Kate is helping organize a company that hopes to bring telegraph lines into this part of the woods for the first time; but as Treasurer and Secretary, it seems nothing is going as smoothly as it looked from the outset. For some of the other Directors, just waiting for the equipment is trial enough. The Crooked Creek Telegraph Company really starts rolling once the equipment arrives -- instruments and batteries, and everything else needed for their effort, all packed up in boxes and arriving by night train. And now there are poles to cut and trim, paths for the wires to clear -- and then the setting of the insulators high up on the poles -- and the stringing of the wires . . .

Author Biography

Frank Richard Stockton (1834 - 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing common to children's stories of the time. Instead, he humorously poked fun at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" (1885) and "The Bee-Man of Orn" (1887). These last two stories were republished in 1963 and 1964, respectively, in editions illustrated by Maurice Sendak. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963. His 1895 adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Horn was the third-best selling book in the United States in 1895.