"Go up," Larrabee said.
Ganz strapped the climbers on with his fingers shaking, and went up the pole in a series of short hard kicks, the gaffs biting in beside the old marks, and at the top he hung back in his belt with the moon behind him and his breath going up in a thin plume, and Larrabee heard him say something in German, very quietly, and then in English, "Oh, that's clever. Oh, that's a dirty clever thing."
"What is it?"
"It's cut, sir. Right by the insulator, where you'd never see. They cut it clean and tied the two ends to a piece of wet rawhide, tight, so the wire still hangs, and then wrapped the whole thing in tarred tape like a regular joint. You could come up the pole and look at it and think it was an old splice. The rawhide dries hard and holds like iron. But the current won't go through it." He was working as he talked. "The Sioux used to do it on the Union Pacific, they told us at school. Only this isn't any Sioux. This is Signal Corps tape, sir. I'd know it anywhere."
"Can you mend it?"
"Give me ten minutes."
It took him twelve. Larrabee stood at the foot of the pole holding the horses, with the cold coming up through his boots and the stars wheeling over, and listened to the small sounds from the top: the snap of the pliers, the creak of the belt, the boy's breath, the twang of the wire as he drew it up with the come-along and wrapped it into a Western Union splice, seven turns and seven turns. Then there was a rattle, and Ganz was clipping the leads of his pocket instrument onto the wire, and a small sharp clicking came down out of the sky, faint as a cricket.
"Calling Keogh," Ganz said. Then, after a while: "Keogh answers, sir. Night man. He says where in hell have you been."