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 . . .
The trials and tribulations of the arrival of the Modern Age to a small community fill this entertaining novel by humorist Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902).
