe return. Three years had confirmed...

Our hero collected a light camping outfit and loitered in town till he was mustered out. His release came on the last day of June, just after the death of the aged Lord Rayleigh...

He lifted his eyes and gazed on the Laurentians. Pencils of incandescence swept across them, whitening their tender purple and then fading, a sight to thrill the heart. Sometime...

He emerged in a rushy bay where a dory lay tied to a pier of two planks. Beside it the water rippled with the fins of a string of fish. Doubtless the light-keeper was on the isl...

She made no reply. Overhead the turbulent updrafts fiercely united the drops of rain, disrupted them, reunited them and again disrupted them, and let them fall with heavy positi...

When he looked back to find his new acquaintance, her faithful wilderness had swallowed her up. Only the veery’s song, farther away and fainter; only the aeolian tones about him...

Next he considered where he should camp. Not on this island, which though dry enough was low and bushy. The Duckling was the proper place. So he plunged into the dripping osiers...

He would certainly accept the challenge, but first he must try to make himself presentable. He shaved. He washed his hand as well as he could, though he could not remove quite a...

They had not gone a hundred feet when Marvin thought he heard a bar of sacred music floating out of space. It was a man’s voice, and the words were faint, but they sounded like...

They walked on down, and Marvin drew deep breaths of relief and satisfaction. No matter how difficult the future, he had thus far met only sweet reasonableness. The nature of th...

“If I am to be infinitely honest, I must begin by inquiring whether I have enough money to settle my dinner check. Were those the berries he picked this morning?”

He found his cap and went out on the porch, taking care that the screen door should not slam. But instead of obeying orders, he sat down and enjoyed the landscape.

The tent was pitched, and dusk began to settle. The thrushes were filling the cathedral with chimes, and the windows began to glow. He felt like a vandal. The owner of this sacr...

The happy youth rowed off to his own hired island and for a time sat watching the port lights coming up the river, red as a nitrate of the thirty-eighth element. Then he went to...

After breakfast he made no delay, for he wished to catch that bass. First he took a good look at his island to see where she kept her private ice-box. On the west it was full of...

Over the savory chowder Marvin was saucily told that since he seemed to be so deeply interested in food he should have a hot beefsteak for his supper. He replied that he would e...

Meantime Jean and her father were spending their four precious hours on Bay-quah-de-nah-shing. They drove from one point to another through the hardwood and the clearings, now s...

Having caught a pike and skinned it, Marvin carried the pearly residue up to Miss Mabel. Then he lingered a little with the old gunsmith, talking about guns and the new alloys o...

He lacked the courage to ask her to marry him and then to sell him her silica. No matter how cautiously he might state the case, it would look like bribing her.

I, Marvin Mahan, being of sound mind on most subjects, though somewhat given to dreaming on atoms, do make and declare this my last will and testament, in manner following, that...

Then the silence was broken by the rustling of squirrels. These were chemical machines that captured energy, stored it, transformed it, and dissipated it. They had eight or nine...

Next morning after breakfast the doctor went off to his garden, and Marvin sat down on the porch to wait till something should bring her out there. In an hour she emerged, beari...

That is to say, he had gone down to the boathouse and embarked in his skiff. He had no notion of leaving the north country, but was willing to pull up stakes and proceed a few m...

Jean was left forlorn. While Agricola crowded close to her in silent sympathy, she had watched the Kittiwake fade into a mere silver tern, and felt that this was the end of ever...

“Suppose voyageur come to Keego on snow-shoes, 1832. He see hole in ice and red on ice and know it good place to fish. He walk up bank and see woodpile and two three barrel salt...

So they crept into the harbor and thence into the tent. The doctor stripped to the skin, nibbed his wiry old muscles dry, and suspended his dripping weeds, uttering an appropria...

As the doctor was about to leave the island he heard a distant bark, and saw Agricola emerge from the cedars and come tearing down to the boat-house. The dog caught sight of him...

The chemist reached Ojeeg’s landing supposing that the chieftain’s estate extended to the shore. It had, originally, but most of it had vanished down a throat. Just now however...

Marvin embarked and departed. He did not understand such references as “chigomee,” which was Ojeeg’s abbreviation of Gitchie Goomee, Lake Superior. Long before Ojeeg’s ancestors...

Marvin was overjoyed when his love consented to return with him. She even made no objection when he slipped round the head of Bay-quah-de-nah-shing and headed south in Huron, an...

Far below him the alders parted, and a woman’s form appeared, with a basket on her arm. The light was dim, but not too dim to reveal the woman’s autumnal vigor. She mounted slow...

Naturally the thwarted man’s first days at sea were passed in heavy mood, but nothing could alter his determination to win her sooner or later. And nothing could deprive him of...

Once on shore at Southampton he secured telephonic communication with the baron’s secretary. He was informed that he could be received in about three hours, which would give his...

The old man lay back and rested, closing his eyes. Sir Clifford rose and showed Marvin to his lordship’s dressing room. When the guest emerged spruced up a bit, and was standing...

As Ambrose Rich had found his son again in an Indian boy, so the baron seemed to have found again his own grandson. As twin elements of a rare earth are almost inseparable, so a...

About a week after Marvin’s departure the mail brought the Riches four envelopes. One contained the deed for Keego, properly made out and ready for signing, another the wonderfu...

But of Indian graves who can say anything worth hearing? The undiscovered sixty-first element is known to be a rare-earth metal, but wisdom in dealing with backward races is rar...

At supper, as Dr. Rich meditatively shook a few drops of canned milk into his tea, he remarked, “We have seen a great sight this day. A hunter has become a farmer, and is less l...

But after the bright bevy had clustered around him, an older woman approached. Her severe little bonnet was black above hair almost as snowy as his, and the girls made way for her.

When the Riches were nearing home on the afternoon mail tug, they found the river covered with dense smoke. There was evidently a forest fire not far away in the west, but as th...

As he paced the deck on the return voyage, Marvin came again to the conclusion that he had been refused because Jean was unwilling to leave her father. She was unwilling even to...

Marvin tripped to the station and took the two o’clock train. He was almost as excited as if he were an alchemist beholding the actual projection of gold. Release two charges of...

“You may. I think I’m going to get a pretty able son-in-law. It may interest you to know that she accepted him as Hogg, but that ain’t his real name. It seems he’s a Huguenot. I...

They left the steamer at Encampment, but were delayed there for a long time, being unable to hire a skiff. About five o’clock however the Black Hawk returned from Canada in his...

The last few hours had been full of surprises to Asher Ferry, but he had adjusted himself to them with the promptness that made him what he was, a great manufacturer.

“So you did, and nothing could have been sweeter than the manner of it, but your conscience was not satisfied. It seems to me that it ought to be satisfied, for Asher Ferry inte...

“I’ve got it, but she declares that she will never marry my son. She requests him not to return to this place before August, 1922, when she will be glad to see him and his bride.”

The last thing that young Moseley did before enlisting was to puzzle his wits over the missing seventy-second element. Not until January of 1923 did chemists following his metho...

The departure of the rich left the Riches as poor as ever, but as a result of the eastern trip the sale of the text-books increased a little, and furthermore the doctor earned a...

Far away her lost lover was deep in the study of carbon—so she thought. That must be an awfully difficult subject, and she must begin with something easier. She plunged into oxy...

January of 1920 came, and the river was frozen over. The flowing oxygen was solid enough for men and horses to walk on. There they went in beaten paths, warm water trudging alon...

During the winter nights she slept long. When she dreamed, which was not often, it was always a happy dream. Mother was alive again and taking all the responsibilities, or Horat...

For that matter, everything was wedded to something else. All the noble metals seemed to happen together. The osmium and iridium in the tip of her fountain pen were so much alik...

That summer she was a good deal saddened by the news from Russia. In the broad valley of the Volga, already ravaged by the passions of armies, no spring showers had coaxed the w...

A year had passed, and still no word from Marvin. Evidently he had not yet gone back to the wonderful Gratia with the hair like spun gold and the eyes like gentians by the river...

And then, as the autumnal days grew lovelier, she could not help shifting the emphasis from the horror to the beauty. It seemed to her that she had never seen colors till now. N...

It was such a note as might have been written to a girl disappointed in love, but Jean felt sure that it was no such thing. Marvin loved her still, and his mother knew it and wa...

Almost, but not quite. Lightning still escaped from earth in the form called life. Wherever there was water, it stole forth as liquid voltaic cells. It was balanced and bottled...

Her twenty-third birthday came, and with it a letter from Mrs. Hogg, who evidently wished to know when she would have to furnish that trousseau, though she did not say so in exa...

That conclusion was her first sign of yielding, and it was not much of a sign. But when in December she came to think about polonium, her determination was almost shaken. Poloni...

The spring months of 1922 were the perfection of growing weather, and Jean rejoiced for the farmers, but elsewhere on her planet there was plenty of trouble to keep her determin...

As July sped along she realized that she must balance her accounts, for Marvin would surely come. She was going to refuse him because life is explosive; because the struggle for...

When August came and she knew that any day might bring the test, she felt her courage ebbing just a little. As a panting man longs for more alkali in his blood, so she longed fo...

But in spite of it all, her sense of pity seemed to be going. When the twenty-third came, and she read that another gallant young leader had been assassinated, she could not mou...

On the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-seventh, she restlessly rowed round into the creek after white lilies. She gathered a score. Then, as she leaned from the dory and dipped...

She dropped the two animals back into the water and began to row homeward through the hush of the Sunday afternoon, her bashfulness returning. She could not understand why, havi...

The mysterious news was wonderful! Men of science would come and live near her—perhaps in the woods across the creek. But her chief perplexity as she washed the dishes was wheth...

The next morning the sun rose with a halo cast by prisms of ice in the upper air, and presently a strong west wind sprang up. Jean calculated that it would increase all the morn...