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+Project Gutenberg's The Campfire Girls of Roselawn, by Margaret Penrose
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Campfire Girls of Roselawn
+       A Strange Message from the Air
+
+Author: Margaret Penrose
+
+Release Date: March 30, 2009 [EBook #28448]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMPFIRE GIRLS OF ROSELAWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMPFIRE GIRLS OF ROSELAWN
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+CAMPFIRE GIRLS
+
+OF ROSELAWN
+
+OR
+
+A STRANGE MESSAGE
+
+FROM THE AIR
+
+BY MARGARET PENROSE
+
+NEW YORK
+
+THE GOLDSMITH PUBLISHING CO
+
+PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+Copyright
+
+By
+
+The Goldsmith Publishing Co.
+
+Printed in U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ CHAPTER                                                          PAGE
+      I. They Hear a Voice                                           1
+     II. A Road Mystery                                             11
+    III. Interest in Radio Spreads                                  19
+     IV. Stringing the Aerials                                      29
+      V. The Freckle-Faced Girl                                     39
+     VI. Something Coming                                           49
+    VII. The Canoe Trip                                             57
+   VIII. Carter's Ghost                                             66
+     IX. Henrietta Is Valiant                                       75
+      X. The Prize Idea                                             82
+     XI. Belle Ringold                                              89
+    XII. The Glorious Fourth                                        96
+   XIII. The Bazaar                                                106
+    XIV. Jealousy                                                  113
+     XV. Can It Be Possible?                                       120
+    XVI. Spotted Snake, the Witch                                  127
+   XVII. Broadcasting                                              134
+  XVIII. A Mystery of the Ether                                    143
+    XIX. A Puzzling Circumstance                                   149
+     XX. Something Doing at the Stanleys'                          156
+    XXI. A Great To-Do                                             163
+   XXII. Silk!                                                     170
+  XXIII. Darry's Big Idea                                          178
+   XXIV. A Radio Trick                                             187
+    XXV. Just in Time                                              193
+
+
+
+
+THEY HEAR A VOICE
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMPFIRE GIRLS OF ROSELAWN
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THEY HEAR A VOICE
+
+
+"Oh, it's wonderful, Amy! Just wonderful!"
+
+The blonde girl in the porch swing looked up with shining eyes and
+flushed face from her magazine to look at the dark girl who swung
+composedly in a rocking chair, her nimble fingers busy with the
+knitting of a shoulder scarf. The dark girl bobbed her head in
+agreement.
+
+"So's the Sphinx, but it's awfully out of date, Jess."
+
+Jessie Norwood looked offended. "Did I ever bring to your attention,
+Miss Drew----"
+
+"Why don't you say 'drew' to my attention?" murmured the other girl.
+
+"Because I perfectly loathe puns," declared Jessie, with energy.
+
+"Good! Miss Seymour's favorite pupil. Go on about the wonder beast,
+Jess."
+
+"It is no beast, I'd have you understand. And it is right up to
+date--the very newest thing."
+
+"My dear Jessie," urged her chum, gayly, "you have tickled my
+curiosity until it positively wriggles! What is the wonder?"
+
+"Radio!"
+
+"Oh! Wireless?"
+
+"Wireless telephone. Everybody is having one."
+
+"Grandma used to prescribe sulphur and molasses for that."
+
+"Do be sensible for once, Amy Drew. You and Darry----"
+
+"That reminds me. Darry knows all about it."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"The radio telephone business. You know he was eighteen months on a
+destroyer in the war, even if he was only a kid. You know," and Amy
+giggled, "he says that if women's ages are always elastic, it was no
+crime for him to stretch his age when he enlisted. Anyhow, he knows
+all about the 'listening boxes' down in the hold. And that is all this
+radio is."
+
+"Oh, but Amy!" cried Jessie, with a toss of her blond head, "that is
+old stuff. The radio of to-day is very different--much improved.
+Anybody can have a receiving set and hear the most wonderful things
+out of the air. It has been brought to every home."
+
+"'Have you a little radio in your home?'" chuckled Amy, her fingers
+still flying.
+
+"Dear me, Amy, you are so difficult," sighed her chum.
+
+"Not at all, not at all," replied the other girl. "You can understand
+me, just as e-e-easy! But you know, Jess, I have to act as a brake for
+your exuberance."
+
+"Don't care," declared Jessie. "I'm going to have one."
+
+"If cook isn't looking, bring one for me, too," suggested the
+irrepressible joker.
+
+"I mean to have a radio set," repeated Jessie quite seriously. "It
+says in this magazine article that one can erect the aerials and all,
+oneself. And place the instrument. I am going to do it."
+
+"Sure you can," declared Amy, with confidence. "If you said you could
+rebuild the Alps--and improve on them--I'd root for you, honey."
+
+"I don't want any of your joking," declared Jessie, with emphasis. "I
+am in earnest."
+
+"So am I. About the Alps. Aunt Susan, who went over this year, says
+the traveling there is just as rough as it was before the war. She
+doesn't see that the war did any good. If I were you, Jess, and
+thought of making over the Alps----"
+
+"Now, Amy Drew! Who said anything about the Alps?"
+
+"I did," confessed her chum. "And I was about to suggest that, if you
+tackle the job of rebuilding them, you flatten 'em out a good bit so
+Aunt Susan can get across them easier."
+
+"Amy Drew! Will you ever have sense?"
+
+"What is it, a conundrum? Something about 'Take care of the dollars
+and the cents will take care of themselves?'"
+
+"I am talking about installing a radio set in our house. And if you
+don't stop funning and help me do it, I won't let you listen in, so
+there!"
+
+"I'll be good," proclaimed Amy at once. "I enjoy gossip just as much
+as the next one. And if you can get it out of the air----"
+
+"It has to be sent from a broadcasting station," announced Jessie.
+
+"There's one right in this town," declared Amy, with vigor.
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes, I tell you. She lives in the second house from the corner of
+Breen Street, the yellow house with green blinds----"
+
+"Now, Amy! Listen here! Never mind local gossips. They only broadcast
+neighborhood news. But we can get concerts and weather reports and
+lectures----"
+
+Amy painfully writhed in her chair at this point. "Say not so, Jess!"
+she begged. "Get lectures enough at school--and from dad, once in a
+while, when the dear thinks I go too far."
+
+"I think you go too far most of the time," declared her chum primly.
+"Nobody else would have the patience with you that I have."
+
+"Except Burd Alling," announced Amy composedly. "He thinks I am all
+right."
+
+"Pooh! Whoever said Burd Alling had good sense?" demanded Jessie. "Now
+listen!" She read a long paragraph from the magazine article. "You
+see, it is the very latest thing to do. Everybody is doing it. And it
+is the most wonderful thing!"
+
+Amy had listened with more seriousness. She could be attentive and
+appreciative if she wished. The paragraph her chum read was
+interesting.
+
+"Go ahead. Read some more," she said. "Is that all sure enough so,
+Jess?"
+
+"Of course it is so. Don't you see it is printed here?"
+
+"You mustn't believe everything you see in print, Jess. My
+grandfather was reported killed in the Civil War, and he came home
+and pointed out several things they had got wrong in the newspaper
+obituary--especially the date of his demise. Now this----"
+
+"I am going to get a book about it, and that will tell us just what to
+do in getting a radio set established."
+
+"I'll tell you the first thing to do," scoffed Amy. "Dig down into
+your pocketbook."
+
+"It won't cost much. But I mean to have a good one."
+
+"All right, dear. I am with you. Never let it be said I deserted Poll.
+What is the first move?"
+
+"Now, let me see," murmured Jessie, staring off across the sunflecked
+lawn.
+
+The Norwood estate was a grand place. The house, with its surrounding
+porches, stood in Roselawn upon a knoll with several acres of sloping
+sod surrounding it and a lovely little lake at the side. There was a
+long rose garden on either side of the house, and groups of summer
+roses in front. Roses, roses, roses, everywhere about the place! The
+Norwoods all loved them.
+
+But there were more roses in this section of the pretty town of New
+Melford, and on that account many inhabitants of the place had gotten
+into the habit of calling the estates bordering the boulevard by the
+name of Roselawn. It was the Roselawn district, for every lawn was
+dotted with roses, red, pink, white, and yellow.
+
+The Norwoods were three. Jessie, we put first because to us she is of
+the most importance, and her father and mother would agree. Being the
+only child, it is true they made much of her. But Jessie Norwood was
+too sweet to be easily spoiled.
+
+Her father was a lawyer in New York, which was twenty miles from New
+Melford. The Norwoods had some wealth, which was good. They had
+culture, which was better. And they were a very loving and
+companionable trio, which was best.
+
+Across the broad, shaded boulevard was a great, rambling, old house,
+with several broad chimneys. It had once been a better class
+farmstead. Mr. Wilbur Drew, who was likewise a lawyer, had rebuilt and
+added to and improved and otherwise transformed the farmhouse until it
+was an attractive and important-looking dwelling.
+
+In it lived the lawyer and his wife, his daughter, Amy, and Darrington
+Drew, when he was home from college. This was another happy family--in
+a way. Yet they were just a little different from the Norwoods. But
+truly "nice people."
+
+When Amy Drew once gave her mind to a thing she could be earnest
+enough. The little her chum had read her from the magazine article
+began to interest her. Besides, whatever Jessie was engaged in must of
+necessity hold the attention of Amy.
+
+She laid aside the knitting and went to sit beside Jessie in the
+swing. They turned back to the beginning of the article and read it
+through together, their arms wound about each other in immemorial
+schoolgirl fashion.
+
+Of course, as Amy pointed out, they were not exactly schoolgirls now.
+They were out of school--since two days before. The long summer
+vacation was ahead of them. Time might hang idly on their hands. So it
+behooved them to find something absorbing to keep their attention
+keyed up to the proper pitch.
+
+"Tell you what," Amy suggested. "Let's go down town to the bookstore
+and see if they have laid in a stock of this radio stuff. We want one
+or two of the books mentioned here, Jess. We are two awfully smart
+girls, I know; we will both admit it. But some things we have
+positively got to learn."
+
+"Silly," crooned Jessie, patting her chum on the cheek. "Let's go.
+We'll walk. Wait till I run and see if Momsy doesn't want something
+from down town."
+
+"We won't ask Mrs. Drew that question, for she will be pretty sure to
+want a dozen things, and I refuse--positively--to be a dray horse. I
+'have drew' more than my share from the stores already. Cyprian in the
+car can run the dear, forgetful lady's errands."
+
+Jessie scarcely listened to this. She ran in and ran out again. She
+was smiling.
+
+"Momsy says all she wants is two George Washington sundaes, to be
+brought home in two separate parcels, one blonde and one brunette,"
+and she held up half a dollar before Amy's eyes.
+
+"Your mother, as I have always said, Jess, is of the salt of the
+earth. And she is well sugared, too. Let me carry the half dollar,
+honey. You'll swallow it, or lose it, or something. Aren't to be
+trusted yet with money," and Amy marched down the steps in the lead.
+
+She always took the lead, and usually acted as though she were the
+moving spirit of the pair. But, really, Jessie Norwood was the more
+practical, and it was usually her initiative that started the chums on
+a new thing and always her "sticktoitiveness" that carried them
+through to the end.
+
+Bonwit Boulevard, beautifully laid out, shaded with elms, with a grass
+path in the middle, two oiled drives, and with a bridle path on one
+side, was one of the finest highways in the state. At this hour of the
+afternoon, before the return rush of the auto-commuters from the city,
+the road was almost empty.
+
+The chums chatted of many things as they went along. But Jessie came
+back each time to radio. She had been very much interested in the
+wonder of it and in the possibility of rigging the necessary aerials
+and setting up a receiving set at her own house.
+
+"We can get the books to tell us how to do it, and we can buy the wire
+for the antenna to-day," she said.
+
+"'Antenna'! Is it an insect?" demanded Amy. "Sounds crawly."
+
+"Those are the aerials----"
+
+"Listen!" interrupted Amy Drew.
+
+A sound--a shrill and compelling voice--reached their ears. Amy's hand
+clutched at Jessie's arm and held her back. There was nobody in sight,
+and the nearest house was some way back from the road.
+
+"What is it?" murmured Jessie.
+
+"Help! He-e-elp!" repeated the voice, shrilly.
+
+"Radio!" muttered Amy, sepulchrally. "It is a voice out of the air."
+
+There positively was nobody in sight. But Jessie Norwood was
+practical. She knew there was a street branching off the boulevard
+just a little way ahead. Besides, she heard the throbbing of an
+automobile engine.
+
+"Help!" shrieked the unknown once more.
+
+"It is a girl," declared Jessie, beginning to run and half dragging
+Amy Drew with her. "She is in trouble! We must help her!"
+
+
+
+
+A ROAD MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A ROAD MYSTERY
+
+
+Like a great many other beautiful streets, there was a
+poverty-stricken section, if sparsely inhabited, just behind Bonwit
+Boulevard. A group of shacks and squatters' huts down in a grassy
+hollow, with a little brook flowing through it to the lake, and woods
+beyond. It would not have been an unsightly spot if the marks of the
+habitation of poor and careless folk had been wiped away.
+
+But at the moment Jessie Norwood and her chum, Amy Drew, darted around
+from the broad boulevard into the narrow lane that led down to this
+poor hamlet, neither of the girls remembered "Dogtown," as the group
+of huts was locally called. The real estate men who exploited Roselawn
+and Bonwit Boulevard as the most aristocratic suburban section of New
+Melford, never spoke of Dogtown.
+
+"What do you suppose is the matter, Jess?" panted Amy.
+
+"It's a girl in trouble! Look at that!"
+
+The chums did not have to go even as far as the brow of the hill
+overlooking the group of houses before mentioned. The scene of the
+action of this drama was not a hundred yards off the boulevard.
+
+A big touring car stood in the narrow lane, headed toward the broad
+highway from which Jessie and Amy had come. It was a fine car, and the
+engine was running. A very unpleasant looking, narrow-shouldered woman
+sat behind the steering wheel, but was twisted around in her seat so
+that she could look behind her.
+
+In the lane was another woman. Both were expensively dressed, though
+not tastefully; and this second woman was as billowy and as generously
+proportioned as the one behind the wheel was lean. She was red-faced,
+too, and panted from her exertions.
+
+Those exertions, it was evident at once to Jessie and Amy, were
+connected with the capturing and the subsequent restraining of a very
+active and athletic girl of about the age of the chums. She was quite
+as red-faced as the fleshy woman, and she was struggling with all her
+might to get away, while now and then she emitted a shout for help
+that would have brought a crowd in almost no time in any place more
+closely built up.
+
+"Oh! What is the matter?" repeated Amy.
+
+"Bring her along, Martha!" exclaimed the woman already in the
+motor-car. "Here come a couple of rubber-necks."
+
+This expression, to Jessie's mind, marked the driver of the
+automobile for exactly what she was. Nor did the face of the fat woman
+impress the girl as being any more refined.
+
+As for the girl struggling with the second woman--the one called
+"Martha"--she was not very well dressed. But she looked neat and
+clean, and she certainly was determined not to enter the automobile if
+she could help it. Jessie doubted, although she had at first thought
+it possible, if either of these women were related to the girl they
+seemed so determined to capture.
+
+"What are they--road pirates? Kidnapers?" demanded Amy. "What?"
+
+The two chums stopped by the machine. They really did not know what to
+do. Should they help the screaming girl? Or should they aid the fleshy
+woman? It might be that the girl had run away from perfectly good
+guardians. Only, to Jessie's mind, there was something of the
+refinement that pertained to the girl lacking in the appearance of
+these two women. She was not favorably impressed by them.
+
+"What is the matter with the girl?" she asked the woman in the car.
+
+Although she said it politely, the woman flashed her a scowling glance
+and said:
+
+"Mind your own business!"
+
+"My!" gasped Amy at this, her eyes opening very wide.
+
+Jessie was not at all reassured. She turned to the fleshy woman, and
+repeated her question:
+
+"What is the matter with the girl?"
+
+"She's crazy, that's what she is!" cried the woman. "She doesn't know
+what is good for her."
+
+"I'll learn her!" rasped out the driver of the car.
+
+"Don't!" shouted the girl. "Don't let them take me back there----"
+
+Just then the fleshy woman got behind her. She clutched the girl's
+shoulders and drove her harshly toward the car with her whole weight
+behind the writhing girl. The other woman jumped out of the car,
+seized the girl by one arm, and together the women fairly threw their
+captive into the tonneau of the car, where she fell on her hands and
+knees.
+
+"There, spiteful!" gasped the lean woman. "I'll show you!"
+
+She hopped back behind the steering wheel. The fleshy woman climbed
+into the tonneau and held the still shrieking girl. The car started
+with a dash, the door of the tonneau flapping.
+
+"Oh! This isn't right!" gasped Jessie.
+
+"They are running away with her, Jess," murmured Amy. "Isn't it
+exciting?"
+
+"It's mean!" declared her chum with conviction. "How dare they?"
+
+"Why, to look at her, I think that skinny woman would dare anything,"
+remarked Amy. "And--haven't--you seen her before?"
+
+"Never! She doesn't live around here. And that car is strange."
+
+The car had turned into the boulevard and headed out of town. When the
+girls walked back to the broad highway it was out of sight. It was
+being driven with small regard for the speed laws.
+
+"I guess you are right," reflected Amy. "I never saw that car before.
+It is a French car. But the woman's face----"
+
+"There was enough of that to remember," declared Jessie, quite
+spitefully.
+
+"I didn't mean the fat woman's face," giggled Amy. "I mean that the
+other woman looked familiar. Maybe I have seen her picture
+somewhere."
+
+"If my face was like hers I'd never have it photographed," snapped
+Jessie.
+
+"How vinegarish," said Amy. "Well, it was funny."
+
+"You do find humor in the strangest things," returned her chum. "I
+guess that poor girl didn't think it was funny."
+
+"Of course, they had some right to her," Amy declared.
+
+"How do you know they did? They did not act so," returned the more
+thoughtful Jessie. "If they had really the right to make the poor girl
+go with them, they would not have acted in such haste nor answered me
+the way they did."
+
+"Well, of course, it wasn't any of our business either to ask
+questions or to interfere," Amy declared.
+
+"I don't know about that, Amy," rejoined her chum. "I wish your
+brother had been here, or somebody."
+
+"Darry!" scoffed Amy.
+
+"Or maybe Burd Alling," and Jessie's eyes twinkled.
+
+"Well," considered Amy demurely, "I suppose the boys might have known
+better what to do."
+
+"Oh," said Jessie, promptly, "I knew what to do, all right; only I
+couldn't do it."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Stopped the women and made them explain before we allowed them to
+take the girl away. And I wonder where she was going. When and where
+did she run away from the women? Did you hear her beg us not to let
+them take her back--back----"
+
+"Back where?"
+
+"That is it, exactly," sighed Jessie, as the two walked on toward
+town. "She did not tell us where."
+
+"Some institution, maybe. An orphan asylum," suggested Amy.
+
+"Did you think she looked like an orphan?"
+
+"How does an orphan look?" giggled Amy. "I don't know any except the
+_Molly Mickford_ kind in the movies, and they are always too appealing
+for words!"
+
+"Somehow, she didn't look like that," admitted Jessie.
+
+"She fought hard. I believe I would have scratched that fat woman's
+face myself, if I'd been her. Anyway, she wasn't in any uniform. Don't
+they always put orphans in blue denim?"
+
+"Not always. And that girl would have looked awful in blue. She was
+too dark. She wasn't very well dressed, but her clothes and their
+colors were tasteful."
+
+"Aren't you the observing thing," agreed Amy. "She was dressed nicely.
+And those women were never guards from an institution."
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"It was a private kidnaping party, I guess," said Amy.
+
+"And we let it go on right under our noses and did not stop it,"
+sighed Jessie Norwood. "I'm going to tell my father about it."
+
+Amy grinned elfishly. "He will tell you that you had a right, under
+the law, to stop those women and make them explain."
+
+"Ye-es. I suppose so. But a right to do a thing and the ability to do
+it, he will likewise tell me, are two very different things."
+
+"Wisdom from the young owl!" laughed Amy. "Well, I don't suppose,
+after all, it is any of our business, or ever will be. The poor thing
+is now a captive and being borne away to the dungeon-keep. Whatever
+that is," she added, shrugging her shoulders.
+
+
+
+
+INTEREST IN RADIO SPREADS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+INTEREST IN RADIO SPREADS
+
+
+Over the George Washington sundaes at the New Melford Dainties Shop
+the girls discussed the mysterious happening on Dogtown Lane until it
+was, as Amy said, positively frayed.
+
+"We do not know what it was all about, my dear, so why worry our
+minds? We shall probably never see that girl again, or those two
+women. Only, that lean one--well! I know I have seen her somewhere, or
+somebody who looks like her."
+
+"I don't see but you are just as bad as I am," Jessie Norwood said.
+"But we did not come to town because of that puzzling thing."
+
+"No-o. We came to get these perfectly gorgeous sundaes," declared Amy
+Drew. "Your mother, Jess, is almost as nice as you are."
+
+"We came in to get radio books and buy wire and stops and all that for
+the aerials, anyway. Of course, I shall have to send for most of the
+parts of the house set. There is no regular radio equipment dealer in
+New Melford."
+
+"Oh, yes! Wireless!" murmured Amy. "I had almost forgotten that."
+
+They trotted across the street to the bookstore. Motors were coming up
+from the station now, and from New York. They waved their hands to
+several motoring acquaintances, and just outside Ye Craftsman's
+Bookshop they ran into Nell Stanley, who they knew had no business at
+all there on Main Street at this hour of the afternoon. Nell was the
+minister's daughter, and there were a number of little motherless
+Stanleys at the parsonage (Amy said "a whole raft of them") who
+usually needed the older sister's attention, approaching supper time.
+
+"Oh, I've a holiday," laughed Nell, who was big and strong and really
+handsome, Jessie thought, her coloring was so fresh, her chestnut hair
+so abundant, her gray eyes so brilliantly intelligent, and her teeth
+so dazzling. "Aunt Freda is at the house and she and the Reverend told
+me to go out and not to show myself back home for hours."
+
+"Bully-good!" declared Amy. "You'll come home to dinner with me, and
+we will spend the evening with Jess helping her build a radio thing so
+we can do without buying the New Melford _Tribune_ to get the local
+news."
+
+"Oh, Jess, dear, _are_ you going to have a radio?" cried Nell. "It's
+just wonderful. Reverend says he may have to broadcast his sermons
+pretty soon or else be without an audience."
+
+The pet name by which she usually spoke of her father, the Reverend
+Doctor Stanley, sounded all right when Nell said it. Nobody else ever
+called the good clergyman by it. But Nell was something between a
+daughter and a wife to the hard working Doctor Stanley. And she
+certainly was a thoughtful and "mothering" sister to the little ones.
+
+"But," Nell added, "you are too late inviting me to the eats, Amy,
+honey. It can't be done. I'm promised. Mr. Brandon and his wife saw me
+first, and I am to dine with them. Then they are going to take me in
+their car out to the Parkville home of their daughter--Oh, say! If
+your radio isn't finished, Jess, why can't you and Amy come with us?
+The Brandon car is big enough. And they tell me Mrs. Brandon's
+daughter has got a perfectly wonderful set at her home. They have an
+amplifier, and you don't have to use phones at all. Has your radio set
+got an amplifier, Jess?"
+
+"But I haven't got it yet," cried Jess. "I only hope to have it."
+
+"Then you and Amy come and hear a real one," said Nell.
+
+"If the Brandons won't mind. Will they?"
+
+"You know they are the loveliest people," said Nell briskly. "Mrs.
+Brandon told me to invite some young friends. But I hadn't thought of
+doing so. But I must have you and Amy. We'll be along for you girls at
+about seven-forty-five, new time."
+
+"Then we must hurry," declared Jess, as the minister's daughter ran
+away.
+
+"I'm getting interested," announced Amy. "Is this radio business like
+a talking machine?"
+
+"Only better," said her chum. "Come on. I know several of the little
+books I want to get. I wrote down the names."
+
+They dived down the four steps into the basement bookshop. It was a
+fine place to browse, when one had an hour to spare. But the chums
+from Roselawn were not in browsing mood on this occasion.
+
+They knew exactly what they wanted--at least, Jessie Norwood did--and
+somewhat to their surprise right near the front door of the shop was a
+"radio table."
+
+"Oh, yes, young ladies," said the clerk who came to wait upon them
+only when he saw that they had made their selections, "we have quite a
+call for books on that topic. It is becoming a fad, and quite
+wonderful, too. I have thought some of buying a radio set myself."
+
+"We're going to build one," declared Amy with her usual prompt
+assurance.
+
+"Are you? You two girls? Well, I don't know why you shouldn't. Lots of
+boys are doing so."
+
+"And anything a boy can do a girl ought to do a little better," Amy
+added.
+
+The clerk laughed as he wrapped up the several books Jessie had
+charged to her father's account. "You let me know how you get on
+building it, will you?" he said. "Maybe I can get some ideas from your
+experience."
+
+"We'll show 'em!" declared Amy, all in a glow of excitement. "And why
+do you suppose, Jess, folks always have to suggest that girls can't do
+what boys can? Isn't it ridiculous!"
+
+"Very," agreed Jessie. "Although, just as I pointed out a while ago,
+it would have been handy if Darry or Burd had been with us when we saw
+that poor girl kidnaped."
+
+"Of course! But, then, those boys are college men." She giggled. "And
+I wager Burd is a sea-sick college man just now."
+
+"Oh! Have they gone out in the _Marigold_?" cried Jessie.
+
+"They left New Haven the minute they could get away and joined the
+yacht at Groton, over across from New London, where it has been tied
+up all winter. Father insisted that Darry shouldn't touch the yacht,
+when Uncle Will died and left it to him last fall, until the college
+year was ended. We got a marconigram last night that they had passed
+Block Island going out. And _now_--well, Burd never was at sea before,
+you know," and Amy laughed again.
+
+"It has been rather windy. I suppose it must be rough out in the
+ocean. Oh, Amy!" Jess suddenly exclaimed, "if I get my radio rigged
+why can't we communicate with the _Marigold_ when it is at sea?"
+
+"I don't know just why you can't. But I guess the wireless rigging on
+the yacht isn't like this radio thing you are going to set up. They
+use some sort of telegraph alphabet."
+
+"I know," declared Jessie with conviction. "I'll tell Darry to put in
+a regular sending set--like the one I hope to have, if father will let
+me. And we can have our two sets tuned so that we can hear each other
+speak."
+
+"My goodness! You don't mean it is as easy as all that?" cried Amy.
+
+"Didn't you read that magazine article?" demanded her chum. "And
+didn't the man say that, pretty soon, we could carry receiving and
+sending sets in our pockets--maybe--and stop right on the street and
+send or receive any news we wanted to?"
+
+"No, I sha'n't," declared Amy. "Pockets spoil the set of even a sports
+skirt. Where you going now?"
+
+"In here. Mr. Brill sells electrical supplies as well as hardware. Oh!
+Amy Drew! There is a radio set in his window! I declare, New Melford
+is advancing in strides!"
+
+"Sure! In seven league boots," murmured Amy, following her friend into
+the store.
+
+Jessie had noted down the things she thought it would be safe to order
+before speaking to her father about the radio matter. Mrs. Norwood had
+cheerfully given her consent. Amy had once said that if Jessie went to
+her mother and asked if she could have a pet plesiosaurus, Mrs.
+Norwood would say:
+
+"Of course, you may, dear. But don't bring it into the house when its
+feet are wet."
+
+For the antenna and lead-in and ground wires, Jessie purchased three
+hundred feet of copper wire, number fourteen. The lightning switch Mr.
+Brill had among his electric fixtures--merely a porcelain base, thirty
+ampere, single pole double throw battery switch. She also obtained the
+necessary porcelain insulators and tubes.
+
+She knew there would be plenty of rope in the Norwood barn or the
+garage for their need in erecting the aerials. But she bought a small
+pulley as well as the ground connections which Mr. Brill had in stock.
+He was anxious to sell her a complete set like that he was exhibiting
+in the show window; but Jessie would not go any farther than to order
+the things enumerated and ask to have them sent over the next
+morning.
+
+The girls hurried home when they had done this, for it was verging on
+dinner time and they did not want to miss going with Nell Stanley and
+the Brandons to Parkville for the radio entertainment. Mr. Norwood was
+at home, and Jessie flew at him a good deal like an eager Newfoundland
+puppy.
+
+"It is the most wonderful thing!" she declared, as she had introduced
+the subject to her chum.
+
+She kept up the radio talk all through dinner. She was so interested
+that for the time being she forgot all about the girl that had been
+carried away in the automobile. Mr. Norwood had not been much
+interested in the new science; but he promised to talk the matter over
+with Momsy after their daughter had gone to the radio concert.
+
+"Anyhow," said Jessie, "I've bought the books telling how to rig it.
+And we're going to do it all ourselves--Amy and I. And Mr. Brill is
+going to send up some wire and things. Of course, if you won't let me
+have it, I'll just have to pay for the hardware out of my allowance."
+
+"Very well," her father said with gravity. "Maybe Chapman can find
+some use for the hardware if we don't decide to build a radio
+station."
+
+As they seldom forbade their daughter anything that was not
+positively harmful, however, there was not much danger that Jessie's
+allowance would be depleted by paying a share of the monthly hardware
+bill. Anyhow, Jessie as well as Amy, went off very gayly in the
+Brandon car with the minister's daughter. Mr. Brandon drove his own
+car, and the girls sat in the tonneau with Mrs. Brandon, who did not
+seem by any means a very old lady, even if she was a grandmother.
+
+"But grandmothers nowadays aren't crippled up with rheumatism and
+otherwise decrepit," declared Amy, the gay. "You know, I think it is
+rather nice to be a grandmother these days. I am going to matriculate
+for the position just as soon as I can."
+
+They rolled out of town, and just as they turned off the boulevard to
+take another road to Parkville, a big car passed the Brandon
+automobile coming into town. It was being driven very rapidly, but
+very skillfully, and the car was empty save for the driver.
+
+"What beautiful cars those French cars are," Mrs. Brandon said.
+
+"Did you see her, Jess?" cried Amy, excitedly. "Look at her go!"
+
+"Do you speak of the car or the lady?" laughed Nell Stanley.
+
+"She is no lady, I'd have you know," Amy rejoined scornfully. "Didn't
+you know her when she passed, Jess?"
+
+"I thought it was the car," her chum admitted. "Are you sure that was
+the woman who ran off with the girl?"
+
+"One of them," declared Amy, with confidence. "And how she can
+drive!"
+
+Naturally Mrs. Brandon and Nell wished to know the particulars of the
+chums' adventure. But none of them knew who the strange woman who
+drove the French car was.
+
+"She is not at all nice, at any rate," Jessie said emphatically. "I
+really wish there was some way of finding out about that girl they
+carried off, and what became of her."
+
+
+
+
+STRINGING THE AERIALS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+STRINGING THE AERIALS
+
+
+Parkville was reached within a short time. It was still early evening.
+The girls from Roselawn and their host and hostess found a number of
+neighbors already gathered in the drawing-room, to listen to the
+entertainments broadcasted from several radio stations.
+
+They were too late for the bedtime story; but from the cabinet-grand,
+like an expensive talking machine, the slurring notes of a jazz
+orchestra greeted their ears as plainly as though it were coming from
+a neighboring room instead of a broadcasting station many miles away.
+Amy confessed that it made her feet itch. She loved to dance.
+
+There was singing to follow, a really good quartette. Then a humorist
+told some of his own funny stories and an elocutionist recited a bit
+from Shakespeare effectively. The band played a popular air and the
+amused audience began singing the song. It was fine!
+
+"I'm just as excited as I can be," whispered Jessie to Nell and Amy.
+"Isn't it better than our talking machine? Why! it is almost like
+hearing the real people right in the room. And an amplifier of this
+kind is not scratchy one bit."
+
+"There is no static to-night," said Mr. Brandon, who overheard the
+enthusiastic girl. "But it is not always so clear."
+
+Jessie and Amy were too excited over this new amusement to heed
+anything that suggested "a fly in the ointment." When they drove home
+they were so full of radio that they chattered like magpies.
+
+"I would put up the aerials and get a set myself," Nell declared,
+"only we don't really need any more talking machines of any kind at
+our house. Dear me! I sometimes wonder how the Reverend can write his
+sermons, there is so much noise and talk all the time. I have tacked
+felt all around his study door to try to make it sound-proof. But when
+Bob comes in he bangs the outer door until you are reminded of the
+Black Tom explosion. And Fred never comes downstairs save on his
+stomach--and on the banisters--and lands on the doormat like a load of
+brick out of a dumpcart. Then Sally squeals so!" She sighed.
+
+"Nell Stanley," Amy said, "certainly has her own troubles."
+
+"I do not see how the doctor stands it," commented Mrs. Brandon
+sympathetically.
+
+"The Reverend is the greatest man in the world," declared Nell, with
+conviction. "He is wonderful. He takes the most annoying things so
+composedly. Why, you remember when he went to Bridgeton a month ago to
+speak at the local Sunday School Union? Something awfully funny
+happened. It would have floored any man but the Reverend."
+
+"What happened?" asked Amy. "I bet it was a joke. Your father, Nell,
+always tells the most delightful stories."
+
+"This isn't a story. It is so," chuckled Nell. "But I suppose that was
+why they asked him to amuse and entertain the little folks at one
+session of the Union. Father talked for fifteen minutes, all about
+Jacob's ladder, and those old stories. And not a kid of 'em went to
+sleep.
+
+"He said he was proud to see them so wide awake, and when he was
+closing he thought he would find out if they really had been
+attentive. So he said:
+
+"'And now, is there any little boy or any little girl who would like
+to ask me a question?'
+
+"And one boy called out: 'Say, Mister, if the angels had wings why did
+they walk up and down Jacob's ladder?'"
+
+"Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Brandon. "What could he say?"
+
+"That is it. You can't catch the Reverend," laughed Nell, proudly.
+"And nothing ever confuses him or puts him out. He just said:
+
+"'Oh, ah, yes, I see. And now, is there any little boy or any little
+girl who would like to answer that question?' And he bowed and slipped
+out."
+
+The laughter over this incident brought them into Roselawn, where
+Jessie and Amy got out, after thanking the kindly Brandons for the
+evening's pleasure. Nell lived a little further along, and went on
+with Mr. and Mrs. Brandon.
+
+"If I can find the time," called Nell Stanley, as the car started
+again, "I am coming over to see how you rig your aerials, Jessie."
+
+"If I am allowed to," commented Jessie, with a sudden fear that
+perhaps her father would find some objection to the new amusement.
+
+But this small fear was immediately dissipated when she ran in after
+bidding Amy good-night. She found her father and mother both in the
+library. The package of radio books had been opened, and Mr. and Mrs.
+Norwood was each reading interestedly one of the pamphlets Jessie had
+chosen at the bookshop.
+
+The three spent an hour discussing the new "plaything," as Mr. Norwood
+insisted upon calling it. But he agreed to everything his daughter
+wanted to do, and even promised to buy Jessie a better receiving set
+than Brill, the hardware man, was carrying.
+
+"As far as I can see, however, from what I read here," said Mr.
+Norwood, "a better set will make no difference in your plans for
+stringing the aerials. You and Amy can go right ahead."
+
+"Oh, but, Robert," said Mrs. Norwood, "do you think the two girls can
+do that work?"
+
+"Why not? Of course Jessie and Amy can. If they need any help they can
+ask one of the men--the chauffeur or the gardener, or somebody."
+
+"We are going to do it all ourselves!" cried Jessie, eagerly. "This is
+going to be our very owniest own radio. You'll see. We'll put the set
+upstairs in my room."
+
+"Wouldn't you rather have it downstairs--in the drawing-room, for
+instance?" asked her mother.
+
+"I know you, Momsy. You'll be showing it off to all your friends. And
+pretty soon it will be the family radio instead of mine."
+
+Mr. Norwood laughed. "I read here that the ordinary aerials will do
+very well for a small instrument or a large. It is suggested, too,
+that patents are pending that may make outside aerials unnecessary,
+anyway. Don't you mind, Momsy. If we find we want a nice, big set for
+our drawing-room, we'll have it in spite of Jessie. And we'll use her
+aerials, too."
+
+The next day Brill sent up the things Jessie had purchased, but the
+girls could not begin the actual stringing of the copper wires until
+the morning following. Ample study of the directions for the work
+printed in the books Jessie had selected made the chums confident that
+they knew just what to do.
+
+The windows of Jessie's room on the second floor of the Norwood house
+were not much more than seventy-five feet from the corner of an
+ornamental tower that housed the private electric plant belonging to
+the place. It was a tank tower, and water and light had been furnished
+to the entire premises from this tower before the city plants had
+extended their service out Bonwit Boulevard and through Roselawn.
+
+Jessie's room had been the nursery when Jessie was little. It was now
+a lovely, comfortable apartment, decorated in pearl gray and pink,
+with willow furniture and cushions covered with lovely cretonne, an
+open fireplace in which real logs could be burned in the winter, and
+pictures of the girl's own selection.
+
+Her books were here. And all her personal possessions, including
+tennis rackets, riding whip and spurs, canoe paddle, and even a bag of
+golf sticks, were arranged in "Jessie's room." Out of it opened her
+bedroom and bath. It was a big room, too, and if the radio was
+successful they could entertain twenty guests here if they wanted to.
+
+"But, of course, father is getting a set with phones, not with an
+amplifier like that one out at Parkville," Jessie explained to her
+chum. "If we want to use a horn afterward, we may. Now, Amy, do you
+understand what there is to do?"
+
+"Sure. We've got to get out our farmerette costumes. You know, those
+we used in the school gardens two years ago."
+
+"Oh, fine! I never would have thought of that," crowed Jessie.
+
+"Leave it to your Aunt Amy. She's the wise old bird," declared Amy. "I
+always did like those overalls. If I climb a ladder I don't want any
+skirt to bother me. If the ladder begins to slip I want a chance to
+slide down like a man. Do the 'Fireman, save my cheeld' act."
+
+"You are as lucid as usual," confessed her chum. Then she went on to
+explain: "I have found rope enough in the barn for our purpose--new
+rope. We will attach the end of the aerial wires with the rope to the
+roof of the old tower. It will enable us to make the far end of the
+aerials higher than my window--you see?"
+
+"Necessary point; I observe. Go ahead, Miss Seymour."
+
+"Please don't call me 'Miss Seymour,'" objected Jessie, frowning. "For
+the poor thing has a wart on her nose."
+
+"No use at all there. Not even as a collar-button," declared Amy. "All
+right; you are not Miss Seymour. And, come to think of it, I wonder
+if it was Miss Seymour I was thinking of last night when I thought
+that woman driving the kidnappers' car looked like somebody I knew? Do
+you think----?"
+
+"Oh! That horrid woman! I don't dislike Miss Seymour, you know, Amy,
+even if she does teach English. I think she is almost handsome beside
+that motor-car driver. Yes, I do."
+
+"Wart and all?" murmured Amy.
+
+But they were both too deeply interested in the radio to linger long
+on other matters. They laid out the work for the next morning, but did
+nothing practical toward erecting the wires and attendant parts that
+day. Amy came over immediately after breakfast, dressed in her
+farmerette costume, which was, in truth, a very practical suit in
+which to work.
+
+The girls even refused the help of the gardener. He said they would be
+unable to raise the heavy ladder to the tower window; and that was a
+fact.
+
+"All right," said the practical Jessie, "then we won't use the
+ladder."
+
+"My! I am not tall enough to reach the things up to you from the
+ground, Jess," drawled Amy.
+
+"Silly!" laughed her friend. "I am going up there to the top window in
+the tower. I can stand on the window sill and drive in the hook, and
+hang the aerial from there. See! We've got it all fixed on the ground
+here. I'll haul it up with another rope. You stay down here and tie it
+on. You'll see."
+
+"Well, don't fall," advised Amy. "The ground is hard."
+
+It had been no easy matter for the two girls to construct their
+aerial. The wire persisted in getting twisted and they had all they
+could do to keep it from kinking. Then, too, they wanted to fasten the
+porcelain insulators just right and had to consult one of the books
+several times. Then there came more trouble over the lead-in wire,
+which should have been soldered to the aerial but was only twisted
+tight instead.
+
+The girls worked all the forenoon. When one end of the aerial was
+attached properly to the tower, Amy ran in and upstairs to her chum's
+room and dropped a length of rope from one of the windows. Jessie came
+down from her perch and attached the house-end of the aerial to the
+rope. When Amy had the latter hauled up and fastened to a hook driven
+into the outside frame of Jessie's window, the antenna was complete.
+
+At that (and it sounds easy, but isn't) they got it twisted and had to
+lower the house-end of the aerial again. While they were thus engaged,
+a taxi-cab stopped out in front. Amy, leaning from her chum's window,
+almost fell out in her sudden excitement.
+
+"Oh, Jess! They've come!" she shouted.
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Jessie. "We were not expecting anybody,
+were we?"
+
+"You weren't, but I was. I forgot to tell you," cried Amy. "They just
+went around Long Island and came up the East River and through Hell
+Gate and got a mooring at the Yacht Club, off City Island."
+
+"Who are you talking about?" gasped her chum, wonderingly.
+
+"Darry----"
+
+"Darry!" ejaculated Jessie with mixed emotions. She glanced down at
+her overalls. She was old enough to want to look her best when
+Darrington Drew was on the scene. "Darry!" she murmured again.
+
+"Yes. And Burd Alling. They telephoned early this morning. But I
+forgot. Here they come, Jess!"
+
+Jessie Norwood turned rather slowly to look. She felt a strong desire
+to run into the house and make a quick change of costume.
+
+
+
+
+THE FRECKLE-FACED GIRL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE FRECKLE-FACED GIRL
+
+
+Of the two young fellows hurrying in from the boulevard one was tall
+and slim and dark; the other was stocky--almost plump, in fact--and
+sandy of complexion, with sharp, twinkling pond-blue eyes. Burdwell
+Alling's eyes were truly the only handsome feature he possessed. But
+he had a wonderfully sweet disposition.
+
+Darry Drew was one of those quiet, gentlemanly fellows, who seem
+rather too sober for their years. Yet he possessed humor enough, and
+there certainly was no primness about him. It was he who hailed Jessie
+on the ground and Amy leaning out of the window above:
+
+"I say, fellows! Have you seen a couple of young ladies around here
+who have just finished their junior year at the New Melford High with
+flying colors? We expected to find them sitting high and dry on the
+front porch, ready to receive company."
+
+"Sure we did," added Burd Alling. "They have taken the highest degree
+in Prunes and Prisms and have been commended by their instructors for
+excellent deportment. And among all the calicos, they are supposed to
+take the bun as prudes."
+
+Amy actually almost fell out of the window again, and stuck out her
+tongue like an impudent urchin. "A pair of smarties," she scoffed.
+"Come home and fret our ears with your college slang. How dare you!"
+
+"I declare! Is that Miss Amy Drew?" demanded Burd, sticking a half
+dollar in his eye like a monocle and apparently observing Amy for the
+first time.
+
+"It is not," said Amy sharply. "Brush by! I don't speak to strange
+young men."
+
+But Darry had come to Jessie and shaken hands. If she flushed
+self-consciously, it only improved her looks.
+
+"Awfully glad to see you, Jess," the tall young fellow said.
+
+"It's nice to have you home again, Darry," she returned.
+
+Amy ran down again then, in her usual harum-scarum fashion, and the
+conversation became general. How had the girls finished their
+high-school year? And how had the boys managed to stay a whole year at
+Yale without being asked to leave for the good of the undergraduate
+body?
+
+Was the _Marigold_ a real yacht, or just a row-boat with a kicker
+behind? And what were the girls doing in their present fetching
+costumes?
+
+"The wires!" cried Burd. "Is it a trapeze? Are we to have a summer
+circus in Roselawn?"
+
+"We shall have if you remain around here," was Amy's saucy reply. "But
+yon is no trapeze, I'd have you know."
+
+"A slack wire? Who walks it--you or Jess?"
+
+"Aw, Burd!" ejaculated Darry. "It's radio. Don't you recognize an
+aerial when you see it?"
+
+"You have a fine ground connection," scoffed Burd.
+
+"Don't you worry about us," Jessie took heart to say. "We know just
+what to do. Go upstairs again, Amy, and haul up this end of the
+contraption. I've got it untwisted."
+
+A little later, when the aerial was secure and Jessie went practically
+to work affixing the ground connection, Darrington Drew said:
+
+"Why, I believe you girls do know what you are about."
+
+"Don't you suppose we girls know anything at all, Darry?" demanded his
+sister from overhead. "You boys have very little on us."
+
+"Don't even want us to help you?" handsome Darry asked, grinning up at
+her.
+
+"Not unless you approach the matter with the proper spirit," Jessie
+put in. "No lofty, high-and-mighty way goes with us girls. We can be
+met only on a plane of equality. But if you want to," she added,
+smiling, "you can go up to my room where Amy is and pull that rope
+tauter. I admit that your masculine muscles have their uses."
+
+They were still having a lot of fun out of the securing of the aerials
+when suddenly Burd Alling discovered a figure planted on the gravel
+behind him. He swept off his cap in an elaborate bow, and cried:
+
+"We have company! Introduce me, Amy--Jess. This young lady----"
+
+"Smarty!" croaked a hoarse voice. "I don't want to be introducted to
+nobody. I want to know if you've seen Bertha."
+
+"Big Bertha?" began Burd, who was as much determined on joking as Amy
+herself.
+
+But Jessie Norwood, her attention drawn to the freckle-faced child who
+stood there so composedly, motioned Burd to halt. She approached and
+in her usual kindly manner asked what the strange child wanted.
+
+It really was difficult to look soberly at the little thing. She might
+have been twelve years old, but she was so slight and undernourished
+looking that it was hard to believe she had reached that age. She had
+no more color than putty. And her sharp little face was so bespatted
+with freckles that one could scarcely see what its real expression
+was.
+
+"Bertha who?" Jessie asked quietly. "What Bertha are you looking
+for?"
+
+"Cousin Bertha. She's an orphan like me," said the freckled little
+girl. "I ain't got anybody that belongs to me but Bertha; and Bertha
+ain't got anybody that belongs to her but me."
+
+Burd and Amy were still inclined to be amused. But Darry Drew took his
+cue from Jessie, if he did not find a sympathetic cord touched in his
+own nature by the child's speech and her forlorn appearance.
+
+For she was forlorn. She wore no denim uniform, such as Amy had
+mentioned on a previous occasion as being the mark of the usual
+"orphan." But it was quite plain that the freckle-faced girl had
+nobody to care much for her, or about her.
+
+"I wish you would explain a little more, dear," said Jessie, kindly.
+"Why did you come here to ask for your Cousin Bertha?"
+
+"'Cause I'm asking at every house along this street. I told Mrs. Foley
+I would, and she said I was a little fool," and the child made the
+statement quite as a matter of course.
+
+"Who is Mrs. Foley?"
+
+"She's the lady I help. When Mom died Mrs. Foley lived in the next
+tenement. She took me. She brought me out here to Dogtown when she
+moved."
+
+"Why," breathed Amy, with a shudder, "she's one of those awful Dogtown
+children."
+
+"Put a stopper on that, Amy!" exclaimed Darry, promptly.
+
+But the freckle-faced girl heard her. She glared at the older
+girl--the girl so much better situated than herself. Her pale eyes
+snapped.
+
+"You don't haf to touch me," she said sharply. "I won't poison you."
+
+"Oh, Amy!" murmured her chum.
+
+But Amy Drew was not at all bad at heart, or intentionally unkind. She
+flamed redly and the tears sprang to her eyes.
+
+"Oh! I didn't mean--Forgive me, little girl! What is your name? I'll
+help you find your cousin."
+
+"My name's Henrietta. They call me Hen. You needn't mind gushin' over
+me. I know how you feel. I'd feel just the same if I wore your clo'es
+and you wore mine."
+
+"By ginger!" exclaimed Burd Alling, under his breath. "There is
+philosophy for you."
+
+But Jessie felt hurt that Amy should have spoken so thoughtlessly
+about the strange child. She took Henrietta's grimy hand and led the
+freckled girl to the side steps where they could sit down.
+
+"Now tell me about Bertha and why you are looking for her along
+Bonwit Boulevard," said Jessie.
+
+"Do you wear these pants all the time?" asked Henrietta, suddenly,
+smoothing Jessie's overalls. "I believe I'd like to wear 'em, too.
+They are something like little Billy Foley's rompers."
+
+"I don't wear them all the time," said Jessie, patiently. "But about
+Bertha?"
+
+"She's my cousin. She lived with us before Mom died. She went away to
+work. Something happened there where she worked. I guess I don't know
+what it was. But Bertha wrote to me--I can read written letters,"
+added the child proudly. "Bertha said she was coming out to see me
+this week. And she didn't come."
+
+"But why should you think----"
+
+"Lemme tell you," said Henrietta eagerly. "That woman that hired
+Bertha came to Foleys day before yesterday trying to find Bertha. She
+said Bertha'd run away from her. But Bertha had a right to run away.
+Didn't she?"
+
+"I don't know. I suppose so. Unless the woman had adopted her, or
+something," confessed Jessie, rather puzzled.
+
+"Bertha wasn't no more adopted than I am. Mrs. Foley ain't adopted me.
+I wouldn't want to be a Foley. And if you are adopted you have to take
+the name of the folks you live with. So Bertha wasn't adopted, and
+she had a right to run away. But she didn't get to Dogtown."
+
+"But you think she might have come this way?"
+
+"Yep. She's never been to see me since we moved to Dogtown. So she
+maybe lost her way. Or she saw that woman and was scared. I'm looking
+to see if anybody seen her," said the child, getting up briskly. "I
+guess you folks ain't, has you?"
+
+"I am afraid not," said Jessie thoughtfully. "But we will be on the
+lookout for her, honey. You can come back again and ask me any time
+you like."
+
+The freckle-faced child looked her over curiously. "What do you say
+that for?" she demanded. "You don't like me. I ain't pretty. And
+you're pretty--and that other girl," (she said this rather grudgingly)
+"even if you do wear overalls."
+
+"Why! I want to help you," said Jessie, somewhat startled by the
+strange girl's downright way of speaking.
+
+"You got a job for me up here?" asked Henrietta promptly. "I guess I'd
+rather work for you than for the Foleys."
+
+"Don't the Foleys treat you kindly?" Amy ventured, really feeling an
+interest in the strange child.
+
+"Guess she treats me as kind as a lady can when she's got six kids
+and a man that drinks," Henrietta said with weariness. "But I'd like
+to wear better clo'es. I wouldn't mind even wearing them overall
+things while I worked if I had better to wear other times."
+
+She looked down at her faded gingham, the patched stockings, the
+broken shoes. She wore no hat. Really, she was a miserable-looking
+little thing, and the four more fortunate young people all considered
+this fact silently as Henrietta moved slowly away and went down the
+path to the street.
+
+"Come and see me again, Henrietta!" Jessie called after her.
+
+The freckled child nodded. But she did not look around. Darry said
+rather soberly:
+
+"Too bad about the kid. We ought to do something for her."
+
+"To begin with, a good, soapy bath," said his sister, vigorously, but
+not unkindly.
+
+"She's the limit," chuckled Burd. "Hen is some bird, I'll say!"
+
+"I wonder----" began Jessie, but Amy broke in with:
+
+"To think of her hunting up and down the boulevard for her cousin. And
+she didn't even tell us what Bertha looked like or how old she is, or
+anything. My!"
+
+"I wonder if we ought not to have asked her for more particulars,"
+murmured Jessie. "It is strange we should hear of another girl that
+had run away----"
+
+But the others paid no attention at the moment to what Jessie was
+saying. It was plain that Amy did not at all comprehend what her chum
+considered. The lively one had forgotten altogether about the unknown
+girl she and Jessie had seen borne away in the big French car.
+
+
+
+
+SOMETHING COMING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOMETHING COMING
+
+
+That afternoon Mr. Norwood brought home the radio receiving set in the
+automobile. The two girls, with a very little help, but a plethora of
+suggestion from Darry and Burd, proceeded to establish the set on a
+table in Jessie's room, and attach the lead-in wire and the ground
+wire.
+
+Jessie had bought a galena crystal mounted, as that was more
+satisfactory, the book said. After all the parts of the radio set had
+been assembled and the connections made, the first essential
+operation, if they were to make use of the invention at once, was to
+adjust the tiny piece of wire--the "cat's whisker"--which lightly
+rests on the crystal-detector, to a sensitive point.
+
+Jessie, who had read the instruction book carefully, knew that this
+adjustment might be made in several different ways. One satisfactory
+way is by the use of a miniature buzzer transmitter.
+
+"What are we going to hear?" Amy demanded eagerly. "How you going to
+tune her, Jess?"
+
+"As there are only three sets of head phones," grumbled Burd, "one of
+us is bound to be a step-child."
+
+"We can take turns," Jessie said, eagerly. "What time is it, Darry?"
+
+"It points to eight, Jess."
+
+"Then there is a concert about to start at that station not more than
+thirty miles away from here. We ought to hear that fine," declared the
+hostess of the party.
+
+"What is the wave length?" Amy asked.
+
+"Three-sixty. We can easily get it," and Jessie adjusted the buzzer a
+little, the phones at her ears.
+
+Eagerly they settled down to listen in. At least, three of them
+listened. Darry said he felt like the fifth wheel of an
+automobile--the one lashed on behind.
+
+"I shall have to get an amplifier--a horn," Jessie murmured.
+
+At first she heard only a funny scratchy sound; then a murmur, growing
+louder, as she tuned the instrument to the required wave length. The
+murmurous sound grew louder--more distinct. Amy squealed right out
+loud! For it seemed as though somebody had said in her ear:
+
+"--and will be followed by the Sextette from Lucia. I thank you."
+
+"We're just in time," said Burd. "They are going to begin the
+concert."
+
+String music, reaching their ears so wonderfully, hushed their speech.
+But Darry got close to his sister, stretching his ear, too, to
+distinguish the sounds. The introduction to the famous composition was
+played brilliantly, then the voices of the singers traveled to the
+little group in Jessie Norwood's room from the broadcasting station
+thirty miles away.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful! Wonderful!" murmured Amy.
+
+"Sh!" admonished her chum.
+
+When the number was ended, Burd Alling removed his head-harness and
+gravely shook hands with Jessie.
+
+"Some calico, you are," he declared. "Don't ever go to college, Jess.
+It will spoil your initiative."
+
+"You needn't call me by your slang terms. 'Calico,' indeed!" exclaimed
+Jessie. "Calico hasn't been worn since long before the war."
+
+"You might at least call us 'ginghams,'" sniffed Amy.
+
+"Wait!" commanded Jessie. "Here comes something else. You take my
+ear-tabs, Darry."
+
+"Wait a moment," cried Amy, who still had her phones to her ears. Then
+she groaned horribly. "It's a lecture! Oh! Merciful Moses' aunt! Here!
+You listen in, Darry!"
+
+"What's it all about?" asked her brother.
+
+"A talk on 'The Home Beautiful,'" giggled Burd, "by One of the
+Victims. Come on, Darry. You may have my phones too."
+
+As all three seemed perfectly willing to let him have their listening
+paraphernalia, Darry refused. "Your unanimity is poisonous," he said.
+"The Greeks bearing gifts."
+
+"Let's get a rain check for this," suggested Burd.
+
+"It will last only twenty minutes, according to the schedule," Jessie
+said, with a sigh. It was such a fine plaything that she disliked
+giving it up for a minute.
+
+They talked, on all kinds of subjects. The boys had had no time before
+to tell the girls about the _Marigold_. Just such another craft it was
+evident had never come off the ways!
+
+"And it is big enough to take out a party of a dozen," Darry declared.
+"Some time this summer we are going to get up a nice crowd and sail as
+far as Bar Harbor--maybe."
+
+"Why not to the Bahamas, Darry?" drawled his sister.
+
+"And there, too," said Darry, stoutly. "Oh, the _Marigold_ is a
+seaworthy craft. We are going down to Atlantic Highlands in her next.
+Burd's got a crush on a girl who is staying there for the summer," and
+he said it wickedly, grinning at his sister.
+
+"Sure," his chum agreed quickly, before Amy's tart tongue could
+comment. "She's my maiden aunt, and I've got a lot of things to thank
+her for."
+
+"And she can't read writing, so we have to go to see her," chuckled
+Darry.
+
+"Send us a snapshot of her, Darry," begged Jessie, not unwilling to
+tease her chum, for it was usually Amy who did the teasing.
+
+"I should worry if Burd has a dozen maiden aunts," observed Amy
+scornfully, "and they all knitted him red wristlets!"
+
+"How savage," groaned Darry. "Red wristlets, no less!"
+
+The girls had news to relate to the boys as well. The church society
+was going to have a summer bazaar on the Fourth of July and a prize
+had been offered by the committee in charge for the most novel
+suggestion for a money-making "stunt" at the lawn party.
+
+"I hope they will make enough to pay Doctor Stanley's salary," Darry
+said.
+
+"We want to raise his salary," Jessie told him. "With all those
+children I don't see how he gets on."
+
+"He wouldn't 'get on' at all if it wasn't for Nell," said Amy warmly.
+"She is a wonderful manager."
+
+The boys departed for City Island and the _Marigold_ the next
+morning; but they promised to return from their trip to Atlantic
+Highlands in season for the church bazaar.
+
+For the next few days Jessie and Amy were busy almost all day long,
+and evening too, with the radio. They even listened to the weather
+predictions and the agricultural report and market prices!
+
+The Norwood home never had been so popular before. People, especially
+Jessie's school friends, were coming to the house constantly to look
+at the radio set and to "listen in" on the airways. The interest they
+all took in it was amusing.
+
+"You see, Momsy," laughed Jessie, when she and her mother were alone
+one day, "if my radio set were downstairs here, I wouldn't have much
+use of it. Even old Mrs. Grimsby has been in twice to talk about it,
+and yesterday she came upstairs to try it."
+
+"But she won't have one in her house," Mrs. Norwood said. "I don't
+know--I didn't think of it before, Jessie. But do you suppose it is
+safe?"
+
+"Suppose what is safe, dear?"
+
+"Having all those wires outside the house? Mrs. Grimsby says she would
+not risk it."
+
+"Why not, for mercy's sake?" cried Jessie.
+
+"Lightning. When we had a shower yesterday I was really frightened.
+Those wires might draw lightning."
+
+"But, _dear!_" gasped Jessie. "Didn't I show you the lightning
+switch?"
+
+"Yes, child. I told Mrs. Grimsby about that. Do you know what she
+said?"
+
+"Something funny, I suppose?"
+
+"She said she wouldn't trust a little thing like that to turn God's
+lightning if He wanted to strike this house."
+
+"O-oh!" gasped Jessie. "What a dreadful idea she must have of the
+Creator. I'm going to tell Doctor Stanley that."
+
+"I guess the good doctor has labored with Mrs. Grimsby more than once
+regarding her harsh doctrinal beliefs. However, the fact that such
+wires may draw lightning cannot be gainsaid."
+
+"Oh, dear, me! I hope you won't worry Momsy. It can't be so, or there
+would be something about it in the radio papers and in those books. In
+one place I saw it stated that the aerials were really preventative of
+lightning striking the house."
+
+"I know. They used to have lightning rods on houses, especially in the
+country. But it was found to be a good deal of a fallacy. I guess,
+after all, Mrs. Grimsby has it partly right. Human beings cannot
+easily command the elements which Nature controls."
+
+"Seems to me we are disproving that right in this radio business,"
+cried Jessie. "And it is going to be wonderful--just _wonderful_--before
+long. They say moving pictures will be transmitted by radio; and there
+will be machines so that people can speak directly back and forth, and
+you'll have a picture before you of the person you are speaking to."
+
+She began to laugh again. "You know what Amy says? She says she always
+powders her nose before she goes to the telephone. You never know who
+you may have to speak to! So she is ready for the new invention."
+
+"Just the same, I am rather timid about the lightning, Jessie," her
+mother said.
+
+
+
+
+THE CANOE TRIP
+
+CARTER'S GHOST
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CANOE TRIP
+
+
+Of course, Jessie Norwood and Amy Drew did not spend all their time
+over the radio set in Jessie's room. At least, they did not do so
+after the first two or three days.
+
+There was not much the girls cared to hear being broadcasted before
+late afternoon; so they soon got back to normal. Not being obliged to
+get off to school every day but Saturday and Sunday, had suddenly made
+opportunity for many new interests.
+
+"Or, if they are not new," Amy said decisively, "we haven't worn them
+out."
+
+"Do you think we shall wear out the radio, honey?" asked Jessie,
+laughing.
+
+"I don't see how the air can be worn out. And the radio stuff
+certainly comes through the air. Or do the Hertzian waves come through
+the ground, as some say?"
+
+"You will have to ask some scientist who has gone into the matter more
+deeply than I have," Jessie said demurely. "But what is this revived
+interest that you want to take up?"
+
+"Canoe. Let's take a lunch and paddle away down to the end of the
+lake. There are just wonderful flowers there. And one of the girls
+said that her brothers were over by the abandoned Carter place and
+found some wild strawberries."
+
+"M-mm! I love 'em," confessed Jessie.
+
+"Better than George Washington sundaes," agreed her chum. "Say we
+go?"
+
+"I'll run tell Momsy. She can play with my radio while we are gone,"
+and Jessie went downstairs to find her mother.
+
+"I tell you what," said Amy as, with their paddles, the girls wended
+their way down to the little boathouse and landing. "Won't it be great
+if they ever get pocket radios?"
+
+"Pocket radios!" exclaimed Jessie.
+
+"I mean what the man said in the magazine article we read in the first
+place. Don't you remember? About carrying some kind of a condensed
+receiving set in one's pocket--a receiving and a broadcasting set,
+too."
+
+"Oh! But that is a dream."
+
+"I don't know," rejoined Amy, who had become a thorough radio convert
+by this time. "It is not so far in advance, perhaps. I see one man has
+invented an umbrella aerial-receiving thing--what-you-may-call-it."
+
+"An umbrella!" gasped Jessie.
+
+"Honest. He opens it and points the ferrule in the direction of the
+broadcasting station he is tuned to. Then he connects the little
+radio set, clamps on his head harness, and listens in."
+
+"It sounds almost impossible."
+
+"Of course, he doesn't get the sounds very loud. But he _hears_. He
+can go off in his automobile and take it all with him. Or out in a
+boat----Say, it would be great sport to have one in our canoe."
+
+"You be careful how you get into it yourself and never mind the
+radio," cried Jessie, as Amy displayed her usual carelessness in
+embarking.
+
+"I haven't got on a thing that water will hurt," declared the other
+girl.
+
+"That's all right. But everything you have on can get wet. Do be
+still. You are like an eel!" cried Jessie.
+
+"Don't!" rejoined Amy with a shudder. "I loathe eels. They are so
+squirmy. One wound right around my arm once when I was fishing down
+the lake, and I never have forgotten the slimy feel of it."
+
+Jessie laughed. "We won't catch eels to-day. I never thought about
+fishing, anyway. I want strawberries, if there are any down there."
+
+Lake Monenset was not a wide body of water. Burd Alling had said it
+was only as wide as "two hoots and a holler." Burd had spent a few
+weeks in the Tennessee Mountains once, and had brought back some
+rather queer expressions that the natives there use.
+
+Lake Monenset was several miles long. The head of it was in Roselawn
+at one side of the Norwood estate and almost touched the edge of
+Bonwit Boulevard. It was bordered by trees for almost its entire
+length on both sides, and it was shaped like a enormous, elongated
+comma.
+
+The gardener at the Norwood estate and his helper looked after the
+boathouse and the canoes. The Norwood's was not the only small estate
+that verged upon the lake, but like everything else about the Norwood
+place, its lake front was artistically adorned.
+
+There were rose hedges down here, too, and as the two girls pushed out
+from the landing the breath of summer air that followed them out upon
+the lake was heavy with the scent of June roses.
+
+The girls were dressed in such boating costumes as gave them the very
+freest movement, and they both used the paddle skillfully. The roomy
+canoe, if not built for great speed, certainly was built for as much
+comfort as could be expected in such a craft.
+
+Jessie was in the bow and Amy at the stern. They quickly "got into
+step," as Amy called it, and their paddles literally plied the lake as
+one. Faster and faster the canoe sped on and very soon they rounded
+the wooded tongue of land that hid all the long length of the lower
+end of the lake.
+
+"Dogtown is the only blot on the landscape," panted Amy, after a
+while. "It stands there right where the brook empties into the lake
+and--and it is unsightly. Whee!"
+
+"What are you panting for, Amy?" demanded her chum.
+
+"For breath, of course," rejoined Amy. "Whee! You are setting an
+awfully fast pace, Jess."
+
+"I believe you are getting over-fat, Amy," declared Jessie, solemnly.
+
+"Say not so! But I did eat an awfully big breakfast. The strawberries
+were so good! And the waffles!"
+
+"Yet you insisted on bringing a great shoe box of lunch," said her
+friend.
+
+"Not a _great_ shoe box. Please! My own shoes came in it and I haven't
+enormously big feet," complained Amy. "But we must slow down."
+
+"Just to let you admire Dogtown, I suppose?" said Jessie, laughing.
+
+"Well, it's a sight! I wonder what became of that freckle-faced young
+one."
+
+"I wonder if she found her cousin," added Jessie.
+
+"That was a funny game; for that child to go hunting through the
+neighborhood after a girl. What was her name--Bertha?"
+
+"Yes. And I have been thinking since then, Amy, that we should have
+asked little Henrietta some more questions."
+
+"Little Henrietta," murmured Amy. "How funny! She never could fill
+specifications for such a name."
+
+"Never mind that," Jessie flung back over her shoulder, and still
+breathing easily as she set a slower stroke. "What I have been
+thinking about is that other girl."
+
+"The lost girl, Bertha?"
+
+"No, no. Or, perhaps, yes, yes!" laughed Jessie. "But I mean that girl
+the two women forced to go with them in the motor-car. You surely
+remember, Amy."
+
+"Oh! The kidnaped girl. My! Yes, I should say I did remember her. But
+what has that to do with little Henrietta? And they call her 'Hen,'"
+she added, chuckling.
+
+"I have been thinking that perhaps the girl Henrietta was looking for
+was the girl we saw being carried away by those women."
+
+"Jess Norwood! Do you suppose so?"
+
+"I don't know whether I suppose so or not," laughed Jessie. "But I
+think if I ever see that child again I shall question her more
+closely."
+
+She said this without the first idea that little Henrietta would
+cross their way almost at once. The canoe touched the grassy bank at
+the edge of the old Carter place at the far end of the lake just
+before noon. An end of the old house had been burned several years
+before, but the kitchen ell was still standing, with chimney complete.
+Picnic parties often used the ruin of the old house in which to sup.
+It was a shelter, at least.
+
+"I've got to eat. I've got to eat!" proclaimed Amy, the moment she
+disembarked. "Actually, I am as hollow as Mockery."
+
+"Well, I never!" chuckled Jessie. "Your simile is remarkably apt. And
+I feel that I might do justice to Alma's sandwiches, myself."
+
+"Where's the sun gone?" suddenly demanded Amy, looking up and then
+turning around to look over the water.
+
+"Why! I didn't notice those clouds. It is going to shower, Amy, my
+dear."
+
+"It is going to thunder and lightning, too," and Amy looked a little
+disturbed. "I confess that I do not like a thunderstorm."
+
+"Let us draw up the canoe and turn it over. Keep the inside of it dry.
+And we'll take the cushions up to the old house," added Jessie,
+briskly throwing the contents of the canoe out upon the bank.
+
+"Ugh! I don't fancy going into the house," said Amy.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"The old place is kind of spooky."
+
+"Spooks have no teeth," chuckled Jessie. "I heard of a ghost once that
+seemed to haunt a country house, but after all it was only an old
+gentleman in a state of somnambulism who was hunting his false
+teeth."
+
+"Don't make fun of spirits," Amy told her, sepulchrally.
+
+"Why not? I never saw a ghost."
+
+"That makes no difference. It doesn't prove there is none. How black
+those clouds are! O-oh! That was a sharp flash, Jessie, honey. Let's
+run. I guess the haunts in the old Carter house can't be as bad as
+standing out here in a thunder-and-lightning storm."
+
+"To say nothing of getting our lunch wet," chuckled Jessie, following
+the dark girl up the grassy path with her arms filled to overflowing.
+
+"Ah, dear me!" wailed Amy, hurrying ahead. "And those strawberries we
+came for. I am afraid I shall not have enough to eat without them."
+
+The ruin of the Carter house stood upon a knoll, several great elms
+sheltering it. The dooryard was covered with a heavy sod and the
+ancient flower beds had run wild with weeds.
+
+The place did have rather an eerie look. Most of the window panes were
+broken and the steps and narrow porch before the kitchen door had
+broken away, leaving traps for careless feet.
+
+The thunder growled behind them. Amy quickened her steps. As she had
+said, she shuddered at the tempest. What might be of a disturbing
+nature in the old farmhouse could not, she thought, be as fearsome as
+the approaching tempest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+CARTER'S GHOST
+
+
+On the broken porch of the abandoned house Amy stopped and waited for
+her chum to overtake her. When she looked back she cried out again.
+Forked lightning blazed against the lurid clouds. It was so sharp a
+display of electricity that Amy shut her eyes.
+
+Jessie, still laughing, plunged up the steps and bumped right into the
+sagging door. It swung inward, creakingly. Amy peered over her chum's
+shoulder.
+
+"O-oh!" she crooned. "Do--do you see anything?"
+
+"Nothing alive. Not even a rat."
+
+"Ghosts aren't alive."
+
+"Nothing moving, then," and Jessie proceeded to march into the rather
+dark kitchen. "Here's a table and some benches. You know, Miss
+Allister's Sunday School class picnicked here last year."
+
+"Oh, I've been here a dozen times," confessed Amy. "But always with a
+crowd. You know, honey, you are no protection against ghosts."
+
+"Don't be so ridiculous," laughed Jessie. She had put down the things
+she had brought up from the lakeside, and now turned back to look out
+of the open door. "Oh, Amy! It's coming!"
+
+There was a crash of thunder and then the rain began drumming on the
+roof of the porch. Jessie looked out. The clearing about the house had
+darkened speedily. A sheet of rain came drifting across the lake
+toward the hillock on which the house stood.
+
+"Do shut the door, Jessie," begged Amy Drew.
+
+"How ridiculous!" Jessie said again. "You can't shut the windows.
+There!"
+
+Another lightning flash blinded the girls and the thunder following
+fairly deafened them for the moment. But Jessie did not leave her post
+in the doorway. Something at the edge of the clearing--some rods away,
+at the verge of the thick wood--had impressed itself on Jessie's sight
+just as the lightning flashed.
+
+"Come away! Come away, Jess Norwood!" shrieked Amy.
+
+"Come here," commanded Jessie. "Look. Don't be foolish. See that thing
+moving down there by the woods? Is it a human being or an animal?"
+
+"Oh, Jessie! Maybe it is a ghost," murmured Amy.
+
+But her curiosity overcame her fears sufficiently for her to join
+Jessie at the doorway. Through the falling rain the chums were sure
+that something was moving down by the woods.
+
+"It's a dog," said Amy, after a moment.
+
+"It's a child," declared Jessie, with conviction. "I saw its face
+then."
+
+"Perhaps it is the Carter ghost," breathed Amy. "I never heard whether
+this haunt was a juvenile or an adult offender."
+
+"I guess you are not much afraid after all," said her chum. "Yes, it
+is a child. And it is getting most awfully wet."
+
+"Wait! Wait!" the girl from Roselawn cried. "Don't run away from me."
+
+Whether the child heard and understood her or not, it gave evidence of
+being greatly frightened. She covered her face with her hands and sank
+down on the wet sod, while the rain beat upon her unmercifully. There
+was no shelter here, and Jessie Norwood herself was getting thoroughly
+wet.
+
+In a calm moment that followed the child piped, without taking down
+her hands.
+
+"Are--are you the ha'nt?"
+
+"What a question!" gasped Jessie, and seized the crouching figure by
+the shoulder. "Do I feel like a ghost? Why, it's Henrietta!"
+
+The clawlike hands dropped from the freckled face. The little girl
+stared.
+
+"Goodness! I seen you before. You are the nice girl. You ain't a
+ghost."
+
+"But you are sopping wet. Come up to the house at once, child."
+
+"Ain't--ain't there ghosts there?"
+
+"If there are they won't hurt us," said Jessie encouragingly. "Come
+on, child. I am getting wet myself."
+
+But little Henrietta hung back stubbornly. "Mrs. Foley says ha'nts
+carry off kids. Like my Bertha was carried off."
+
+"We have some nice lunch," said Jessie, quickly. "You'll forget all
+about the silly ghosts when you are helping us eat that."
+
+This invitation and prospect overcame the fear of ghosts in
+Henrietta's mind. She began to trot willingly by Jessie's side. But
+already the rain had saturated the girl from Roselawn as well as the
+child from Dogtown.
+
+"Two more bedrabbled persons I never saw!" exclaimed Amy, when they
+arrived upon the porch. "Do come in. There is wood here and we can
+make a fire on the hearth. You can take off that skirt, Jess, and get
+it dry. And this poor little thing--well, she looks as though she
+ought to be peeled to the skin if we are ever to get _her_ dry."
+
+She hustled Henrietta into the house, but kindly. She even knelt down
+beside her and began to unfasten the child's dress after lighting the
+fire that she had herself suggested. "Spooks" were evidently wiped
+from Amy's memory; but she flinched every time it lightened, as it
+did occasionally for some time.
+
+"Say!" said the wondering Henrietta hoarsely. "I'm just as dirty as I
+was the other day. You don't haf to touch me."
+
+"Oh, dear me!" cried Amy. "This child is never going to forgive me for
+that. Won't you like me a little, Henrietta?"
+
+"Not as much as that other one," said the freckle-faced girl frankly.
+
+Jessie, who was taking off her own outer garments to hang before the
+now roaring fire, only laughed at that.
+
+"Tell us," she said, "why you think your cousin was carried off?"
+
+"That lady she lived with was awful mad when she came to Foleys
+looking for Bertha. She said she'd put Bertha where she wouldn't run
+away again for one while. That's what she said."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed Amy suddenly. "Do you suppose--Child! did the
+woman come to your house----"
+
+"Foley's house. I ain't got a house," declared Henrietta.
+
+"Well, to Mrs. Foley's house in a big maroon automobile?" finished
+Amy.
+
+"No'm. Didn't come in a car at all. She came on foot, she did. She
+said Bertha was a silly to run away when nothing was going to hurt
+her. But she looked mad enough to hurt her," concluded the observant
+Henrietta.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Amy again. "Was she dark and thin and--and waspish
+looking?"
+
+"Who was?" asked the child, staring.
+
+"The woman who asked for Bertha," explained Jessie, quite as eagerly
+as her chum.
+
+"She wasn't no wasp," drawled Henrietta, with indescribable scorn.
+"She was big around, like a barrel. She was fat, and red, and ugly. I
+don't like that woman. And I guess Bertha had a right to run away from
+her."
+
+Jessie and Amy looked at each other and nodded. They had both decided
+that the girl, Bertha, was the one they had seen carried off in the
+big French car.
+
+"And you don't know what Bertha was afraid of?" asked Jessie.
+
+"I dunno. She just wrote me--I can read writing--that she was coming
+to see me at Foley's. And she never come."
+
+"Of course you did not hear anything about her when you searched up
+and down the boulevard the other day?" Amy asked.
+
+"There wouldn't many of 'em answer questions," said the child
+gloomily. "Some of 'em shooed me out of their yards before I could
+ask."
+
+Amy had undressed the child now down to one scant undergarment. She
+looked from her bony little body to Jessie, and Amy's eyes actually
+filled with tears.
+
+"Aren't you hungry, honey?" she asked the waif.
+
+"Ain't I hungry?" scoffed Henrietta. "Ain't I always hungry? Mrs.
+Foley says I'm empty as a drum. She can't fill me up. That's how I
+came over here to-day."
+
+"Because she didn't give you enough to eat?" demanded Amy, in rising
+wrath.
+
+"Aw, she'd give it me if she had it. But the kids got to be fed first,
+ain't they? And when you've got six of 'em and a man that drinks----"
+
+"It is quite understandable, dear," Jessie said, with more composure
+than her chum could display at the moment. "So you came over
+here----"
+
+"To pick strawberries. Got a pail half full down there somewhere. The
+thunder scared me. Then I saw youse two up here and I thought you was
+the Carter ha'nt sure enough."
+
+"Let's have some lunch," cried Amy quickly.
+
+She got up and began to bustle about. She opened the two boxes they
+had brought and set the vacuum bottle of hot cocoa on the bench. There
+were two cups and she insisted upon giving one of them to Henrietta.
+
+"I don't believe I could drink a drop or eat a morsel," she said to
+Jessie, when the latter remonstrated. "I feel as if I was in the
+famine section of Armenia or Russia or China. That poor little
+thing!"
+
+She insisted upon giving Henrietta the bulk of her own lunch and all
+the tidbits she could find in Jessie's lunchbox. The freckle-faced
+girl began systematically to fill up the hollow with which she was
+accredited. It was evident that the good food made Henrietta quite
+forget the so-called ha'nts.
+
+The rain continued to fall torrentially; the thunder muttered almost
+continually, but in the distance; again and again the lightning
+flashed.
+
+Jessie Norwood fed the fire on the hearth until the warmth of it could
+be felt to the farther end of the big old kitchen. She and Henrietta
+were fast becoming dried, and their outer clothing could soon be put
+on again.
+
+"I wonder if Momsy was scared when the storm broke," ruminated Jessie.
+"She thinks the aerial may attract lightning."
+
+"Nothing like that," declared Amy cheerfully. "But I wish we had a
+radio sending set here and could talk to her----"
+
+"Ow! What's that?"
+
+Even Henrietta stopped eating, looked upward at the dusty ceiling, and
+listened for a repetition of the sound. It came in a moment--a sudden
+thump--then the thrashing about of something on the bare boards of
+the floor of the loft over the kitchen.
+
+"O-oh!" squealed Amy, jumping up from the table.
+
+"What _can_ it be?" demanded Jessie Norwood, and her face expressed
+fear likewise.
+
+Henrietta took another enormous bite of sandwich; from behind that
+barrier she said in a muffled tone:
+
+"Guess it's the Carter ha'nt after all!"
+
+
+
+
+HENRIETTA IS VALIANT
+
+THE PRIZE IDEA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HENRIETTA IS VALIANT
+
+
+Jessie Norwood tried to remember that she should set little Henrietta
+a good example. She should not show panic because of the mysterious
+noise in the loft of the abandoned Carter house.
+
+But as the thrashing sounds continued and finally the cause of it came
+tumbling down the enclosed stairway and bumped against the door that
+opened from the kitchen upon that stairway, Jessie screamed almost as
+loud as Amy.
+
+Amy Drew, however, ran out into the rain. Neither Jessie nor the
+little freckle-faced girl were garbed properly for an appearance in
+the open; not even in as lonely a place as the clearing about the old
+Carter house. To tell the truth, Henrietta kept on eating and did not
+at first get up from the table.
+
+"Aren't you scared, child?" demanded Jessie, in surprise.
+
+"Course I am," agreed the little girl. "But ha'nts chase you anywhere.
+They can go right through keyholes and doors----"
+
+"Mercy! Whatever it is seems determined to come through that door."
+
+"There ain't no keyhole to it," said Henrietta complacently.
+
+The banging continued at the foot of the stairs. Amy was shrieking for
+her chum to come out of the house. But Jessie began to be ashamed of
+her momentary panic.
+
+"I'm going to see what it is," she declared, approaching the door.
+
+"Maybe you won't see nothing," said Henrietta. "Mrs. Foley says that
+ha'nts is sometimes just wind. You don't see nothing. Only you feel
+creepy and cold fingers touch you and a chilly breath hits the back o'
+your neck."
+
+"I declare!" exclaimed Jessie. "That Mrs. Foley ought not to tell you
+such things."
+
+She looked about for some weapon, for the sounds behind the door
+panels seemed to suggest something very material. There was a long
+hardwood stick standing in the corner. It might have been a mop handle
+or something of the kind. Jessie seized it, and with more courage
+again walked toward the door.
+
+Bang, bang, thump! the noise was repeated. She stretched a tentative
+hand toward the latch. Should she lift it? Was there something
+supernatural on the stairway?
+
+She saw the door tremble from the blows delivered upon it. There was
+nothing spiritual about that.
+
+"Whatever it is----"
+
+To punctuate her observation Jessie Norwood lifted the iron latch and
+jerked open the door. It was dusky in the stairway and she could not
+see a thing. But almost instantly there tumbled out upon the kitchen
+floor something that brought shriek after shriek from Jessie's lips.
+
+"Hi!" cried Henrietta. "Did it bite you?"
+
+Jessie did not stop to answer. She seized her skirt drying before the
+fire and wrapped it around her bare shoulders as she ran through the
+outer door. She left behind her writhing all over the kitchen floor a
+pair of big blacksnakes.
+
+The fighting snakes hissed and thumped about, wound about each other
+like a braided rope. Probably the warmth of the fire passing up the
+chimney had stirred the snakes up, and it was evident that they were
+in no pleasant frame of mind.
+
+"What is it? Ghosts?" cried Amy Drew, standing in the rain.
+
+"It's worse! It's snakes!" Jessie declared, looking fearfully behind
+her, and in at the door.
+
+She had dropped the stick with which she had so valiantly faced the
+unknown. But when that unknown had become known--and Jessie had always
+been very much afraid of serpents--all the girl's valor seemed to have
+evaporated.
+
+"Mercy!" gasped Amy. "What's going on in there? Hear that thumping,
+will you?"
+
+"They are fighting, I guess," replied her chum.
+
+"Where's Hen?"
+
+"She's in there, too. She didn't stop eating."
+
+At that Amy began laughing hysterically. "She can't eat the snakes,
+can she?" she shrieked at last. "But maybe they'll eat her. How many
+snakes are there, Jess?"
+
+"Do you suppose I stopped to count them? Dozens, maybe. They came
+pouring out of that dark stairway----"
+
+"Where _is_ the child?" demanded Amy, who had come up upon the porch,
+and was now peering in through the doorway.
+
+The sounds from inside, like the beating of a flail, continued. Amy
+craned her head around the door jamb to see.
+
+"Goodness, mercy, child!" she shouted. "Look out what you are doing!
+You will get bitten!"
+
+The noise of the thrashing stopped. At least, the larger part of the
+noise. Henrietta came to the door with the stick that Jessie had
+dropped in her hand.
+
+"I fixed 'em," she said calmly. "I just hate snakes. I always kill
+them black ones. They ain't got no poison. And I shut the door so if
+there's any more upstairs they won't come down. You can come back to
+dinner."
+
+"Well, you darling!" gasped Jessie.
+
+Her chum leaned against the door jamb while peal after peal of
+laughter shook her. She could just put out her hands and make motions
+at the freckled little girl.
+
+"She--she--she----"
+
+"For pity's sake, Amy Drew!" exclaimed Jessie. "You'll have a fit, or
+something."
+
+"She--she didn't even--stop--chewing!" Amy got out at last.
+
+"Bless her heart! She's the bravest little thing!" Jessie declared,
+shakingly. "We two great, big girls should be ashamed."
+
+"I guess you ain't so much acquainted with snakes as I am," Henrietta
+said, sliding onto the bench again. "But I certainly am glad it wasn't
+Carter's ha'nt."
+
+"But," cried Amy, still weak from laughing, "it _was_ the ghost. Of
+course, those snakes had a home upstairs there. Probably in the
+chimney. And every time anybody came here to picnic and built a fire,
+they got warmed up and started moving about. Thusly, the ghost stories
+about the Carter house."
+
+"Your explanation is ingenious, at any rate," admitted Jessie. "Ugh!
+They are still writhing. Are you sure they are dead, Henrietta?"
+
+"That's the trouble with snakes," said the child. "They don't know
+enough to keep still when they're dead-ed. I smashed their heads good
+for 'em."
+
+But Amy could not bear to sit down to the bench again until she had
+taken the stick and poked the dead but still writhing snakes out of
+the house. The rain was diminishing now and the thunder and lightning
+had receded into the distance. The two older girls ate very little of
+the luncheon they had brought. It was with much amazement that they
+watched Henrietta absorb sandwiches, cake, eggs, and fruit. She did a
+thorough job.
+
+"Isn't she the bravest little thing?" Jessie whispered to her chum.
+"Did you ever hear the like?"
+
+"I guess that girl we saw run away with, was her cousin all right,"
+said Amy. "How she did fight!"
+
+At that statement Jessie was reminded of the thing that had been
+puzzling her for some days. She began asking questions about Bertha,
+how she looked, how old she was, and how she was dressed.
+
+"She's just my cousin. She is as old as you girls, I guess, but not so
+awful old," Henrietta said. "I don't know what she had on her. She
+ain't as pretty as you girls. Guess there ain't none of our family
+real pretty," and Henrietta shook her head with reflection.
+
+"What happened to her that she wanted to leave that dreadful fat
+woman?" asked Amy, now, as well as her chum, taking an interest in
+the matter.
+
+"There wasn't a thing happened to her that I know of," said Henrietta,
+shaking her head again. "But by the way that lady talked it would
+happen to her if she got hold of Bertha again."
+
+"How dreadful," murmured Jessie, looking at her chum.
+
+"I don't see how we can help the girl," said Amy. "She has been shut
+up some place, of course. If I could just think who that skinny woman
+is--or who she looks like. But how she can drive a car!"
+
+"I think we can do something," Jessie declared. "I've had my head so
+full of radio that I haven't thought much about this poor child's
+cousin and her trouble."
+
+"What will you do?" asked Amy.
+
+"Tell daddy. He ought to be able to advise."
+
+"That's a fact," agreed Amy, her eyes twinkling. "He is quite a good
+lawyer. Of course, not so good as Mr. Wilbur Drew. But he'll do at a
+pinch."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PRIZE IDEA
+
+
+When the two girls paddled back up the lake after their adventure at
+the old Carter house, Henrietta squatted in the middle of the canoe
+and seemed to enjoy the trip immensely.
+
+"I seen these sort of boats going up and down the lake, and they look
+pretty. Me and Charlie Foley and some of the other boys at Dogtown
+made a raft. But Mr. Foley busted it with an ax. He said we had no
+business using the coal-cellar door and Mrs. Foley's bread-mixing
+board. So we didn't get to go sailing," observed the freckle-faced
+child.
+
+Almost everything the child said made Amy laugh. Nevertheless, like
+her chum, Amy felt keenly the pathos of the little girl's situation.
+Perhaps with Amy Drew this interest went no farther than sympathy,
+whereas Jessie was already, and before this incident, puzzling her
+mind regarding what might be done to help Henrietta and improve her
+situation.
+
+The girls paddled the canoe in to a broken landing just below the
+scattered shacks of Dogtown, and Henrietta went ashore. It was plain
+that she would have enjoyed riding farther in the canoe.
+
+"If you see us come down this way again, honey," Amy said, "run down
+here to the shore and we will take you aboard."
+
+"If Mrs. Foley will let you," added Jessie.
+
+"I dunno what Mrs. Foley will say about the strawberries. I told her
+I'd bring home some if she'd let me go over there. And here I come
+home without even the bucket."
+
+"It is altogether too wet to pick wild strawberries," Jessie said. "I
+wanted some myself. But we shall have to go another day. And you can
+find your bucket then, Henrietta."
+
+The chums drove their craft up the lake and in half an hour sighted
+the Norwood place and its roses. Everything ashore was saturated, of
+course. And in one place the girls saw that the storm had done some
+damage.
+
+A grove of tall trees at the head of the lake and near the landing
+belonging to the Norwood place was a landmark that could be seen for
+several miles and from almost any direction on this side of Bonwit
+Boulevard. As the canoe swept in toward the dock Amy cried aloud:
+
+"Look! Look, Jess! No wonder we thought that thunder was so sharp. It
+struck here."
+
+"The thunder struck?" repeated Jessie, laughing. "I _am_
+thunderstruck, then. You mean----Oh, Amy! That beautiful great tree!"
+
+She saw what had first caught Amy's eye. One of the tallest of the
+trees was split from near its top almost to the foot of the trunk. The
+white gash looked like a wide strip of paper pasted down the stick of
+ruined timber.
+
+"Isn't that too bad?" said Amy, staring.
+
+But suddenly Jessie drove her paddle deep into the water and sent the
+canoe in a dash to the landing. She fended off skillfully, hopped out,
+and began to run.
+
+"What is the matter, Jess?" shrieked Amy. "You've left me to do all
+the work."
+
+"Momsy!" gasped out Jessie, looking back for an instant. "She was
+scared to death that the lightning would strike the house because of
+the radio aerial."
+
+Her chum came leaping up the hill behind her, having moored the canoe
+with one hitch. She cried out:
+
+"No danger from lightning if you shut the switch at the set. You know
+that, Jessie."
+
+"But Momsy doesn't know it," returned the other girl, and dashed madly
+into the house.
+
+She had forgotten to tell her mother of that fact--the safety of the
+closed receiving switch. She felt condemned. Suppose her mother had
+been frightened by the thunder and lightning and should pay for it
+with one of her long and torturing sick headaches?
+
+"Momsy! Momsy!" she cried, bursting into the hall.
+
+"Your mother is down town, Miss Jessie," said the quiet voice of the
+parlor maid. "She drove down in her own car before the storm."
+
+"Oh! She wasn't here when the lightning struck----"
+
+"No, Miss Jessie. And that was some thunder-clap! Cook says she'll
+never get over it. But I guess she will. Bill, the gardener's boy,
+says it struck a tree down by the water."
+
+"So it did," Jessie rejoined with relief. "Well, I certainly am glad
+Momsy wasn't here. It's all right, Amy," she called through the screen
+doors.
+
+"I am glad. I thought it was all wrong by the way you ran. Now let's
+go back and get our rugs and the rest of the junk out of the canoe.
+And, oh, me! Ain't I hungry!"
+
+Jessie ignored this oft-repeated complaint, saying:
+
+"We should have remembered about the bazaar committee meeting. Momsy
+would go to that. Do you know, Amy, she thinks she can get the other
+ladies to agree to have the lawn party out here."
+
+"Here, in Roselawn?" asked her chum.
+
+"Right here on our place."
+
+"How fine!" ejaculated Amy. "But, Jessie, I wish I could think of some
+awfully smart idea to work in connection with the lawn party. That
+lovely, lovely sports coat that Letterblair has in his window has
+taken my eye."
+
+"I saw it," Jessie admitted. "And the card says it goes to the girl
+under eighteen who suggests the best money-making scheme in unusual
+channels that can be used by the bazaar committee. Yes, it's lovely."
+
+"Let's put on our thinking-caps, honey, and try for it. Only two days
+more."
+
+"And if we win it, shall we divide the coat between us?"
+
+"No, we'll cast lots for it," said Amy seriously. "It is a be-a-utiful
+coat!"
+
+That evening after dinner Jessie climbed upon the arm of her father's
+big chair in the library, sitting there and swinging her feet just as
+though she were a very small child again. He hugged her up to him with
+one arm while he laid down the book he was reading.
+
+"Out with it, daughter," Mr. Norwood said. "What is the desperate need
+for a father?"
+
+"It is not very desperate, and really it is none of my business,"
+began Jessie thoughtfully.
+
+"And that does not surprise me. It will not be the first time that you
+have shown interest in something decidedly not your concern."
+
+"Oh! But I am concerned about her, Daddy."
+
+"A lady in the case, eh?"
+
+"A girl. Like Amy and me. Oh, no! _Not_ like Amy and me. But about our
+age."
+
+"What is her name and what has she done?"
+
+"Bertha. Or, perhaps it isn't Bertha. But we think so."
+
+"Somehow, it seems to me, you have begun wrong. Who is this young
+person who may be Bertha but who probably is not?"
+
+Jessie told him about the "kidnaped" girl then. But it spilled out of
+her mouth so rapidly and so disconnectedly that it is little wonder
+that Mr. Norwood, lawyer though he was, got a rather hazy idea of the
+incident connected with the strange girl's being captured on Dogtown
+Lane.
+
+In fact, he got that girl and little, freckled Henrietta Haney rather
+mixed up in his mind. He found himself advising Jessie to have the
+child come to the house so that Momsy could see her. Momsy always knew
+what to do to help such unfortunates.
+
+"And you think there can be nothing done for that other girl?" Jessie
+asked, rather mournfully.
+
+"Oh! You mean the girl you saw put in the automobile and taken away?
+Well, we don't know her or the woman who took her, do we?"
+
+"No-o. Though Amy says she thinks she has seen somebody who looks
+like the woman driving the car before."
+
+"Humph! You have no case," declared Mr. Norwood, in his most judicial
+manner. "I fear it would be thrown out of court."
+
+"Oh, dear!"
+
+"If your little acquaintance could describe her cousin so that we
+could give the description to the police--or broadcast it by radio,"
+and Mr. Norwood laughed.
+
+Jessie suddenly hopped down from the chair arm and began a pirouette
+about the room, clapping her hands as she danced.
+
+"I've got it! I've got it!" she cried. "Radio! Oh, Daddy! you are just
+the nicest man. You give me such fine ideas!"
+
+"You evidently see your way clear to a settlement of this legal matter
+you brought to my attention," said Mr. Norwood quite gravely.
+
+"Nothing like that! Nothing like that!" cried Jessie. "Oh, no. But you
+have given me such a fine idea for winning the prize Momsy and the
+other ladies are offering. I've got it! I've got it!" and she danced
+out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+BELLE RINGOLD
+
+THE GLORIOUS FOURTH
+
+THE BAZAAR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+BELLE RINGOLD
+
+
+Whether Jessie Norwood actually "had it," as she proclaimed, or not,
+she kept very quiet about her discovery of what she believed to be a
+brand new idea. She did not tell Amy, even, or Momsy. That would have
+been against the rules of the contest.
+
+She wrote out her suggestion for the prize idea, sealed it in an
+envelope, and dropped it through the slit in the locked box in the
+parish house, placed there for that purpose. It was not long to wait
+until the next evening but one.
+
+She rode down to the church in Momsy's car, an electric runabout, and
+waited outside the committee room door with some of the other girls
+and not a few of the boys of the parish, for there had been a prize
+offered, too, for the boy who made the best suggestion.
+
+"I am sure they are going to use my idea," Belle Ringold said, with a
+toss of her bobbed curls.
+
+Did we introduce you to Belle? By this speech you may know she was a
+very confident person, not easily persuaded that her own way was not
+always best. She not only had her hair bobbed in the approved manner
+of that season, but her mother was ill-advised enough to allow her to
+wear long, dangling earrings, and she favored a manner of walking
+(when she did not forget) that Burd Alling called "the serpentine
+slink." Belle thought she was wholly grown up.
+
+"They couldn't throw out my idea," repeated Belle.
+
+"What is it, Belle, honey?" asked one of her chums.
+
+"She can't tell," put in Amy, who was present. "That is one of the
+rules."
+
+"Pooh!" scoffed Belle. "Guess I'll tell if I want to. That won't
+invalidate my chances. They will be only too glad to use my idea."
+
+"Dear me," drawled Amy, laughing. "You're just as sure as sure, aren't
+you?"
+
+Miss Seymour, the girls' English teacher in school, came to the door
+of the committee room with a paper in her hand. A semblance of order
+immediately fell upon the company.
+
+"We have just now decided upon the two suggestions of all those placed
+in the box, the two prize ideas. And both are very good, I must say.
+Chippendale Truro! Is Chip here?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Chip, who was a snub-nosed boy whose chums declared
+"all his brains were in his head."
+
+"Chip, I think your idea is very good. You will be interested to learn
+what it is, girls. Chip suggests that all the waitresses and
+saleswomen at the lawn party wear masks--little black masks as one
+does at a masquerade party. That will make them stand out from the
+guests. And the committee are pleased with the idea. Chip gets the
+tennis racket in Mr. Brill's show-window."
+
+"Cricky, Chip! how did you come to think of that?" demanded one of the
+boys in an undertone.
+
+"Well, they are going to be regular road-agents, aren't they?" asked
+the snub-nosed boy. "They take everything you have in your pockets at
+those fairs. They ought to wear masks--and carry guns, too. Only I
+didn't dare suggest the guns."
+
+Amid the muffled explosion of laughter following this statement, Miss
+Seymour began speaking again:
+
+"The girl's prize--the sports coat at Letterblair's--goes to Jessie
+Norwood, on whose father's lawn the bazaar is to be held on the
+afternoon and evening of the Fourth of July."
+
+At this announcement Belle Ringold actually cried out: "What's that?"
+
+"Hush!" commanded Miss Seymour. "Jessie has suggested that a tent be
+erected--her father has one stored in his garage--and that her radio
+set be placed in the tent and re-connected. With an amplifier the
+concerts broadcasted from several stations can be heard inside the
+tent, and we will charge admission to the tent. Radio is a new and
+novel form of amusement and, the committee thinks, will attract a
+large patronage. The coat is yours, Jessie."
+
+"Well, isn't that the meanest thing!" ejaculated Belle Ringold.
+
+"Did I hear you say something, Belle?" demanded Miss Seymour, in her
+very sternest way.
+
+"Well, I want to say----"
+
+"Don't say it," advised the teacher. "The decisions upon the prize
+ideas are arbitrary. The committee is responsible for its acts, and
+must decide upon all such matters. The affair is closed," and she went
+back into the committee room and closed the door.
+
+"Well, isn't she the mean thing!" exclaimed one of those girls who
+liked to stand well with Belle Ringold.
+
+"I am sure your idea was as good as good could be, Belle," Jessie
+said. "Only I happened to have the radio set, and--and everything is
+rigged right for my idea to work out."
+
+"Oh, I can see that it was rigged right," snapped Belle. "Your mother
+is on the committee, and the lawn party is going to be at your house.
+Oh, yes! No favoritism shown, of course."
+
+"Oh, cat's foot!" exclaimed Amy, linking her arm in Jessie's. "Let her
+splutter, Jess. We'll go to the Dainties Shop and have a George
+Washington sundae."
+
+"I am afraid Belle is going to be very unpleasant about this thing,"
+sighed Jessie, as she and her chum came out of the parish house.
+
+"As usual," commented Amy. "Why should we care?"
+
+"I hate to have unpleasant things happen."
+
+"Think of the new coat," laughed Amy. "And I do think you were awfully
+smart to think of using your radio in that way. Lots of people, do you
+know, don't believe it can be so. They think it is make-believe."
+
+"How can they, when wireless telegraphy has been known so long?"
+
+"But, after all, this is something different," Amy said. "Hearing
+voices right out of the air! Well, you know, Jess, I said before, I
+thought it was sort of spooky."
+
+"Ha, ha!" giggled her chum. "All the spooks you know anything about
+personally are blacksnakes. Don't forget that."
+
+"And how brave that little Hen was," sighed Amy, as they sat down to
+the round glass table in the Dainties Shop. "I never saw such a
+child."
+
+"I was trying to get daddy interested in her and in her lost
+cousin--if that was her cousin whom we saw carried off," Jessie
+returned. "Come to think of it, I didn't get very far with my story. I
+must talk to daddy again. But Momsy says he is much troubled over a
+case he has on his hands, an important case, and I suppose he hasn't
+time for our small affairs."
+
+"I imagine that girl who was kidnaped doesn't think hers is a small
+affair," observed Amy Drew, dipping her spoon into the rich concoction
+that had been placed before her. "Oh, yum, yum! Isn't this good,
+Jess?"
+
+"Scrumptious. By the way, who is going to pay for it?"
+
+"Oh, my! Haven't you any money?" demanded Amy.
+
+"We-ell, you suggested this treat."
+
+"But you should stand it. You won the prize coat," giggled Amy.
+
+"I never saw the like of you!" exclaimed Jessie. "And you say I am not
+fit to carry money, and all. Have you actually got me in here without
+being able to pay for this cream?"
+
+"But haven't you any money?" cried Amy.
+
+"Not one cent. I shall have to hurry back to the parish house and beg
+some of Momsy."
+
+"And leave me here?" demanded Amy. "Never!"
+
+"How will you fix it, then?" asked Jessie, who was really disturbed
+and could not enjoy her sundae.
+
+"Oh, don't let that nice treat go to waste, Jess."
+
+"It does not taste nice to me if we can't pay for it."
+
+"Don't be foolish. Leave it to me," said Amy, getting on her feet.
+"I'll speak to the clerk. He's nice looking and wears his hair slicked
+back like patent leather. Lo-o-vely hair."
+
+"Amy Drew! Behave!"
+
+"I am. I am behaving right up, I tell you. I am sure I can make that
+clerk chalk the amount down until we come in again."
+
+"I would be shamed to death," Jessie declared, her face flushing
+almost angrily, for sometimes Amy did try her. "I will not hear of
+your doing that. You sit down here and wait till I run back to the
+church----"
+
+"Oh, you won't have to," interrupted Amy. "Here come some of the
+girls. We can borrow----"
+
+But the girl who headed the little group just then entering the door
+of the Dainties Shop was Belle Ringold. The three who followed Belle
+were her particular friends. Jessie did not feel that she wanted to
+borrow money of Belle or her friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE GLORIOUS FOURTH
+
+
+"Never mind," whispered Amy Drew quickly, quite understanding her
+chum's feelings regarding Belle and her group. "I'll ask them. It's my
+fault, anyway. And I only meant it for a joke----"
+
+"A pretty poor joke, Amy," Jessie said, with some sharpness. "And I
+don't want you to borrow of them. I'll run back to the church."
+
+She started to leave the Dainties Shop. Sally Moon, who was just
+behind Belle Ringold, halted Jessie with a firm grasp on her sleeve.
+
+"Don't run away just because we came in, Jess," she said.
+
+"I'm coming right back," Jessie Norwood explained. "Don't keep me."
+
+"Where you going, Jess?" drawled another of the group.
+
+"I've got to run back to the church to speak to mother for a moment."
+
+"Your mother's not there," broke in Belle. "She was leaving in her
+flivver when we came away. The committee's broken up and the parish
+house door is locked."
+
+"Oh, no!" murmured Jessie, a good deal appalled.
+
+"Don't I tell you _yes_?" snapped Belle. "Don't you believe me?"
+
+"Of course I believe what you say, Belle," Jessie rejoined politely.
+"I only said 'Oh, no!' because I was startled."
+
+"What scared you?" demanded Belle, curiously.
+
+"Why, I--I'm not scared----"
+
+"It is none of your business, Belle Ringold," put in Amy. "Don't annoy
+her. Here, Jessie, I'll----"
+
+The clerk who waited on them had come to the table and placed a
+punched ticket for the sundaes on it. He evidently expected to be paid
+by the two girls. The other four were noisily grouping themselves
+about another table. Belle Ringold said:
+
+"Give Nick your orders, girls. This is on me. I want a banana royal,
+Nick. Hurry up."
+
+The young fellow with the "patent leather" hair still lingered by the
+table where Jessie and Amy had sat. Belle turned around to stare at
+the two guilty-looking chums. She sneered.
+
+"What's the matter with you and Jess, Amy Drew? Were you trying to
+slip out without paying Nick? I shouldn't wonder!"
+
+"Oh!" gasped Jessie, flushing and then paling.
+
+But Amy burst out laughing. It was a fact that Amy Drew often saw
+humor where her chum could not spy anything in the least laughable.
+With the clerk waiting and these four girls, more than a little
+unfriendly, ready to make unkind remarks if they but knew the
+truth----
+
+What should she do? Jessie looked around wildly. Amy clung to a chair
+and laughed, and laughed. Her chum desired greatly to have the floor
+of the New Melford Dainties Shop open at her feet and swallow her!
+
+"What's the matter with you, Amy Drew? You crazy?" demanded Belle.
+
+"I--I----" Amy could get no farther. She weaved back and forth,
+utterly hysterical.
+
+"If you young ladies will pay me, please," stammered the clerk,
+wondering. "I'd like to wait on these other customers."
+
+"I want my banana royal, Nick," cried Belle.
+
+The other three girls gave their orders. The clerk looked from the
+laughing Amy to the trembling Jessie. He was about to reiterate his
+demand for payment.
+
+And just then Heaven sent an angel! Two, in very truth! At least, so
+it seemed to Jessie Norwood.
+
+"Darry!" she almost squealed. "And Burd Alling! We--we thought you
+were at Atlantic Highlands."
+
+The two young fellows came hurrying into the shop. They had evidently
+seen the girls from outside. Darry grabbed his sister and sat her
+down at a table. He grinned widely, bowing to Belle and her crowd.
+
+"Come on, Jessie!" he commanded. "No matter how many George Washington
+sundaes you kids have eaten----"
+
+"'Kids'! Indeed! I like that!" exploded Amy.
+
+But her brother swept on, ignoring her objection: "No matter how many
+you have eaten, there is always room for one more. You and Amy,
+Jessie, must have another sundae on me."
+
+"Darry!" exclaimed Jessie Norwood. "I thought you and Burd went to his
+aunt's."
+
+"And we came back. That is an awful place. There's an uncle, too--a
+second crop uncle. And both uncle and auntie are vegetarians, or
+something. Maybe it's their religion. Anyway, they eat like
+horses--oats, and barley, and chopped straw. We were there for two
+meals. Shall we ever catch up on our regular rations, Burd?"
+
+"I've my doubts," said his friend. "Say, Nick, bring me a plate of the
+fillingest thing there is on your bill of fare."
+
+"In just a minute," replied the clerk, hopping around the other table
+to have Belle Ringold and her friends repeat their orders.
+
+Belle had immediately begun preening when Darry and Burd came in. That
+the two college youths were so much older, and that they merely
+considered Amy and Jessie "kids," made no difference to Belle. She
+really thought that she was quite grown up and that college men should
+be interested in her.
+
+"We had just finished, boys," Jessie managed to say in a low tone. "We
+had not even paid for our sundaes."
+
+Darry and Burd just then caught sight of the punched check lying on
+the table and they both reached for it. There was some little rivalry
+over who should pay the score, but Darry won.
+
+"Leave it to me," he said cheerfully. "Girls shouldn't be trusted with
+money anyway."
+
+"Oh! Oh!" gurgled Amy, choked with laughter again.
+
+"What's the matter with you, Sis?" demanded her brother.
+
+Jessie forbade her chum to tell, by a hard stare and a determined
+shake of her head. It was all right to have Darry pay the check--it
+was really a relief--but it did not seem to Jessie as though she could
+endure having the matter made an open joke of.
+
+The four settled about the little table. But the Ringold crowd was too
+near. Belle turned sideways in her chair, even before they were
+served, and, being at Darry's elbow, insisted upon talking to him.
+
+"Talk about my aunt!" said Burd Alling, grinning. "I'll tell the world
+that somebody has a crush on Sir Galahad that's as plain to be seen as
+a wart on the nose of Venus."
+
+"Of all the metaphors!" exclaimed Amy.
+
+Jessie feared that Belle would overhear the comments of Burd and her
+chum, and she hurried the eating of her second sundae.
+
+"I must get home, Darry," she explained. "Momsy has gone without me in
+her car and will be surprised not to find me there."
+
+"Sure," agreed Burd quickly. "We'll gobble and hobble. Can't you tear
+yourself away, Darry?" he added, with a wicked grin.
+
+Amy's brother tried politely to turn away from Belle. But the latter
+caught him by the coat sleeve and held on while she chattered like a
+magpie to the young college man. She smiled and shook her bobbed curls
+and altogether acted in a rather ridiculous way.
+
+Darry looked foolish, then annoyed. His sister was in an ecstasy of
+delight. She enjoyed her big brother's annoyance. She and Jessie and
+Burd had finished their cream.
+
+"Come on, Darry," Burd drawled, taking a hint from the girls. "Sorry
+you are off your feed and can't finish George Washington's finest
+product. I'll eat it for you, if you say so, and then we'll beat
+it."
+
+He reached casually for Darry's plate; but the latter would not yield
+it without a struggle. The incident, however, gave Darry a chance to
+break away from the insistent Belle. The latter stared at the two
+girls at Darry's table, sniffed, and tossed her head.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Drew," she said in her high-pitched voice, "I suppose you
+have to take the children home in good season, or they would be
+chastised."
+
+"Ouch!" exclaimed Burd. "I bet that hurt you, Amy."
+
+Darry had picked up both checks from the table. Belle smiled up at him
+and moved her check to the edge of her table as Darry rather grimly
+bade her good-night. He refused to see that check, but strode over to
+the desk to pay the others.
+
+"That girl ought to get a job at a broadcasting station," growled out
+Darry, as they went out upon the street. "I never knew before she was
+such a chatterbox. Don't need any radio rigging at all where she is."
+
+"Oh, wouldn't it be fun to get a chance to work at a broadcasting
+station?" Amy cried. "We could sing, Jess. You know we sing well together.
+'The Dartmoor Boy' and 'Bobolink, Bobolink, Spink-spank-spink' and----"
+
+"And 'My Old Kentucky Blues,'" broke in Burd Alling. "If you are going
+to broadcast anything like that, give us something up to date."
+
+"You hush," Amy said. "If Jess and I ever get the chance we shall be
+an honor to the program. You'll see."
+
+That the two young fellows had returned so much earlier than had been
+expected was a very fortunate thing, Jessie and Amy thought. For their
+assistance was positively needed in the work of making ready for the
+Fourth of July bazaar on the Norwood place, they declared.
+
+There were only three days in which to do everything. "And believe
+me," groaned Burd before the first day was ended, "we're doing
+everything. Talk about being in training for the scrub team!"
+
+"It will do you good, Burdie," cooed Amy, knowing that the diminutive
+of Burd Alling's name would fret him. "You are getting awfully plump,
+you know you are."
+
+"I feel it peeling off," he grumbled. "Don't fear. No fellow will ever
+get too fat around you two girls. Never were two such young Simon
+Legrees before since the world began!"
+
+But the four accomplished wonders. Of course the committee and their
+assistants and some of the other young people came to help with the
+decorations. But the two girls and Amy's older brother and his friend
+set up the marquees and strung the Japanese lanterns, in each of which
+was a tiny electric light.
+
+"No candle-power fire-traps for us," Jessie said. "And then, candles
+are always blowing out."
+
+About all the relaxation they had during the time until the eve of the
+Fourth was in Jessie's room, listening to the radio concerts. Mr.
+Norwood brought out from the city a two-step amplifier and a horn and
+they were attached to the instrument.
+
+The third of the month, with the help of the men servants on the
+Norwood place, the tent for the radio concert was set up between the
+house and the driveway, and chairs were brought from the parish house
+to seat a hundred people. It was a good tent, and there were hangings
+which had been used in some church entertainment in the past to help
+make it sound proof.
+
+They strung through it a few electric bulbs, which would give light
+enough. And the lead wire from the aerials, well grounded, was brought
+directly in from overhead and connected with the radio set.
+
+"I hope that people will patronize the tent generously," Jessie said.
+"We can give a show every hour while the crowd is here."
+
+"What are you going to charge for admission?" Amy asked.
+
+"Momsy says we ought to get a quarter. But ten cents----"
+
+"Ten cents for children, grown folks a quarter," suggested Amy. "The
+kids will keep coming back, but the grown folks will come only once."
+
+"That is an idea," agreed Jessie. "But what bothers me is the fact
+that there are only concerts at certain times. We ought to begin
+giving the shows early in the afternoon. Of course, the radio is just
+as wonderful when it brings weather reports and agricultural prices as
+when Toscanini sings or Volburg plays the violin," and she laughed.
+"But----"
+
+"I've got it!" cried her chum, with sudden animation. "Give
+lectures."
+
+"What! You, Amy Drew, suggesting such a horrid thing? And who will
+give the lecture?"
+
+"Oh, this is a different sort of lecture. Tell a little story about
+the radio, what has already been done with it, and what is expected of
+it in the future. I believe you could do it nicely, Jess. That sort of
+lecture I would stand for myself."
+
+"I suppose somebody has got to attend to the radio and talk about it.
+I had not thought of that," agreed Jessie. "I'll see what the
+committee say. But me lecture? I never did think of doing that!" she
+proclaimed, in no little anxiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE BAZAAR
+
+
+When she had talked it over with Momsy and Miss Seymour, however,
+Jessie Norwood took up the thought of the radio lecture quite
+seriously. Somebody must explain and manage the entertainment in the
+radio tent, and who better than Jessie?
+
+"It is quite wonderful how much you young people have learned about
+radio--so much more than I had any idea," said the school teacher. "Of
+course you can write a little prose essay, Jessie, get it by heart,
+and repeat it at each session in the tent, if you feel timid about
+giving an off-hand talk on the subject."
+
+"You can do it if you only think you can, Jessie," said her mother,
+smiling. "I am sure I have a very smart daughter."
+
+"Oh, now, Momsy! If they should laugh at me----"
+
+"Don't give them a chance to laugh, dear. Make your talk so
+interesting and informative that they can't laugh."
+
+Thus encouraged, Jessie spent all the forenoon of the Fourth shut up
+in her own room making ready for the afternoon and evening. She had
+already made a careful schedule of the broadcasting done by all the
+stations within reach of her fine radio set, and found that it was
+possible, by tuning her instrument to the wave lengths of different
+stations, to get something interesting into every hour from two
+o'clock on until eleven.
+
+Naturally, some of the entertainments would be more interesting or
+amusing than others; but as New Melford people for the most part were
+as yet unfamiliar with radio, almost anything out of the air would
+seem curious and entertaining.
+
+"Besides," Burd Alling said in comment on this, "for a good cause we
+are all ready and willing to be bunkoed a little."
+
+"Let me tell you, Mr. Smarty," said Amy, "that Jessie's lecture is
+well worth the price of admission alone. Never mind the radio
+entertainment."
+
+"I'll come to hear it every time," agreed Burd. "You can't scare me!"
+
+The radio had been carefully tried out in the tent the evening before.
+The boys had got the market reports and the early baseball scores out
+of the air on Fourth of July morning, before the bazaar opened. When
+Jessie came out after luncheon to take charge of the radio tent, she
+felt that she was letter perfect in the "talk" she had arranged to
+introduce each session of the wireless entertainment.
+
+No admission was charged to the Norwood grounds; but several of the
+older boys had been instructed to keep an oversight of the entire
+place that careless and possibly rough youngsters should do no harm.
+The Norwoods', like the Drews' was one of the show places of the
+Roselawn section of New Melford. Boys and girls might do considerable
+harm around the place if they were not under discipline.
+
+The girls and boys belonging to the congregation of Dr. Stanley's
+church were on hand as flower sellers, booth attendants, and
+waitresses. Ice-creams and sherbets were served from the garage;
+sandwiches and cake from the house kitchen, where Mrs. Norwood's cook
+herself presided proudly over the goodies.
+
+In several booths were orangeade, lemonade, and other soft drinks. The
+fancy costumes and the funny masks the girls and boys wore certainly
+were "fetching." That the masks were the result of a joke on Chip
+Truro's part made them none the less effective.
+
+Amy was flying about, as busy as a bee. Darry and Burd were at the
+head of the "police." Miss Seymour took tickets for the radio tent,
+and after the first entertainment, beginning at two o'clock, she
+complimented Jessie warmly on the success of her talk on radio with
+which the girl introduced the show.
+
+The lawns of the Norwood place began to be crowded before two o'clock.
+Cars were parked for several blocks in both directions. Special
+policemen had been sent out from town to patrol the vicinity. Dr.
+Stanley's smile, as he walked about welcoming the guests, expanded to
+an almost unbelievable breadth.
+
+The noisy and explosive Fourth as it used to be is now scarcely known.
+Our forefathers did not realize that freedom could be celebrated
+without guns and firecrackers and the more or less smelly and
+dangerous burning of powder.
+
+"Now," stated Burd Alling pompously, "we celebrate the name of the
+Father of his Country with a dish of fruit ice-cream. How are the
+mighty fallen! A George Washington sundae, please, with plenty of
+'sundae' on it. Thank you!"
+
+Then he gave up twice the price that he would have had to pay at the
+Dainties Shop down town for the same concoction to the young lady in
+the Columbine skirt and the mask.
+
+"Young Truro had it right," grumbled Darry. "It's a hold-up."
+
+"But you know you like to be robbed for a good cause," chuckled Amy,
+who chanced to hear these comments. "And remember that Doctor Stanley
+is going to get his share out of this."
+
+"Right-o," agreed Burd. "The doctor is all right."
+
+"But we ought to pony up the money for his support like good sports,"
+said Darry, continuing to growl.
+
+"You'd better ask him about that," cried Amy. "Do you know what the
+dear doctor says? He is glad, he says, to know that so many people who
+never would by any chance come to hear him preach give something to
+the support of the church. They are in touch with the church and with
+him on an occasion like this, when by no other means could they be
+made to interest themselves in our church save to look at the clock
+face in the tower as they go past."
+
+"Guess he's right there," said Burd. "I reckon there are some men on
+the boulevard whose only religious act is to set their watches by the
+church clock as they ride by to town in their automobiles."
+
+However and whatever (to quote Amy again), the intentions were that
+brought the crowd, the Norwood place was comfortably filled. The
+goodies were bought, the sale of fancy goods added much to the
+treasury, and a bigger thing than any other source of income was the
+admission to the radio shows.
+
+The children were not the most interested part of the audience in the
+tent. From two o'clock until closing time Jessie Norwood presided at
+eight shows. She sometimes faced almost the same audience twice. Not
+only did some of the children pay their way in more than once, but
+grown people did the same. Curiosity regarding radio science was
+rife.
+
+Doctor Stanley came more than once himself to listen. And the
+minister's boys wanted to take the radio set all apart between shows
+to "see how it went."
+
+"I bet we could build one our own selves," declared Bob Stanley.
+
+"I betcha!" agreed Fred.
+
+"Only, it will cost a lot of money," groaned the minister's oldest
+son.
+
+"You can do it for about ten dollars--if you are ingenious," said
+Jessie encouragingly.
+
+"Gee whiz! That's a lot of money," said Fred.
+
+The girl knew better than to suggest lending them or giving them the
+money. But she told them all the helpful things she could about
+setting up the radio paraphernalia and rigging the wires.
+
+"I guess Nell would help us," Bob remarked. "She's pretty good, you
+know, for a girl."
+
+"I like that!" exclaimed Jessie.
+
+Bob Stanley grinned at her impishly.
+
+In the evening when the electric lights were ablaze the Norwood lawns
+were a pretty sight indeed. People came in cars from miles away. It
+was surprising how many came, it seemed, for the purpose of listening
+to the radio. That feature had been well advertised, and it came at a
+time when the popular curiosity was afire through reading so much
+about radio in the newspapers.
+
+Among the hundreds of cars parked near by were those of several of the
+more prosperous farmers of the county. One ancient, baldheaded,
+bewhiskered agriculturist sat through three of the radio shows, and
+commented freely upon this new wonder of the world.
+
+"The telegraph was just in its infancy when I was born," he told
+Jessie. "And then came the telephone, and these here automobiles, and
+flying machines, and wireless telegraph, and now this. Why, ma'am,
+this radio beats the world! It does, plumb, for sure!"
+
+The surprise and the comments of the audience did not so much interest
+Jessie Norwood as the fact that the money taken in by the tent show
+would add vastly to the profit of the bazaar.
+
+"You sure have beaten any other individual concession on the lot," Amy
+told her at the end of the evening. "You know, Belle Ringold bragged
+that she was going to take in the most money at the orangeade stand,
+because it was a hot night. But wait till we count up! I am sure you
+have beaten her with the radio tent, Jess."
+
+
+
+
+JEALOUSY
+
+CAN IT BE POSSIBLE?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+JEALOUSY
+
+
+Jessie Norwood had not much personal desire to "beat" either Belle
+Ringold or any other worker for the bazaar; but she confessed to a
+hope that the radio show had helped largely to make up the deficit in
+church income for which the bazaar had been intended.
+
+Miss Seymour had added up after each show the amount taken in at the
+door of the tent. Before the lights were put out and the booths were
+dismantled she was ready to announce to the committee the sum total of
+the radio tent's earnings.
+
+"Goody! That will beat Belle, sure as you live," Amy cried when she
+heard it, and dragged Jessie away across the lawn to hear the report
+of the sum taken from the cash-drawer under the orangeade counter.
+Groups of young people milled around the "concession" which served the
+delicious cooling drinks.
+
+"Walk right up, ladies and gentlemen--and anybody else that's with
+you--and buy the last of the chilled nectar served by these masked
+goddesses. In other words, buy us out so we can all go home." It was
+Darry Drew up on a stool ballyhooing for the soft drink booth.
+
+"Did you ever?" gasped the young collegian's sister. "He is helping
+that Belle Ringold. I am amazed at Darry!"
+
+"He is helping the church society," said Jessie, composedly.
+
+But she could easily believe that Belle had deliberately entangled
+Darry in this thing. He never would have chosen to help Belle in
+closing out her supply of orangeade.
+
+There she stood behind her counter, scarcely helping wait on the trade
+herself, but aided by three of her most intimate girl friends. Belle
+gave her attention to Darry Drew. She seemed to consider it necessary
+to steady him upon the stool while he acted as "barker."
+
+"Come away, do!" sniffed Amy to Jessie. "That brother of mine is as
+weak as water. Any girl, if she wants to, can wind him right around
+her finger."
+
+But Jessie did not wholly believe that. She knew Darry's character
+pretty well, perhaps better than Amy did. He would be altogether too
+easy-going to refuse to help Belle, especially in a good cause. Belle
+Ringold was very shrewd, young as she was, in the arts of gaining and
+holding the attention of young men.
+
+But Darry saw his sister coming and knew that Amy disapproved. He
+flushed and jumped down from the stool.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Drew! Darrington!" cried Belle, languishingly, "you won't
+leave us?" Then she, too, saw Amy and Jessie approaching. "Oh, well,"
+Belle sneered, "if the children need you, I suppose you have to go."
+
+Burd, who stood by, developed a spasm of laughter when he saw Amy's
+expression of countenance, but Jessie got her chum away before there
+came any further explosion.
+
+"Never you mind!" muttered Amy. "I know you've got her beaten with
+your radio show. You see!"
+
+It proved to be true--this prophecy of Amy's. The committee, adding up
+the intake of the various booths, reported that the radio tent had
+been by far the most profitable of any of the various money-making
+schemes. By that time the booths were entirely dismantled and almost
+everybody had gone home.
+
+Belle and her friends had lingered on the Norwood veranda, however, to
+hear the report. It seemed that Belle had not achieved all that she
+had desired, although with the restaurant department, her stand had
+won a splendid profit. Of course, the money taken in at the radio tent
+was almost all profit.
+
+"She just thought of that wireless thing so as to make the rest of us
+look cheap," Belle was heard to say to her friends. "Isn't that always
+the way when we come up here to the Norwoods'? Jess skims the cream of
+everything. I'll never break my back working for a church
+entertainment again if the Norwoods have anything to do with it!"
+
+Unfortunately Jessie heard this. It really spoiled the satisfaction
+she had taken in the fact that her idea, and her radio set, had made
+much money for a good cause. She stole away from her chum and the
+other young people and went rather tearfully to bed.
+
+Of course, she should not have minded so keenly the foolish talk of an
+impertinent and unkind girl. But she could not help wondering if other
+people felt as Belle said she felt about the Norwoods. Jessie had
+really thought that she and Daddy and Momsy were very popular people,
+and she had innocently congratulated herself upon that fact.
+
+The morning brought to Jessie Norwood more contentment. When Momsy
+told her how the ladies of the bazaar committee had praised Jessie's
+thoughtfulness and ingenuity in supplying the radio entertainment, she
+forgot Belle Ringold's jealousy and went cheerfully to work to help
+clear up the grounds and the house. Her radio set was moved back to
+her room and she restrung the wires and connected up the receiver
+without help from anybody.
+
+When Mr. Norwood came home that evening both she and Momsy noticed at
+once that he was grave and apparently much troubled. Perhaps, if their
+thought had not been given so entirely to the bazaar during the last
+few days, the lawyer's wife and daughter would before this have
+noticed his worriment of mind.
+
+"Is it that Ellison case, Robert?" Mrs. Norwood asked, at the dinner
+table.
+
+"It is the bane of my existence," declared the lawyer, with
+exasperation. "Those women are determined to obtain a much greater
+share of the estate than belongs to them or than the testator ever
+intended. Their testimony, I believe, is false. But as the
+apportionment of the property of the deceased Mr. Ellison must be
+decided by verbal rather than written evidence, the story those women
+tell--and stick to--bears weight with the Surrogate."
+
+"Your clients are likely to lose their share, then?" his wife asked.
+
+"Unless we can get at the truth. I fear that neither of those women
+knows what the truth means. Ha! If we could find the one witness, the
+one who was present when the old man dictated his will at the last!
+Well!"
+
+"Can't you find her?" asked Momsy, who had, it seemed, known
+something about the puzzling case before.
+
+"Not a trace. The old man, Abel Ellison, died suddenly in Martha
+Poole's house. She and the other woman are cousins and were distantly
+related to Ellison. He had a shock or a stroke, or something, while he
+was calling on Mrs. Poole. It did not affect his brain at all. The
+physicians are sure of that. Their testimony is clear.
+
+"But neither of them heard what the old man said to the lawyer that
+Mrs. Poole sent for. McCracken is a scaly practitioner. He has been
+bought over, body and soul, by the two women. You see, they are a
+sporty crowd--race track habitues, and all that. The other woman--her
+name is Bothwell--has driven automobiles in races. She is a regular
+speed fiend, they tell me.
+
+"Anyhow, they are all of a kind, the two women and McCracken. As
+Ellison had never made a will that anybody knows of, and this
+affidavit regarding his dictated wishes is the only instrument brought
+into court, the Surrogate is inclined to give the thing weight.
+
+"Here comes in our missing witness, a young girl who worked for Mrs.
+Poole. She was examined by my chief clerk and admitted she heard all
+that was said in the room where Ellison died. Her testimony
+diametrically opposes several items which McCracken has written into
+the unsigned testament of the deceased.
+
+"You see what we are up against when I tell you that the young girl
+has disappeared. Martha Poole says she has run away and that she does
+not know where she went to. The girl seems to have no relatives or
+friends. But I have my doubts about her having run away. I think she
+has been hidden away in some place by the two women or by the
+lawyer."
+
+"Oh, Daddy!" exclaimed Jessie, who had been listening with interest.
+"That is just like the girl I tried to tell you about the other
+night--little Henrietta's cousin. _She_ was carried off by two women
+in an automobile. What do you think, Daddy? Could Bertha be the girl
+you are looking for?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+CAN IT BE POSSIBLE?
+
+
+"What is this?" Mr. Norwood asked, staring at his eager daughter.
+"Have I heard anything before about a girl being carried away?"
+
+"Why, don't you remember, Daddy, about Henrietta who lives over in
+Dogtown, and her cousin, Bertha, and how Bertha has disappeared,
+and--and----"
+
+"And Henrietta is the champion snake killer of all this region?"
+chuckled Mr. Norwood. "I certainly have a vivid remembrance of the
+snakes, at any rate."
+
+"Dear me!" cried Momsy. "This is all new to me. Where are the snakes,
+Jessie?"
+
+"Gone to that bourne where both good and bad snakes go," rejoined her
+husband. "Come, Jessie! It is evident I did not get all that you
+wanted to tell me the other evening. And, it seems to me, if I
+remember rightly, you got so excited over your radio business before
+you were through that you quite forgot the snakes--I mean forgot the
+girl you say was run away with."
+
+"Don't joke her any more, Robert," advised Momsy. "I can see she is in
+earnest."
+
+"You just listen here, Daddy Norwood," Jessie cried. "Perhaps you'll
+be glad to hear about Bertha. She is little Henrietta Haney's cousin,
+and Henrietta expected Bertha to come to see her where she lives with
+the Foleys in Dogtown.
+
+"Well, the day that Bertha was expected, she didn't come. That was the
+day Amy and I first thought of building our radio. And when we were
+walking into town we heard a girl screaming in Dogtown Lane. So we ran
+in, and there was this girl being pulled into an automobile by two
+women."
+
+"What girl was this?" asked Mr. Norwood, quite in earnest now. "A girl
+you and Amy knew?"
+
+"We had never seen her before, Daddy. And I am not positive, of
+course, that she was Bertha, Henrietta's cousin. But Amy and I thought
+it might be. And now you tell about two women who want to keep a
+servant girl away from you, and it might be the same."
+
+"It might indeed," admitted Mr. Norwood thoughtfully. "Tell me what
+the two women looked like. Describe them as well as you can."
+
+Jessie did so. She managed, even after this length of time, to
+remember many peculiarities about the woman who drove the big car and
+the fleshy one who had treated the girl so roughly. Mr. Norwood
+exclaimed at last:
+
+"I should not be at all surprised if that were Martha Poole and Mrs.
+Bothwell. The descriptions in a general way fit them. And if it is so,
+the girl Jessie and Amy saw abused in that way is surely the maid who
+worked for Mrs. Poole."
+
+"Oh, Robert! can it be possible, do you think?" cried his wife.
+
+"Not alone possible, but probable," declared Robert Norwood. "Jessie,
+I am glad that you are so observant. I want you to get the little girl
+from Dogtown some day soon and let me talk with her. Perhaps she can
+tell me something about her cousin's looks that will clinch the
+matter. At least, she can tell us her cousin's full name, I have no
+doubt."
+
+"It's Bertha for a first name," said Jessie, eagerly. "And I supposed
+it was Haney, like Henrietta's."
+
+"The girl I am looking for is not named Haney, whatever her first name
+may be. Anyway, it is a chance, and I mean to get to the bottom of
+this mysterious kidnaping if I can, Jessie. Let me see this little
+Henrietta who kills snakes with such admirable vigor," and he
+laughed.
+
+It was, however, no inconsiderable matter, as Jessie well understood.
+In the morning she hurried over to the Drew house to tell Amy about
+it. Both had been interested from the very beginning in the mystery of
+the strange girl and her two women captors. There was something wrong
+with those women. Amy said this with a serious shake of her head. You
+could tell!
+
+And when, on further discussion, Jessie remembered their names--Poole
+and Bothwell--this fact brought out another discovery.
+
+"Bothwell! I never did!" ejaculated Amy Drew. "Why, no wonder I
+thought she looked like somebody I knew. And she drives a fast
+car--I'll say she does. Jess Norwood! where were our wits? Don't you
+remember reading about Sadie Bothwell, whose husband was one of the
+first automobile builders, and she has driven in professional races,
+and won a prize--a cup, or something? And her picture was in the
+paper."
+
+"That is the person Daddy refers to," Jessie agreed. "I did not like
+her at all."
+
+"Ho! I should say not!" scoffed Amy. "And I wasn't in love with the
+fat woman. So she is a race track follower, is she?" Then Amy giggled.
+"I guess she wouldn't follow 'em far afoot! She isn't so lively in
+moving about."
+
+"But where do you suppose they took Bertha--if it was Henrietta's
+cousin we saw carried off?"
+
+"Now, dear child, I am neither a seventh daughter of a seventh
+daughter nor----"
+
+"Nor one of the Seven Sleepers," laughed Jessie. "So you cannot
+prophesy, can you? We will go down to Dogtown this afternoon and see
+if Mrs. Foley will let us bring Henrietta back to see Daddy."
+
+"The child hasn't been up to see you at all, has she?" asked Amy.
+
+"Why, no."
+
+"Maybe the woman won't want her to come. Afraid somebody may take
+little Hen away from her. Did you see the child's hands? They have
+been well used to hard work. I have an idea she is a regular little
+slave."
+
+"Oh, I hope not. It doesn't seem to me as though anybody could treat
+that child cruelly. And she doesn't seem to blame Mrs. Foley for her
+condition."
+
+"Well, Hen knows how to kill snakes, but maybe she is a poor judge of
+character," laughed Amy. "I'll go with you and defend you if the Foley
+tribe attack in force. But let's go down in the canoe. Then we can
+steal the cheeld, if necessary. 'Once aboard the lugger!' you know,
+'and the gal is mine'."
+
+"To hear you, one would think you were a real pirate," scoffed
+Jessie.
+
+At lunch time Nell Stanley had an errand in the neighborhood, and she
+dropped in at the Drew house. The three girls, Mrs. Drew being away,
+had a gay little meal together, waited on by the Drew butler,
+McTavish, who was a very grave and solemn man.
+
+"Almost ecclesiastic, I'll say," chuckled Nell, when the old serving
+man was out of the room. "He is a lot more ministerial looking than
+the Reverend. I expect him, almost any time, to say grace before meat.
+Fred convulsed us all at the table last evening. We take turns, you
+know, giving thanks. And at dinner last evening it was the Reverend's
+turn.
+
+"'Say, Papa,' Fred asked afterward--he's such a solemn little tike you
+have no idea what's coming--'Say, Papa, why is it you say a so-much
+longer prayer than I do?'
+
+"'Because you're not old enough to say a long one,' Reverend told
+him.
+
+"'Oh!' said Master Freddie, 'I thought maybe it was 'cause I wasn't
+big enough to be as wicked as you and I didn't need so long a one.'
+Now! What can you do with a young one like that?" she added, as the
+girls went off into a gale of laughter.
+
+But she had other news of her young brothers besides this. Bob and
+Fred were enamored of the radio. They were ingenious lads. Nell said
+she believed they could rig a radio set with a hair-pin and a
+mouse-trap. But she was going to help them obtain a fairly good set;
+only, because of the shortage of funds at the parsonage, Bob and Fred
+would be obliged themselves to make every part that was possible.
+
+So she drew from Jessie and from Amy all they knew about the new
+science, and Jessie ran across to her house and got the books she had
+bought dealing with radio and the installation of a set.
+
+Jessie and Amy got into their outing clothes when Nell Stanley had
+gone and embarked upon the lake, paddling to the landing at despised
+Dogtown. It was not a savory place in appearance, even from the
+water-side. As the canoe drew near the girls saw a wild mob of
+children, both boys and girls, racing toward the broken landing.
+
+"Why! What are they ever doing?" asked Jessie, in amazement, backing
+with her paddle.
+
+"Chasing that young one ahead," said Amy.
+
+They were all dressed most fantastically, and the child running in
+advance, an agile and bedrabbled looking little creature, was more in
+masquerade than the others. She wore an old poke bonnet and carried a
+crooked stick, and there seemed to be a hump upon her back.
+
+"Spotted Snake! Spotted Snake! Miss Spotted Snake!" the girls from
+Roselawn heard the children shrieking, and without doubt this
+opprobrious epithet referred to the one pursued.
+
+
+
+
+SPOTTED SNAKE, THE WITCH
+
+BROADCASTING
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SPOTTED SNAKE, THE WITCH
+
+
+"What are they trying to do to that poor child?" repeated Jessie
+Norwood, as the crowd swept down to the shore.
+
+"Spotted snake! Spotted Snake!" yelled the crowd, and spread out to
+keep the pursued from running back. The hump-backed little figure with
+poke-bonnet and cane was chased out upon the broken landing.
+
+"She will go overboard!" shrieked Jessie, and drove in her paddle
+again to reach the wharf. Amy, who was in the bow sheered off, but
+brought the side of the canoe skillfully against the rough planks.
+
+"What are they doing to you, child?" Amy cried.
+
+"Goin' to drown the witch! Goin' to drown the witch!" shrieked the
+rabble in the rear. "Spotted Snake! Spotted Snake!"
+
+"It's little Henrietta!" screamed Jessie suddenly. "Oh, Amy!"
+
+Amy, who was strong and quick, reached over the gunwale of the canoe
+and seized upon the crooked figure. She bore it inboard, knocking off
+the old bonnet to reveal Henrietta's freckled little face. The cloak
+and the hump under it were likewise torn off and went sailing away on
+the current.
+
+"For pity's sake, Henrietta!" gasped Jessie.
+
+"Yes'm," said the child composedly. "Did you come to see me?"
+
+"Not expecting to see you in this--this shape," hesitated Jessie.
+
+Amy went off into a gale of laughter. She could not speak for a
+minute. Jessie demanded:
+
+"Who are those awful children, Henrietta?"
+
+"Part Foleys, some McGuires, two Swansons, the Costeklo twins, and
+Montmorency Shannon," was the literal reply.
+
+"What were they trying to do to you?"
+
+"Drown me," said Henrietta composedly. "But they ain't ever done it
+yet. I always manage to get away. I'm cute, I am. But once they most
+nearly burned me, and Mrs. Foley stopped _that_. So now they mostly
+try to drown the witch."
+
+"'The witch'?" murmured the amazed Jessie.
+
+"Yep. That's me. Spotted Snake, the witch. That's cause I'm so
+freckled. It's a great game."
+
+"I should say it was," marveled Jessie, and immediately Amy began to
+laugh again. "I don't see how you can, Amy," Jessie complained. "I
+think it is really terrible."
+
+"I don't mind it," said Henrietta complacently. "It keeps 'em busy
+and out from under their mothers' feet."
+
+"But they shriek and yell so."
+
+"That don't hurt 'em. And there's plenty of outdoors here to yell in.
+Where we moved from in town, folks complained of the Foleys because
+they made so much noise. But nobody ever complains here in Dogtown."
+
+As Amy said, when she could keep from laughing, it was a great
+introduction to Henrietta's home. They went ashore, and Henrietta, who
+seemed to have a good deal of influence with the children, ordered two
+of the boys to watch the canoe and allow nobody to touch it. Then she
+proudly led the way to one of the largest and certainly the most
+decrepit looking of all the hovels in Dogtown.
+
+Mrs. Foley, however, was a cheerful disappointment. She was, as Amy
+whispered, a "bulgy" person, but her calico wrapper was fairly clean;
+and although she sat down and took up her youngest to rock to sleep
+while she talked (being too busy a woman to waste any time visiting)
+she impressed the girls from Roselawn rather favorably.
+
+"That child is the best young one in the world," Mrs. Foley confessed,
+referring to "Spotted Snake, the Witch." "Sometimes I rant at her like
+a good one. But she saves me a good bit, and if ever a child earned
+her keep, Hen earns hers."
+
+Jessie asked about the missing cousin, Bertha.
+
+"Bertha Blair. Yes. A good and capable girl. Was out at service when
+Hen's mother died and left her to me. Something's wrong with Bertha,
+or she surely would have come here to see Hen before this."
+
+"Did Bertha Blair work for a woman named Poole?" Jessie asked.
+
+"That I couldn't tell you, Miss. But you take Hen up to see your
+father, like you say you want to. The child's as sharp as a steel
+knife. Maybe she'll think of something that will put him on the trace
+of Bertha."
+
+So they bore Spotted Snake away with them in the canoe, while the
+Dogtown gang shrieked farewells from the old landing. Henrietta had
+been dressed in a clean slip and the smartest hair ribbon she owned.
+But she had no shoes and stockings, those being considered unnecessary
+at Dogtown.
+
+"I believe Nell could help us find something better for this child to
+wear," Amy observed, with more thoughtfulness than she usually
+displayed. "What do you think, Jess? Folks are always giving the
+Stanleys half-worn clothes for little Sally, more than Sally can ever
+make use of. And Hen is just about Sally Stanley's size."
+
+"That might be arranged," agreed Jessie. "I guess you'd like to have a
+new dress, wouldn't you, Henrietta?"
+
+"Oh, my yes! I know just what I would like," sighed Henrietta,
+clasping her clawlike hands. "You've seen them cape-suits that's come
+into fashion this year, ain't you? _That's_ what I'd like."
+
+"My dear!" gasped Amy explosively.
+
+"I don't mind going barefooted," said Henrietta. "But if I could just
+have _one_ dress in style! I expect you two girls wear lots of stylish
+things when you ain't wearing sweaters and overall-pants like you did
+the other day. I never had anything stylish in my life."
+
+Amy burst into delighted giggles, but Jessie said:
+
+"The poor little thing! There is a lot in that. How should we like to
+wear nothing but second-hand clothes?"
+
+"'Hand me downs'," giggled Amy. "But mind you! A cape-coat suit! Can
+you beat it?"
+
+"I saw pictures of 'em in a fashion book Mrs. McGuire sent for," went
+on Henrietta. "They are awful taking."
+
+Little Henrietta proved to be an interesting specimen for the Norwood
+family that evening. Momsy took her wonted interest in so appealing a
+child. The serving people were curious and attentive. Mr. Norwood
+confessed that he was much amused by the young visitor.
+
+A big dictionary placed in an armchair, raised little Henrietta to the
+proper height at the Norwood dinner table. Nothing seemed to trouble
+or astonish the visitor, either about the food or the service. And
+Jessie and Momsy wondered at the really good manners the child
+displayed.
+
+Mrs. Foley had not wholly neglected her duty in Henrietta's case. And
+there seemed to be, too, a natural refinement possessed by the girl
+that aided her through what would have seemed a trying experience.
+
+Best of all, Henrietta could give a good description of her missing
+cousin. Her name was Bertha Blair, and that was the name of the girl
+Mr. Norwood's clerk had interviewed before she had been whisked away
+by Martha Poole and Sadie Bothwell.
+
+In addition, Mr. Norwood had brought home photographs of the two
+women, and both Jessie and Amy identified them as the women they had
+seen in Dogtown Lane, forcing the strange girl into the automobile.
+
+"It is a pretty clear case," the lawyer admitted. "We know the date
+and the place where the missing witness was. But the thing is now to
+trace the movements of those women and their prisoner after they drove
+away from Dogtown Lane."
+
+Nevertheless, he considered that every discovery, even a small one,
+was important. Detectives would be started on the trail. Jessie and
+Amy rode back to Dogtown in the Norwoods' car with the excited
+Henrietta after dinner, leaving her at the Foleys' with the promise
+that they would see her soon again.
+
+"And if those folks you know have any clothes to give me," said
+Henrietta, longingly, "I hope they'll be fashionable."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+BROADCASTING
+
+
+Darry and Burd were planning another trip on the _Marigold_, and so
+had little time to give to the girl chums of Roselawn. Burd wickedly
+declared that Darry Drew was running away from home to get rid of
+Belle Ringold.
+
+"Wherever he goes down town, she pops up like a jack-in-the-box and
+tries to pin him. Darry is so polite he doesn't know how to get away.
+But I know he wishes her mother would lock her in the nursery."
+
+"It is her mother's fault that Belle is such a silly," scoffed Amy.
+"She lets Belle think she is quite grown up."
+
+"She'll never be grown up," growled out Darry. "Never saw such a kid.
+If you acted like her, Sis, I'd put you back into rompers and feed you
+lollipops."
+
+"You'd have a big chance doing anything like that to me, Master
+Darry," declared his sister, smartly. "Even Dad--bless his
+heart!--would not undertake to turn back the clock on me."
+
+Before the two young fellows left Roselawn again, they did the girls a
+favor that Amy and Jessie highly appreciated. It was done
+involuntarily but was nevertheless esteemed. Mark Stratford drifted up
+the Bonwit Boulevard in his big and shiny car and halted it in front
+of the Norwood place to hail Darry and Burd.
+
+"Here's the millionaire kid," called out Alling. "Know him, girls?
+He's quite the fastest thing that lingers about old Yale. Zoomed over
+the German lines in the war, stoking an airplane, although at that
+time he was only a kid. Mark Stratford. His family are the Stratford
+Electric Company. Oodles of money. But Mark is a patient soul."
+
+"'Patient'?" repeated Jessie, wonderingly, as she and Amy accompanied
+the young fellows down to the street.
+
+"Sure," declared Burd. "Most fellows would be impatient, burdened with
+so much of the filthy lucre as Mark has. But not he. He is doing his
+little best to spend his share."
+
+However, and in spite of Burd's introduction, Mark Stratford proved to
+be a very personable young man and did not look at all the "sport."
+Jessie considered that Burd was very probably fooling them about Mark.
+The young folks were talking like old friends in five minutes. In five
+minutes more they had piled into the car for a ride.
+
+Mark's car "burned up the road" so fast that in half an hour they came
+to Stratfordtown where the huge plant of the Electric Company lay, and
+on the border of which was the large Stratford estate.
+
+Jessie and Amy did not care anything about the beauties of the show
+place of the county. While riding over the girls had discussed one
+particular topic. And when Mark asked them where they wanted to go, or
+what they preferred to see, Jessie spoke out:
+
+"Oh, Mr. Stratford! take us to the plant and let us go into the radio
+broadcasting room. Amy and I are just longing to see how it is done."
+
+"Oh, _that!_" exclaimed Mark Stratford.
+
+"We're crazy about radio, Mr. Stratford," agreed Amy.
+
+"Some radio fiends, these two," said Darry. And he told his friend to
+what use the girls had already put Jessie's set for the benefit of the
+church bazaar.
+
+"If you girls want to see how it's done, to be sure I'll introduce you
+to the man in charge. Wait till we drive around there." Stratford was
+as good as his word. It was a time in the afternoon when the Electric
+Company's matinee concert was being broadcasted. They went up in the
+passenger elevator in the main building of the plant to a sort of
+glassed-in roof garden. There were several rooms, or compartments,
+with glass partitions, sound-proof, and hung with curtains to cut off
+any echo. The young people could stare through the windows and see the
+performers in front of the broadcasting sets. The girls looked at each
+other and clung tightly to each other's hand.
+
+"Oh, Amy!" sighed Jessie.
+
+"If we could only get a chance to sing here!" whispered Amy in
+return.
+
+It did not mean much to the boys. And Mark Stratford, of course, had
+been here time and time again. A gray-haired man with a bustling
+manner and wearing glasses came through the reception room and Mark
+stopped him.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Blair!" the collegian said. "Here are some friends of mine
+who are regular radio bugs. Let me introduce you to Miss Jessie
+Norwood and Miss Amy Drew. Likewise," he added, as the gentleman
+smilingly shook hands with the girls, "allow me to present their
+comrades in crime, Darry Drew and Burdwell Alling. These fellows help
+me kill time over at Yale, to which the governor has sentenced me for
+four years."
+
+"Mr. Blair?" repeated Jessie, looking sideways at her chum.
+
+"Mr. Blair?" whispered Amy, who remembered the name as well as Jessie
+did.
+
+"That is my name, young ladies," replied the superintendent, smiling.
+
+"You don't know anything about a girl of our age named Blair, do you,
+Mr. Blair?" Jessie asked hesitatingly.
+
+"I have no daughters," returned the superintendent, and the expression
+of his face changed so swiftly and so strangely that Jessie did not
+feel that she could make any further comment upon the thought that had
+stabbed her mind. After all, it seemed like sheer curiosity on her
+part to ask the man about his family.
+
+"Just the same," she told Amy afterward, when they were in the
+automobile once more, "Blair is not such a common name, do you
+think?"
+
+"But, of course, that Bertha Blair couldn't be anything to the
+superintendent of the broadcasting station. Oh, Jessie! What a
+wonderful program he had arranged for to-day. I am coming over
+to-night to listen in on that orchestral concert and hear Madame Elva
+sing. I would not miss it for anything."
+
+"Suppose we could get a chance to help entertain!" Jessie sighed.
+"Not, of course, on the same program with such performers as these the
+Stratford people have. But----"
+
+They happened to be traveling slowly and Mark overheard this. He
+twisted around in his seat to say:
+
+"Why didn't you ask Blair about it? You have no idea how many amateurs
+offer their services. And some of them he uses."
+
+"I'll say he does!" grumbled Burd. "Some of the singers and others I
+have listened in on have been punk."
+
+"Well, I'll have you know that Jessie and I wouldn't sing if we could
+not sing well," Amy said, with spirit.
+
+"Sure," agreed Burd, grinning. "Madame Elva wouldn't be a patch on you
+two girls singing the 'Morning Glories' Buns' or the 'Midnight
+Rolls'."
+
+"Your taste in music is mighty poor, sure enough, Burd," commented
+Darry. "Jessie sings all right. She's got a voice like a----"
+
+"Like a bird, I know," chuckled Alling. "That is just the way I
+sing--like a Burd."
+
+"I've heard of a bird called a crow," put in Mark Stratford, smiling
+on the two girl chums. Jessie thought he had a really nice smile.
+"That is what your voice sounds like, Alling. You couldn't make the
+Glee Club in a hundred and forty years."
+
+"Don't say a word!" cried Burd. "I'll be a long time past singing
+before the end of that term. Ah-ha! Here we are at Roselawn."
+
+They got out at the Norwood place and the girls insisted upon Mark
+coming in to afternoon tea, which Amy and Jessie poured on the porch.
+The chums liked Mark Stratford and they did not believe that he was
+anywhere near as "sporty" as Burd had intimated. Naturally, a fellow
+who had driven a warplane and owned an airship now and often went up
+in it, would consider the driving of a motor-car rather tame. As for
+his college record, Jessie and Amy later discovered that Mark was a
+hard student and was at or near the head of his class in most of his
+studies.
+
+"And he drives that wonderful car of his," said Amy, with approval,
+"like a jockey on the track."
+
+The girl chums did not forget the concert they expected to enjoy that
+evening, but Darry and Burd left right after dinner for the moorings
+of the _Marigold_ at City Island. They took Mark Stratford and some
+other college friends with them for a three days' trip on the yacht.
+
+Jessie and Amy were eager to see the _Marigold_; but their parents had
+forbidden any mixed parties on the yacht until either Mr. and Mrs.
+Drew, or Mr. and Mrs. Norwood could accompany the young people. That
+would come later in the summer.
+
+Amy ran over to the Norwood place before half past eight. The concert,
+Mr. Blair had told them, was to begin at nine. Jessie had learned a
+good deal about tuning in on the ether by this time; and there is no
+other part of radio knowledge more necessary if the operator would
+make full use of his set.
+
+"The bedtime story is just concluded, Amy," Jessie said when her chum
+came in. "Sit down. I am going to get that talk on 'Hairpins and
+Haricots' by that extremely funny newspaper man--what is his name?"
+
+"I don't know. What's in a name, anyhow?" answered her chum, lightly.
+
+Amy adjusted the earphones while her friend manipulated the slides on
+the tuning coil. They did not catch the first of the talk, but they
+heard considerable of it. Then something happened--just what it was
+Amy had no idea. She tore off the ear-tabs and demanded:
+
+"What _are_ you doing, Jess? That doesn't sound like anything I ever
+heard before. Is it static interference?"
+
+"It certainly is interference," admitted Jessie, trying to tune the
+set so as to get back upon the wave that had brought the funny talk
+about 'Hairpins and Haricots.'
+
+But it did not work. Jessie could not get in touch with the lecture.
+Instead, out of the ether came one word, over and over again. And that
+word in a voice that Jessie was confident must come from a woman or a
+girl:
+
+"Help! He-lp! He-e-lp!"
+
+Over and over again it was repeated. Amy who had put on her head
+harness again, snatched at her chum's arm.
+
+"Listen! Do you hear that?" she cried in an awed tone.
+
+
+
+
+A MYSTERY OF THE ETHER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MYSTERY OF THE ETHER
+
+
+Jessie knew that by carefully moving the slides on her tuning coil she
+could get into touch again with the talk to which she and Amy had been
+listening. But now the broadcasted cry for "Help!" seemed of so much
+importance that she wanted to hear more of this air mystery.
+
+"He-lp!" The word came to their ears over and over again. Then: "I am
+a prisoner. They brought me here and locked me in. There is a red barn
+and silo and two fallen trees. He-lp! Come and find me!"
+
+"For pity's sake, Jess Norwood!" shrilled Amy. "Do you hear that?"
+
+"I'm trying to," her chum replied. "Hush!"
+
+"It must be a hoax."
+
+"Wait!"
+
+They listened and heard it repeated, almost word for word. A red barn
+and a silo and two fallen trees. These points the strange voice
+insisted on with each repetition.
+
+"I can't believe it!" declared Amy.
+
+"It is a girl. I am sure it is a girl. Oh, Amy!" gasped Jessie.
+"Suppose it should be the girl whom we saw carried off by those two
+awful women?"
+
+"Bertha Blair?"
+
+"Yes. Of course, I suppose that is awfully far-fetched----"
+
+"Wait! Here it comes again," whispered Amy.
+
+"Come and find me! Help! I am a prisoner! The red barn and the silo
+with the two fallen trees."
+
+How many times this was repeated the girls did not know. Suddenly
+something cluttered up the airways--some sort of interference--and the
+mystery of the ether died away. No matter what Jessie did to the
+tuning coil she could not bring that strangely broadcasted message
+back to their ears.
+
+"What do you know about that?" demanded Amy, breathlessly.
+
+"Why--why," murmured her chum, "we don't know much of anything about
+it. Only, I am sure that was a girl calling. It was a youthful
+voice."
+
+"And I feel that it is Bertha Blair!" exclaimed Amy. "Oh, Jessie, we
+must do something for her."
+
+"How can we? How can we find her?"
+
+"A red barn with a silo and two fallen trees. Think of it! Did you
+ever see a place like that when you have been riding about the
+country?"
+
+"I--nev-er--did!" and Jessie shook her head despondently.
+
+"But there must be such a place. It surely is not a hoax," said Amy,
+although at first she had thought it was a joke. "And there is another
+thing to mark, Jess."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"The place where this girl is kept a prisoner has a broadcasting
+station. You can't talk into a radio set like this. There has to be
+electric power and a generator, and all that--such as Mark Stratford
+showed us there at Stratfordtown."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Then don't you think, Jessie, the fact that it is a broadcasting
+plant where the girl is imprisoned must narrow the inquiry a good
+deal?"
+
+"How clever you are, dear," declared Jessie. "But a red barn with a
+silo and two fallen trees! Why, Amy! we don't know in which direction
+to look. Whether to the north, south, east or west!"
+
+"No-o. I suppose----Oh, wait, Jess!" cried the excited Amy. "We don't
+really know where those women took that girl we saw carried off. They
+drove out the boulevard as far as we could see them. But, do you
+remember, we met that Mrs. Bothwell again in the big French car that
+very evening?"
+
+"When we went to Parkville with Nell and the Brandons!" Jessie said
+eagerly. "I remember she passed us. You pointed her out to me."
+
+"And she turned out of the very road we took to go to Parkville," said
+Amy, with confidence. "I believe that red barn with the silo must be
+over beyond Parkville."
+
+"It might be so," admitted her chum, thoughtfully. "I have never been
+through that section of the state. But Chapman knows every road, I
+guess."
+
+"Doesn't your father know the roads, too?"
+
+"But Daddy and Momsy have gone to Aunt Ann's in New York and will not
+be back to-night," Jessie explained.
+
+"Anyhow we couldn't go hunting around in the dark after this
+broadcasting station, wherever it is," Amy observed.
+
+"Of course not," her chum agreed, taking the harness off her head.
+"Come down to the telephone and I'll see if Chapman is in the
+garage."
+
+They ran downstairs, forgetting all about the radio concert they were
+to have heard, and Jessie called up the garage to which a private wire
+was strung.
+
+The chauffeur, who had served the Norwoods ever since they had had a
+car, answered Jessie's request quickly, and appeared at the side door.
+Amy was just as eager as Jessie to cross-question the man about a red
+barn with a silo. He had to ask the girls to stop and begin all over
+again, and----
+
+"If you please, Miss Jessie," he added, widely a-grin, "either let
+Miss Amy tell me or you tell me. I can't seem to get it right when you
+both talk."
+
+"Oh, I am dumb!" announced Amy. "Go ahead, Jess; you tell him."
+
+So Jessie tried to put the case as plainly as possible; but from the
+look on Chapman's face she knew that the chauffeur thought that this
+was rather a fantastic matter.
+
+"Why, Chapman!" she cried, "you do not know much about this radio
+business, do you?"
+
+"Only what I have seen of it here, Miss Jessie. I heard the music over
+your wires. But I did not suppose that anybody could talk into the
+thing and other folks could hear like----"
+
+"Oh! You don't understand," Jessie interrupted. "No ordinary radio set
+broadcasts. It merely receives."
+
+As clearly as she could she explained what sort of plant there must be
+from which the strange girl had sent out her cry for help.
+
+"Of course, you understand, the girl must have got a chance on the sly
+to speak into the broadcasting horn. Now, all the big broadcasting
+stations are registered with the Government. And if secret ones are
+established the Government agents soon find them out.
+
+"It might be, if the people who imprisoned this girl are the ones we
+think, they may have a plant for the sending out of information that
+is illegal. For instance, it might have some connection with race
+track gambling. One of the women is interested in racing and the other
+in automobile contests. If the broadcasting plant is near a race
+course or an autodrome----"
+
+"Now you give me an idea, Miss Jessie!" exclaimed Chapman suddenly. "I
+remember a stock farm over behind Parkville where the barns are
+painted red. And there is a silo or two. Besides, it is near the
+Harrimay Race Course. I could drive over there in the morning, if you
+want to go. Mr. Norwood won't mind, I am sure."
+
+"Would you go, Amy?" Jessie asked, hesitatingly.
+
+"Sure! It's a chance. And I am awfully anxious now to find out what
+that mysterious voice means."
+
+
+
+
+A PUZZLING CIRCUMSTANCE
+
+SOMETHING DOING AT THE STANLEY'S
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+A PUZZLING CIRCUMSTANCE
+
+
+Jessie's parents being away, Amy ran home and announced her desire to
+keep her chum company and was back again before ten o'clock. There was
+not much to be heard over the airways after that hour. They had missed
+Madame Elva and the orchestra music broadcasted from Stratfordtown.
+
+"Nothing to do but to go to bed," Amy declared. "The sooner we are
+asleep the sooner we can get up and go looking for the mysterious
+broadcasting station. Do you believe that cry for help was from little
+Hen's cousin?"
+
+"I have a feeling that it is," Jessie admitted.
+
+"Maybe we ought to take Spotted Snake, the Witch, with us," chuckled
+her chum. "What do you say?"
+
+"I think not, honey. We might only raise hopes in the child's mind
+that will not be fulfilled. I think she loves her cousin Bertha very
+much; and of course we do not know that this is that girl whose cry
+for help we heard."
+
+"We don't really know anything about it. Maybe it is all a joke or a
+mistake."
+
+"Do you think that girl sounded as though she were joking?" was
+Jessie's scornful reply. "Anyway, we will look into it alone first. If
+Chapman can find the stock farm with the red barn----"
+
+"And there are two fallen trees and a silo near it," put in Amy,
+smiling. "Goodness me, Jess! I am afraid the boys would say we had
+another crazy notion."
+
+"I like that!" cried Jessie Norwood. "What is there crazy about trying
+to help somebody who certainly must be in trouble? Besides," she added
+very sensibly, "Daddy Norwood will be very thankful to us if we should
+manage to find that Bertha Blair. He needs her to witness for his
+clients, and Momsy says the hearing before the Surrogate cannot be
+postponed again. The matter must soon be decided, and without Bertha
+Blair's testimony Daddy's clients may lose hundreds of thousands of
+dollars."
+
+"We'll be off to the rescue of the prisoner in the morning, then,"
+said Amy, cuddling down into one of her chum's twin beds. "Good-night!
+Sweet dreams! And if you have a nightmare don't expect me to get up
+and tie it to the bed-post."
+
+The next morning Chapman brought around the car as early as half past
+eight, when the girls were just finishing breakfast.
+
+"Don't eat any more, Amy," begged Jessie. "Do get up for once from
+the table feeling that you could eat more. The doctors say that is the
+proper way."
+
+"Pooh! What do the doctors know about eating?" scoffed Amy. "Their job
+is to tend to you when you can't eat. Why? honey! I feel lots better
+morally with a full stomach than when I am hungry."
+
+They climbed into the car and Chapman drove out the boulevard and
+turned into the Parkville road. It was a lovely morning, not too hot
+and with only a wind made by their passage, so that the dust only
+drifted behind the car. They passed the home of Mr. and Mrs. Brandon's
+daughter and saw the aerials strung between the house and the flagpole
+on the garage.
+
+"Keep your eyes open for aerials anywhere, Amy," said Jessie. "Of
+course wherever that broadcasting station is, the aerials must be
+observable."
+
+"They'll be longer and more important than the antenna for the usual
+receiving set, won't they?" eagerly asked Amy.
+
+"Of course." Then Jessie leaned forward to speak to Chapman, for they
+were in the open car. "When you approach the stock farm you spoke of,
+please drive slowly. We want to look over all the surroundings."
+
+"Very well, Miss Jessie," the chauffeur said.
+
+Passing through Parkville, they struck a road called a turnpike,
+although there were no ticket-houses, as there are at the ferries. It
+was an old highway sweeping between great farms, and the country was
+rolling, partly wooded, and not so far off the railroad line that the
+latter did not touch the race-track Chapman had spoken of.
+
+The car skirted the high fence of the Harrimay enclosure and then they
+ran past a long string of barns in which the racing horses were housed
+and trained for a part of the year. There was no meet here at this
+time, and consequently few horses were in evidence.
+
+"I like to see horses race," remarked Amy. "And they are such lovely,
+intelligent looking creatures. But so many people who have anything to
+do with horses and racing are such hard-faced people and so--so
+impossible! Think of the looks of that Martha Poole. She's the limit,
+Jessie."
+
+"Neither she nor Mrs. Bothwell is nice, I admit. But don't blame it on
+the poor horses," Jessie observed, smiling. "I am sure it is not their
+fault. Mrs. Poole would be objectionable if she was interested in
+cows--or--or Pekingese pups."
+
+Chapman turned up a hilly road and they came out on a ridge
+overlooking the fenced-in track. The chauffeur shifted his position so
+as to glance behind him at the girls, the car running slowly.
+
+"Now look out, Miss Jessie," he advised. "We are coming to the old
+Gandy stock farm. That's the roof of the house just ahead. Yonder is
+the tower they built to house the electric lighting plant like what
+your father used to have. See it?"
+
+"Yes, yes!" exclaimed Jessie. "But--but I don't see any aerials. No, I
+don't! And the red barn----"
+
+"There it is!" cried Amy, grabbing at her chum's arm. "With the silo
+at the end."
+
+The car turned a corner in the road and the entrance gate to the
+estate came into view. Up the well kept lane, beyond the rambling
+house of weathered shingles, stood a long, low barn and a silo, both
+of a dull red color. And on either side of the entrance gate were two
+broken willow trees, their tall tops partly removed, but most of the
+trunks still lying upon the ground where they had fallen.
+
+"Ha!" ejaculated the chauffeur. "Those trees broke down since I was
+past here last."
+
+"Do drive slower, Chapman," Jessie cried.
+
+But she drew Amy down when the girl stood up to stare at the barn and
+the tower.
+
+"There may be somebody on watch," Jessie hissed. "They will suspect
+us. And if it is either of those women, they will recognize you."
+
+"Cat's foot!" ejaculated Amy. "I don't see any signs of occupancy
+about the house. Nor is there anybody working around the place. It
+looks abandoned."
+
+"We don't know. If the poor girl is shut up here----"
+
+"Where?" snapped Amy.
+
+"Perhaps in the house."
+
+"Perhaps in the barn," scoffed her chum. "Anyway, every window of that
+tower, both the lower and the upper stories, is shuttered on the
+outside."
+
+"Maybe that is where Bertha is confined--if it is Bertha."
+
+"But, honey! Where is the radio? There is nothing but a telephone wire
+in sight. There is no wireless plant here."
+
+"Dear me, Amy! don't you suppose we have come to the right place?"
+
+The car was now getting away from the Gandy premises. Jessie had to
+confess that there was no suspicious looking wiring anywhere about the
+house or outbuildings.
+
+"It does not seem as though that could be the place after all. What do
+you think, Chapman?" she added, leaning forward again. "Don't you
+think that place looked deserted?"
+
+"It often does between racing seasons, Miss Jessie," the man said.
+"Whoever owns it now does not occupy it all the year."
+
+Suddenly Jessie sat up very straight and her face flamed again with
+excitement. She cried aloud:
+
+"Chapman! Isn't there a village near? And a real estate office?"
+
+"Harrimay is right over the hills, Miss Jessie," said the chauffeur.
+
+"Drive there at once, please," said the girl. "And stop at the office
+of the first real estate agent whose sign you see."
+
+"For goodness sake, Jess!" drawled Amy, her eyes twinkling, "you don't
+mean to buy the Gandy farm, do you?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+SOMETHING DOING AT THE STANLEYS'
+
+
+Chapman drove the automobile down into Harrimay only ten minutes
+later. It was a pretty but rather somnolent place, just a string of
+white-painted, green-blinded houses and two or three stores along both
+sides of an oiled highway. It was a long ten-minute jitney ride from
+the railway station.
+
+"Perkins, Real Estate" faced the travelers from a signboard as they
+drove into the village. Chapman stopped before the office door, and
+the eager Jessie hopped out.
+
+"I'm coming, too! I'm coming, too!" squealed Amy, running across the
+walk after her.
+
+"Do be quiet," begged her chum. "And for once let me do the talking."
+
+"Oui, oui, Mademoiselle! As I haven't the least idea what the topic of
+the conversation will be, I can easily promise that," whispered Amy.
+
+A high-collared man with eyeglasses and an ingratiating smile arose
+from behind a flat-topped desk facing the door and rubbed his hands as
+he addressed the two girls.
+
+"What can I do for you, young ladies?"
+
+"Why, why----Oh, I want to ask you--" Jessie stammered. "Do you know
+who owns the farm over there by the track? The Gandy place?"
+
+"The old Gandy stock farm, Miss?" asked the real estate man with a
+distinct lowering of tone. "It is not in the market. The Gandy place
+never has been in the market."
+
+"I just wish to know who owns it," repeated Jessie, while Amy stared.
+
+"The Gandys still own it. At least old man Gandy's daughter is in
+possession I believe. Horse people, all of them. This woman----"
+
+"Please tell me her name?"
+
+"Poole, Martha Poole, is her name."
+
+"Oh!" cried Amy, seeing now what Jessie wanted.
+
+But Jessie shook her head at her chum warningly, and asked the man:
+
+"Do you know if Mrs. Poole is at the place now?"
+
+"Couldn't say. She comes and goes. She is always there when the racing
+is going on. It is supposed that some things that go on there at the
+Gandy place are not entirely regular," said the real estate man
+stiffly. "If you are a friend of Mrs. Poole----"
+
+"I am Jessie Norwood. My father, Mr. Robert Norwood, is a lawyer, and
+we live in the Roselawn section of New Melford."
+
+"Oh, ah, indeed!" murmured the real estate man. "Then I guess it is
+safe to tell you that the people around here do not approve of Mrs.
+Poole and what goes on at the Gandy place during the racing season. It
+is whispered that people there are interested in pool rooms in the
+city. You know, where betting on the races is conducted."
+
+"I do not know anything about that," replied Jessie, in some
+excitement. "But I thank you for telling me about Martha Poole."
+
+She seized Amy by the arm and hurried back to the automobile.
+
+"What do you think of that?" gasped Amy, quite as much amazed as was
+her chum.
+
+"I do wish Daddy was coming home to-day. But he isn't. Not until
+dinner time, anyway. I do believe, Amy Drew, that poor Bertha is
+hidden away somewhere at that farm."
+
+"But--but----how could she get at any sending station to tell her
+troubles to--to the air?" and Amy suddenly giggled.
+
+"Don't laugh. It is a very serious matter, I feel sure. If the poor
+girl actually isn't being abused, those women are hiding her away so
+that they can cheat Daddy's clients out of a lot of money."
+
+"Again I ask," repeated Amy, more earnestly, "_how_ could that girl,
+whoever she is, get to a sending station? We did not see the first
+sign of an aerial anywhere near that house and barn, or above the
+tower, either."
+
+"I don't know what it means. It is a mystery," confessed Jessie. "But
+I just _feel_ that what we heard over the radio had to do with that
+missing girl--that it was Bertha Blair calling for help, and that in
+some way she is connected with that red barn and the silo and the two
+fallen trees. We traced the place from her description."
+
+"So we did!"
+
+"And unless it is all a big hoax, somewhere near that place Bertha is
+held a prisoner. If that Martha Poole is in with some crooked people
+who break the state gambling law by radio, sending news of the races
+to city gambling rooms, she would commit other things against the
+law."
+
+"Oh!" cried Amy. "Both she and that Mrs. Bothwell look like hard
+characters. But there were no aerials in sight!"
+
+Jessie thought for a moment. Then she flashed at her chum:
+
+"Well, that might be, too. Some people string their aerials indoors. I
+don't know if that can be done at a sending station. But it may be.
+They are inventing new things about radio all the time. You know that,
+dear."
+
+"I know it," agreed Amy.
+
+"And if that broadcasting station up there at the Gandy farm is used
+for the sending of private racing information, in all probability the
+people who set it up would want to keep it secret."
+
+"I see! So they would."
+
+"It is not registered, you can make up your mind. And as it is only
+used much when the racing season is on at the Harrimay track, the
+Government has probably given it little attention."
+
+"Could they find it, do you think, Jessie?" asked her chum.
+
+"I have read that the Government has wonderful means of locating any
+'squeak-box', as they call it, that is not registered and which
+litters up the airways with either unimportant or absolutely evil
+communications. These methods of tracing unregistered sending stations
+were discovered during the war and were proved thoroughly before the
+Government allowed any small stations to be established since."
+
+"Do you suppose the police knew that that woman was sending racing
+news to gambling rooms from up there at her farm?"
+
+"We don't know that she is. Mr. Perkins was only repeating gossip. And
+we did not see aerials up there."
+
+"But you say that maybe they could have rigging for the station
+without any aerials in the open?"
+
+"It might be. I am all confused. There certainly is a mystery about
+it, and Daddy Norwood ought to know at once. Oh, Chapman! That was
+thunder. We must hurry home."
+
+"Yes, Miss Jessie," said the chauffeur, looking up at the clouds that
+had been gathering. "I think I can get you home before it rains."
+
+He increased the speed of the car. They had circled around by another
+way than the Parkville road, and they came through the edge of New
+Melford. When the automobile shot into Bonwit Boulevard and headed
+toward Roselawn the first flash of lightning made the girls jump.
+
+Chapman stepped on the accelerator and the car shot up the oiled way.
+The thunder seemed to explode right overhead. Before the first peal
+rolled away there was another sharp flash. Although the rain still
+held off, the tempest was near.
+
+"Oh!" gasped Jessie, covering her eyes.
+
+"There's the church," said Amy. "We'll soon be home now."
+
+Even as she spoke another crackling stroke burst overhead. The green
+glare of it almost blinded them. The thunder shook the air. Jessie
+screamed.
+
+"See! See! Look at the parsonage!" she cried in Amy's ear.
+
+"Why, the boys must have already strung their wires and got a radio
+set established," said Amy.
+
+"Look at the window--that attic window!" Jessie exclaimed. "Don't you
+see what I see, Amy Drew?"
+
+"It's smoke!" said the other girl, amazed.
+
+"The house is afire! In the attic! That lightning must have struck
+there. It must have been led in by the wires, just as Momsy feared."
+
+"Then the boys never closed their switch!" cried Amy. "Oh! I wonder if
+Doctor Stanley or Nell knows that the house is on fire?"
+
+
+
+
+A GREAT TO-DO
+
+SILK
+
+DARRY'S BIG IDEA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+A GREAT TO-DO
+
+
+"Chapman! Stop!" shouted Jessie. "We must tell them!"
+
+The chauffeur wheeled the car in toward the curb and stopped as
+quickly as he could. But it was some distance past the church and the
+parsonage.
+
+The girls jumped out and ran back. They saw Dr. Stanley come out on
+the porch from his study. He was in his house gown and wore a little
+black cap to cover his bald spot. It was a little on one side and gave
+the good clergyman a decidedly rakish appearance.
+
+"Come in here, children! Hurry! It is going to rain," he called in his
+full and mellow voice.
+
+"Oh, Doctor! Doctor!" Jessie gasped. "The fire! The fire!"
+
+"Why, you are not wet. Here come the first drops. You don't need a
+fire."
+
+"Nor you don't need one, Doctor," and Amy began to laugh. "But you've
+got one just the same."
+
+"In the kitchen stove. Is it a joke or a conundrum?" asked the
+smiling minister, as the two chums came up under the porch roof just
+as the first big drops came thudding down.
+
+"Upstairs! The radio!" declared the earnest Jessie. "Don't you know
+it's afire?"
+
+"The radio afire?"
+
+"The lightning struck it. Didn't you feel and hear it? The boys must
+have left the switch to the receiver open, and the lightning came
+right in----"
+
+"Come on!" broke in Amy, who knew the way about the parsonage as well
+as she did about her own house. "We saw the smoke pouring out of the
+window," and she darted in and started up the front stairway.
+
+"Why, why!" gasped the good doctor. "I can hardly believe Nell would
+be so careless."
+
+"Oh, it isn't Nell," Jessie said, following her chum. "It is the
+boys."
+
+"But she always knows what the boys are up to, and Sally, too,"
+declared the minister, confident of his capable daughter's oversight
+of the family.
+
+The girls raced up the two flights. They smelled the smoke strongly as
+they mounted the second stairway to the garret. Then they heard
+voices.
+
+"They've got it right in the old lumber room, Jess!" panted Amy.
+
+"But why don't they give the alarm?"
+
+"Trying to put it out themselves. We ought to have brought buckets!"
+
+"There is no water on this floor!"
+
+Amy banged open the door of the big room in which they knew, by the
+arrangement of the outside wires, Bob and Fred must have set up the
+radio set. Amy plunged in, with Jessie right behind her. The room was
+unpleasantly filled with smoke.
+
+"Why don't you put it out?" shrieked Amy, and then began to cough.
+
+"Hullo!" Bob Stanley exclaimed out of the smother. "We want to put it
+in, not out. Hullo, Jess. You here, too?"
+
+"The fire! The smoke!" gasped Jessie.
+
+"Shucks," said Fred, who was down on his knees poking at something.
+"We can't have the windows open, for the rain is beating this way.
+We've got to solder this thing. Did you have trouble with yours,
+Jess?"
+
+"Sweetness and daylight!" groaned a voice behind them.
+
+Dr. Stanley stood in the doorway. He was a heavy man, and mounting the
+stairs at such a pace tried his temper as well as his wind.
+
+"Is _this_ what started you girls off at such a tearing pace? Why, the
+boys borrowed that soldering outfit from the plumber. It's all
+right."
+
+"I am so sorry we annoyed you," said Jessie, contritely.
+
+But Amy had begun to laugh and could say nothing. Only waved her hands
+weakly and looked at the clergyman, whose cap was much more over his
+ear than before.
+
+"Right in the middle of Sunday's sermon, young ladies," said the
+minister, with apparent sternness. "If that sermon is a failure, Amy
+and Jessie, I shall call on one of you girls--perhaps both of you--to
+step up into the pulpit and take my place. Remember that, now!" and he
+marched away in apparent dudgeon; but they heard him singing "Onward
+Christian Soldiers" before he got to the bottom of the upper flight of
+stairs.
+
+"But it certainly was a great to-do," murmured Jessie, as she tried to
+see what the boys were doing.
+
+She was able to advise them after a minute. But Amy insisted upon
+opening one of the windows and so getting more of the smoke out of the
+long room.
+
+"You boys don't even know how to make a fire in a fire-pot without
+creating a disturbance," she said.
+
+Nell came up from the kitchen where she had been consulting the cook
+about the meals, and Sally came tagging after her; of course, with a
+cookie in one hand and a rag doll in the other.
+
+"This Sally is nothing but a yawning cavity walking on hollow stilts,"
+declared Nell, who "fussed" good-naturedly, just as her father did.
+"She is constantly begging from the cook between meals, and her eyes
+are the biggest things about her when she comes to the table."
+
+"Ain't," said Sally, shaking her curls in denial.
+
+"Ain't what?" asked Jessie.
+
+"Ain't--ain't _if you please_," declared the little girl, revealing
+the fact that her sister had tried to train her in politeness.
+
+When the girls stopped laughing--and Sally had finished the
+cookie--Nell added:
+
+"Aunt Freda came last night to dinner and we had strawberry fool. Cook
+makes a delicious one. And Sally could eat her weight of that
+delicacy. When I came to serve the dessert Sally was watching me with
+her eagle eye and her mouth watering. I spooned out an ordinary
+dishful, and Sally whispered:
+
+"'Oh, sister! is _that_ all I get?'
+
+"So I told her it was for Aunt Freda, and she gasped:
+
+"'What! All _that_?'"
+
+The boys got the thing they wanted soldered completed about this time,
+and Bob ran down the back way with the fire-pot. The rain began to
+lift. As Nell cheerfully said, a patch of blue sky soon appeared in
+the west big enough to make a Scotchman a kilt, so they could be sure
+that it would clear.
+
+Jessie and Amy walked home after seeing the Stanley boys' radio set
+completed. Their minds then naturally reverted to the adventures of
+the morning and what they had heard so mysteriously out of the ether
+the evening before. Jessie had warned her chum to say nothing to
+anybody about the mysterious prisoner and the stock farm over by
+Harrimay or of their suspicions until she had talked again with Mr.
+Norwood.
+
+Momsy came home that afternoon from Aunt Ann's, but Mr. Norwood did
+not appear. The Court was sitting, and he had several cases which
+needed his entire attention. He often remained away from home several
+days in succession at such times.
+
+"And one of the most important cases is that one he told us about,"
+Momsy explained. "He is greatly worried about that. If he cannot find
+that girl who lived with Mrs. Poole----"
+
+"Oh, Momsy!" exclaimed Jessie, "let us find Daddy and tell him about
+what Amy and I heard over the radio. I believe we learned something
+about Bertha Blair, only we could not find her this morning."
+
+She proceeded to explain the adventure which included the automobile
+trip to Harrimay and the Gandy farm. Momsy became excited. It did not
+really seem to her to be so; but she agreed that Daddy Norwood ought
+to hear about it.
+
+When they tried to get him on the long distance telephone, however,
+the Court had closed for the day and so had the Norwood law office. He
+was not at his club, and Momsy did not know at which hotel he was to
+spend the night. There really seemed to be nothing more Jessie could
+do about the lost witness. And yet she feared that this delay in
+getting her father's attention would be irreparable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+SILK!
+
+
+Belle Ringold and Sally Moon came up to the Norwood place the next
+forenoon and found Jessie and Amy in a porch hammock, their heads
+together, writing a letter to Jessie's father. Jessie had tried to get
+Robert Norwood at his office right after breakfast, but a clerk had
+informed her that Mr. Norwood was not expected there until later. He
+would go direct to court from his hotel.
+
+"And they have no more idea where he went to sleep than Momsy had,"
+Jessie had explained to her chum when Amy appeared, eager and curious.
+"He is so busy with his court work that he does not want to be
+disturbed, I know. But it seems to me that what we heard over the
+radio ought to be told to him."
+
+It was Amy who had suggested the writing of the letter and having it
+taken into town by Chapman, the chauffeur. The coming of Belle and
+Sally disturbed the chums in the middle of the letter.
+
+"Glad we found you here, Amy," said Belle. "You never are at home, are
+you?"
+
+"Only to sleep," confessed Amy Drew. "What seems to be the trouble,
+ladies? Am I not to be allowed to go calling?"
+
+"Oh, we know you are always gadding over here," said Sally, laughing.
+"You are Jessie's shadow."
+
+"Ha, ha! and likewise ho, ho!" rejoined Amy. "In this case then, the
+shadow is greater than the substance. I weigh fifteen pounds more than
+Jess. We'll have to see about that."
+
+"And I suppose your brother, Darrington, is over here, too?" asked
+Belle, her sharp eyes glancing all about the big veranda.
+
+"Wrong again," rejoined Amy, cheerfully. "But if you have any message
+for Darry you can trust me to deliver it to him."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Just about off Barnegat, if his plans matured," said Amy composedly.
+
+"Oh!" cried Belle. "Did he go out on that yacht? And without taking
+any of us girls?" and she began to pout.
+
+"No mixed parties until the family can go along," Amy said promptly.
+"Jess and I, even, haven't been aboard the _Marigold_."
+
+"Oh, you children!" scoffed Belle. "I shouldn't think that Darry and
+Burd Alling and that Mark Stratford would want little girls tagging
+them. Why, they are in college."
+
+Belle really was a year older than the chums; but she acted, and
+seemed to feel, as though she were grown up. Amy stared at her with
+wide eyes.
+
+"Well, I like your nerve!" said she. "Darry's my brother. And I've
+known Burd Alling since he and Darry went to primary school. And so
+has Jess. I guess they are not likely to take strangers off on that
+yacht with them before they take Jess and me."
+
+Belle tossed her head and laughed just as though she considered Amy's
+heated reply quite childish.
+
+"Oh, dear me," she proclaimed. "To hear you, one would think you were
+still playmates, all making mud pies together. I don't know that you
+and Jess, Amy Drew, ever will be grown up."
+
+"Hope not, if we have to grow into anything that looks and acts like
+you," grumbled Amy.
+
+But Jessie tried to pour oil on the troubled waters. "Just what did
+you come for, Belle?" she asked. After all, she must play hostess. "Is
+it anything I can do for you?"
+
+"Some of us older girls are going to have a box party down at the
+Carter Landing on Lake Monenset the first moonlight night. Sally and I
+are on the committee of arrangements. We want to talk it over with
+Darrington and Burd and get them to invite Mark Stratford."
+
+"Humph! You'll have to use long distance or radio," chuckled Amy.
+
+"Now, don't interfere, Amy!" said Belle sharply.
+
+"Wait," Jessie said, in her quiet way. "Don't let us argue over
+nothing. The boys really are off on their boat. We do not know just
+when they are coming back. Why don't you write Darry a note and leave
+it at the house?"
+
+"Humph! I wonder if he'd get it?" snapped Belle, with her face screwed
+up as though she had bitten into something awfully sour.
+
+"Well! I like her impudence," muttered Amy, as Belle and Sally
+disappeared. "I don't see how her mother ever let her grow up."
+
+"It is not as bad as all that," her chum said gravely. "But it is
+awfully silly for Belle and those girls who go with her to be thinking
+of the boys all the time, and trying to get the older boys to show an
+interest in them. That is perfectly ridiculous."
+
+"You're right," said Amy, bluntly. "And Darry and Burd think that
+Belle is foolish."
+
+"Now, let's finish this letter to Daddy," Jessie said, hastily. "And
+then, oh, Amy Drew, I have an idea!"
+
+"Another idea?" cried her friend.
+
+"I don't know whether there is anything in it or not. But listen.
+Don't you think we might get Henrietta, take her over to the Gandy
+place, and look around again for Bertha?"
+
+"We-ell, I admit that kid has got sharp eyes. But how could she see
+into those buildings that are all shut up any better than we could
+when we were over there?"
+
+"You don't just get my idea, honey. If the girl who radioed her
+message, and which we heard, is Henrietta's cousin, she will know
+Henrietta's voice. And if Henrietta calls her from outside, maybe she
+can shout and we will hear her."
+
+"That is an idea!" exclaimed Amy. "It might work, at that." Then she
+laughed. "Anyway, we can give Hen a ride. Hen certainly likes riding
+in an automobile."
+
+"And Nell has got an almost new dress and other things for her. Let us
+go down to the parsonage and get them. And while Chapman goes to town
+with this letter we'll paddle around to Dogtown and get Henrietta."
+
+"Fine!" cried Amy, and ran home for her hat.
+
+A little later, when she had returned from the parsonage with the
+bundle and the chums were embarked upon the lake, Jessie said:
+
+"I hope the poor little thing will like this dress that Nell was so
+kind as to find for her. But, to tell the truth, Amy, it seems a
+little old for Henrietta."
+
+"Is it a cape-coat suit?" giggled her friend.
+
+"It is a little taffeta silk, and Nell said it was cut in a style so
+disgracefully freakish that she would not let Sally wear it. It was
+bought at one of those ultra-shops on Fifth Avenue where they have
+styles for children that ape the frocks their big sisters wear."
+
+"Let's see it," urged Amy, with curiosity.
+
+"Wait till you see it on Henrietta. There are undies, too, and
+stockings and a pair of shoes that I hope will fit her. But consider!
+Taffeta silk for a child like Henrietta."
+
+There could be no doubt that the girls from Roselawn were welcome when
+they landed at Dogtown and came to the Foley house. The greater number
+of the village children seemed to have swarmed elsewhere; but little
+Henrietta was sitting on the steps of the house holding the
+next-to-the-youngest Foley in her arms.
+
+"Hush!" she hissed, holding up an admonishing finger. "He's 'most
+gone. When he goes I'll lay him in that soap-box and cover him with
+the mosquito netting. Then I can tend to you."
+
+"The little, old-fashioned thing," murmured Amy. "It isn't right,
+Jess."
+
+Jessie understood and nodded. She was glad that Amy showed a certain
+amount of sympathy for Henrietta and appreciation of her. In a few
+moments the child was utterly relaxed and Henrietta got up and
+staggered over to the soap-box on wheels and laid the sleeper down
+upon a pillow.
+
+"He ought to sleep an hour," said little Henrietta, covering Billy
+Foley carefully so that the flies could not bite his fat, red legs. "I
+ain't got nothing to do now but to sweep out the house, wash the
+dishes in the sink, clean the clinkers out of the stove, hang out a
+line for clothes, and make the beds before Mrs. Foley and the baby get
+back. I can talk to you girls while I'm doing them things."
+
+"Landy's sake!" gasped Amy, horrified.
+
+But Jessie determined to take matters in her own hands for the time
+being, Mrs. Foley not being present. She immediately unrolled the
+bundle of things she had brought, and Henrietta halted on the step of
+the house, poised as though for flight, her pale eyes gradually
+growing rounder and rounder.
+
+"Them ain't for _me_?"
+
+"If they fit you, or can be made to fit you, honey," said Jessie.
+
+"Oh, the poor child!" exclaimed Amy softly, taking care that Henrietta
+should not hear her.
+
+"Silk!" murmured Henrietta, and sat down on the step again, put her
+arms out widely and squeezed the silk dress up to her flat little
+body as though the garment was another baby.
+
+"Silk!" repeated the poor little thing. "Miss Jessie! How good you are
+to me! I never did have a thing made of silk before, 'cepting a
+hair-ribbon. And I never had any too many of them."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+DARRY'S BIG IDEA
+
+
+When Mrs. Foley and the baby arrived home there stood upon the
+platform at the back door of the house a most amazing figure. She knew
+every child in Dogtown, and none of them had ever made such an
+appearance. She almost dropped the baby through amazement.
+
+"For love of John Thomas McGuire!" burst forth the "bulgy" woman,
+finally finding her voice. "What's happened to that child? Is it an
+angel she's turned into? Or is she an heiress, I dunno? Hen Haney!
+what's the meaning of this parade? And have you washed the dishes like
+I told you?"
+
+"You must forgive her, Mrs. Foley," Jessie said, coming down to meet
+the woman and taking the baby from her. "Go and see and speak to the
+child," she whispered. "She is so delighted that she has not been able
+to talk for ten minutes."
+
+"Then," said Mrs. Foley solemnly, "the wor-r-rld has come to an end.
+When Hen Haney can't talk----"
+
+But she mounted heavily to the platform. Little Henrietta stood there
+like a wax figure. She dared not move for fear something would happen
+to her finery.
+
+Every individual freckle on her thin, sharp face seemed to shine as
+though there was some radiance behind it. Absurd as that taffeta dress
+was for a child of her age, it seemed to her an armor against all
+disaster. Nothing bad (she had already acclaimed it to Amy and Jessie)
+could happen to her with that frock on. And those silk stockings! And
+the patent-toed shoes! And a hat that almost hid the child's features
+from view!
+
+"Well, well, well!" muttered the amazed Mrs. Foley. "If anybody had
+ever told me that you'd have been dressed up like--like a
+millionaire's kid! When I took you away from your poor dead mother and
+brought you out here, Hen Haney, to be a playfellow of me little
+Charlie, and Billy, and--and--Well, anyway, to be a playmate to them.
+Ha! You never cleaned out the stove-grate, did you?"
+
+She had looked into the kitchen and saw the dishes in the sink and the
+gaping stove hearth, and shook her head. Jessie thought it time to
+intercede for the little girl.
+
+"You must forgive her, Mrs. Foley, and blame me. I made her dress up
+in the things we brought. I was sure you would want to see her in her
+Sunday clothes."
+
+A deep sigh welled up from Henrietta's chest. "Am I going to
+sure-enough keep 'em to wear Sundays?" she asked.
+
+"If Mrs. Foley will let you," said the politic Jessie. "You can keep
+them very carefully. It is really wonderful how well they fit."
+
+"Sure," sighed Mrs. Foley, "she's better dressed than me own
+children."
+
+"But you told us your children were all boys," Amy put in quickly.
+
+"Aw, but a time like this I wish't I had a daughter," declared the
+woman, gazing at Henrietta almost tenderly. "What a sweet little
+colleen she might be if she had some flesh on her bones and something
+besides freckles to color her face. Yes, yes!"
+
+"I am awfully glad, Mrs. Foley," said Jessie quickly, "to see how much
+you approve of what we have tried to do for Henrietta. So I am bold
+enough to ask you to let us take her up to my house for over night.
+Momsy wants to see her in these new clothes, and----"
+
+"Well, if Mrs. Momsy--Or is it Mr. Momsy, I dunno?"
+
+"Why, Momsy is my mother!"
+
+"The like o' that now! And she lets you call her out o' name? Well,
+there is no understanding you rich folks. Ha! So you want to take
+little Hen away from me?"
+
+"Only for over night. It would be a little vacation for her, you
+know."
+
+Mrs. Foley looked back into the kitchen and shook her head. "By the
+looks o' things," she said, "she's been having a vacation right here.
+Well, she'll be no good for a while anyway, I can see that. Why, she
+can't much more than speak with them glad rags on her."
+
+"Come on," said Henrietta, and walked down the steps, heading toward
+the lake.
+
+Amy burst into laughter again, and even Mrs. Foley began to grin.
+
+"She's as ready to go as though you two young ladies was her fairy
+god-mothers. Sure, and maybe 'tis me own fault. I've been telling her
+for years about the Good Little People that me grandmother knew in
+Ireland--or said she knew, God rest her soul!--and she has always been
+looking for banshees and ha'nts and fairies to appear and whisk her
+away. She is a princess in disguise that's been char-r-rmed by a
+wicked witch. All them stories and beliefs has kept her contented.
+She's a good little thing," Mrs. Foley ended, wiping her eyes. "Go
+along with her and tell your Mrs. Momsy to be good to her."
+
+So they got away from Dogtown with flying colors. Henrietta sat, a
+little silk-clad figure, in the bottom of the canoe and shivered
+whenever she thought a drop of water might come inboard.
+
+"She ought to have worn her old clothes in the canoe," Amy suggested,
+but with dancing eyes.
+
+"O-o-oh!" gasped Henrietta, pleadingly.
+
+"It is going to take dentist's forceps to ever get the child out of
+that dress," chuckled Jessie. "I can see that."
+
+They got back to Roselawn in good season for dinner. Chapman had
+returned from town, but had not brought Mr. Norwood home. Jessie's
+father, it seemed, had left the courtroom early in the afternoon and
+had gone out of town on some matter connected with the Ellison case.
+That case, as Jessie and her mother feared, was already in the court.
+A jury had been decided upon, as the defendants, Mrs. Poole and Mrs.
+Bothwell, had been advised by McCracken, their lawyer, to demand a
+jury trial.
+
+The plaintiffs would have to get in their witnesses the next day. If
+Bertha Blair was ever to aid the side of right and truth in this
+matter, she must be found and brought to court.
+
+"And we don't know how to find her. If she is hidden away over there
+at that Gandy farm, how shall we ever find it out for sure?" wailed
+Jessie. "I hoped Daddy would get my letter and come and take charge of
+the search himself."
+
+"Your idea of taking Henrietta over there and letting her call Bertha
+is a good one," declared Amy stubbornly. "Aren't you going to do
+it?"
+
+"Yes. We'll drive over early. But it is only a chance."
+
+They could not interest Henrietta in her Cousin Bertha that evening,
+save that she said she hoped Bertha would come and see her before she
+had to take off the silk dress and the other articles of her gay
+apparel.
+
+She scarcely had appetite for dinner, although Momsy and Jessie tried
+their very best to interest Henrietta in several dishes that were
+supposed to appeal to a child's palate. Henrietta was polite and
+thanked them, but was not enthusiastic.
+
+She found a tall mirror in the drawing room and every time they missed
+her, Jessie tip-toed into that long apartment to see Henrietta posing
+before the glass. The child certainly did enjoy her finery.
+
+The suggestion of bedtime only annoyed Henrietta. But finally Jessie
+took her upstairs and showed her the twin beds in her own room, one of
+which the visitor was to occupy, and so gradually Henrietta came to
+the idea that some time she would have to remove the new clothes.
+
+They listened in on the radio that evening until late, using the
+amplifier and horn that Mr. Norwood had bought. Henrietta could not
+understand how the voices could come into the room over the outside
+wires.
+
+"I'll tell Charlie Foley and Montmorency Shannon about this," she
+confided to Jessie and Amy. "I guess you don't know them. But they are
+smart. They can rig one of these wireless things with wires, I bet.
+And then the whole of Dogtown will listen in."
+
+"Or, say! Maybe they won't let poor folks like those in Dogtown have
+radios? Will they?"
+
+"This is for the rich and poor alike," Jessie assured her.
+
+"Provided," added Amy, "that the poor are not too poor."
+
+They finally got Henrietta to bed. She went to sleep with the silk
+dress hanging over a chair within reach. After Amy had gone home
+Jessie retired with much more worriment upon her mind than little
+Henrietta had upon hers.
+
+Everybody was astir early about the Norwood and Drew places in
+Roselawn that next morning. At the former house Jessie and Henrietta
+aroused everybody. At the Drew place "two old salts," as Amy sleepily
+called them from her bedroom window, came rambling in from a taxi-cab
+and disturbed the repose of the family.
+
+"Where did you leave that _Marigold_?" the sister demanded from her
+window. "You boys go off on that yacht, supposedly to stay a year, and
+get back in forty-eight hours. You turn up like a couple of bad
+pennies. You----"
+
+"Chop it, Sis," Darry advised. "See if you can get a bite fixed for a
+couple of started castaways. The engine went dead on us and we sailed
+into Barnegat last night and all hands came home by train. Mark has
+the laugh on us."
+
+Fortunately the cook was already downstairs and Amy put on a negligee
+and ran down to sit with the boys in the breakfast room and listen to
+the tale of their adventures.
+
+"Oh! But," she said, after a while, "there's been something doing in
+this neighborhood, too. At least, our neighbors have been doing
+something. Do you know, Darry, Jess is bound to find that lost girl we
+were telling you about? Mr. Norwood goes into court to-day on that
+Ellison case, and he admits himself that he has very little chance of
+winning without the testimony of Bertha Blair."
+
+"Fine name," drawled Darry. "Sounds like a movie actress."
+
+"Let me tell you," Amy said eagerly.
+
+She related how she and Jessie had tried to find Bertha after hearing
+what they believed to be the lost girl's voice out of the air. Darry
+and Burd listened with increasing wonder.
+
+"What won't you kids do next?" gasped Darry.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't call us kids. You are as bad as Belle Ringold,"
+complained his sister.
+
+"Is she hanging around here yet?" demanded Darry. "I don't want to see
+that girl. I know I'm going to say something unpleasant to her yet."
+
+"She is right after you, just the same," Amy said, suddenly giggling.
+She told about the coming moonlight box-party down the lake.
+
+"We'll go right back to the _Marigold_, Burd," said Darry promptly.
+"Home is no place for us. But tell us what else you did, Sis."
+
+When Amy had finished her tale her brother was quite serious.
+Particularly was he anxious to help Jessie, for he thought a good deal
+of his sister's chum.
+
+"Tell you what," he said, looking at Burd, "we'll hang around long
+enough to ride over to the stock farm with the girls, sha'n't we?"
+
+"What do you think you can do more than they have done?" asked Burd,
+with some scorn.
+
+"I have an idea," said Darry Drew slowly. "I think it is a good one.
+It even beats using that little Hen Haney for a bait. Listen here."
+
+And he proceeded to tell them.
+
+
+
+
+A RADIO TRICK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+A RADIO TRICK
+
+
+Jessie was of course delighted to see Darry and Burd in Amy's company
+when her chum appeared on the Norwood premises after breakfast. Jessie
+had dressed Henrietta, and the child was preening herself in the sun
+like a peacock. The boys scarcely recognized her.
+
+At once Burd Alling called her the Enchanted Princess. That disturbed
+little Henrietta but slightly.
+
+"I expect I am a 'chanted princess,'" she admitted gravely. "I expect
+I am like Cinderella. I know all about her. And the pumpkin and rats
+and mice was charmed, too. I hope I won't get charmed back again into
+my old clothes."
+
+"You could not very well help Mrs. Foley in that dress, Henrietta,"
+Jessie suggested.
+
+"No. I suppose not. But if I could just find my cousin Bertha maybe I
+would not have to help Mrs. Foley any more. Maybe Bertha is rich, and
+we could hire somebody to take care of Billy Foley and to clean out
+the kitchen stove."
+
+She was more than eager to ride along with the others to look for
+Bertha Blair. As it chanced, Jessie did not have to call for Chapman
+and the Norwood car when the time to go came. For who should drive up
+to the house but Mark Stratford, who had come home with Darry and Burd
+from the yacht cruise and had driven over from Stratfordtown in his
+powerful car?
+
+It was a tight fit for the six in the racing car, but they squeezed in
+and drove out through the Parkville road while it was still early
+morning. Meanwhile Darry had explained his idea to the others, and
+they were all eager to view the surroundings of the Gandy stock farm.
+
+"If Bertha is there she'll know me if I holler; of course, she will,"
+agreed little Henrietta. "But she never will know me by looking at me.
+Never!"
+
+"So she'll have to shut her eyes if she wants to know you, will she,
+kid?" chuckled Burd.
+
+There really did not seem to be any need for the child to call when
+the party stopped before the closed gate, for there was not any sign
+of occupancy of either the house or surrounding buildings. The
+shingled old house offered blank windows to the road, like so many
+sightless eyes. There were no horses in the stables, for the windows
+over the box-stalls were all closed. And the tower the girls had
+marked before seemed deserted as well.
+
+"Just the same, the voice spoke of the red barn and that silo and
+those two fallen trees there. Chapman says the trees must have fallen
+lately. And yet there isn't an aerial in sight, as we told you," said
+Jessie.
+
+"Let's look around," Darry said, jumping out, and Burd and Amy went
+with him. Mark turned around in the driver's seat to talk with
+Jessie.
+
+"You know, it's a funny thing that the girl's name should be Bertha
+Blair," the young man said. "I heard you folks talking about her
+before, and I said something about it to our Mr. Blair at the factory.
+He's had a lot of trouble in his family. Never had any children, he
+and his wife, but always wanted 'em."
+
+"His younger brother married a girl of whom the Blair family did not
+approve. Guess she was all right, but came from poor kind of folks.
+And when the younger Blair died they lost trace of his wife and a baby
+girl they had. Funny thing," added Mark. "That baby's name was
+Bertha--Bertha Blair. When I told the superintendent something about
+your looking for such a girl because of a law case, he was much
+interested. If you go over there again to the sending station, tell
+the superintendent all about her, Miss Jessie."
+
+"I certainly will," promised the Roselawn girl. "But we haven't even
+found Bertha yet, and we are not sure she is here."
+
+Darry and the others had entered the grounds surrounding the stock
+farm buildings and they were gone some time. When they came back even
+Amy seemed despondent.
+
+"I guess we were fooled, Jess," she said. "There is nobody here--not
+even a caretaker. I guess what we heard over the radio that time was a
+hoax."
+
+"I don't believe it!" declared Jessie. "I just _feel_ that Bertha
+Blair, little Henrietta's cousin, is somewhere here."
+
+"And maybe she can't get away," said Henrietta. "I'd like to help
+Bertha run away from that fat woman."
+
+"Let's take the kid in and let her call," suggested Burd.
+
+"Sure you didn't see any aerial, Darry?" Mark asked, showing increased
+interest in the matter.
+
+"Not a sign," said Drew, shaking his head.
+
+"That tower----"
+
+"Yes. It would make an ideal station. But I went all around it. I
+can't see the roof, for it is practically flat. And if what I
+suggested was there, we will have to get above the level of the roof
+to see it."
+
+Mark suddenly got out and opened his toolbox. He brought forth a pair
+of lineman's climbers.
+
+"Thought I had 'em here. I'll go up that telegraph pole and see what
+I can see," and he began to strap them on.
+
+"Good as gold!" cried Burd admiringly. "You have a head on you, young
+fellow."
+
+"Yes," said Mark dryly. "I was born with it."
+
+He proceeded to the tall telegraph pole and swarmed quickly up it. The
+others waited, watching him as he surveyed the apparently deserted
+place from the cross-piece of the pole. By and by he came down.
+
+"It's there, Darry," he said confidently. "Your big idea was all to
+the good. That folding wireless staff you use on the _Marigold_ is
+repeated right on the top of that tower. When they use the sending set
+they raise the staff with the antenna and--there you have it."
+
+"Oh! Then she's in the tower!" cried Amy.
+
+"At least, she was in the tower if she sent her message from this
+station," agreed Darry.
+
+"How shall we find out--how shall we?" cried Amy, excitedly.
+
+"If Mr. Stratford is quite sure that he sees the aerials upon that
+roof, then I am going to get the tower door open somehow," declared
+Jessie, with her usual determination.
+
+"It is there, Miss Jessie," Mark assured her.
+
+"Come on, Henrietta," said Jessie, helping the little girl to jump
+down from the car. "We are going to find your Cousin Bertha if she is
+here."
+
+"You are real nice to be so int'rusted in Bertha," said Henrietta.
+
+"I am interested in her particularly because Daddy Norwood needs her,"
+admitted the older girl. "Come on now, honey. We'll go up to that
+tower building and you shout for Bertha just as hard as you can shout.
+She will know your voice if she doesn't know you in your new dress,"
+and she smiled down at the little girl clinging to her hand.
+
+
+
+
+JUST IN TIME
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+JUST IN TIME
+
+
+It seemed as though if there really was anybody left in charge of the
+Gandy house and premises, such a caretaker would have appeared before
+this to demand of the party of young folks from Roselawn what they
+wanted. As Jessie Norwood walked up the lane, with little Henrietta by
+the hand and followed by Darrington Drew, she saw no person at any
+window or door.
+
+The tower might have been abandoned years before, as far as appearance
+went. But Mark Stratford's discovery seemed to make it plain that the
+tower was sometimes in use.
+
+Jessie noted that the tower stood on a knoll behind the house from
+which vantage the race track some quarter of a mile away might be
+seen. With good field glasses one might stand in the second story of
+the tower and see the horses running on the track. Then, if there was
+a sending radio set in the tower, the reports of races could be
+broadcasted in secret code to sets tuned to the one in the tower.
+
+Of course, if the radio instrument was so illegally used, it was only
+so used while the races were being held at the Harrimay Track. Then
+the folding aerials were raised and made use of. The cry for help that
+had been broadcasted and which Jessie and Amy had heard might have
+been sent out from this station some night when Martha Poole or her
+friends had neglected to shut off the aerial by dropping it flat upon
+the roof of the tower.
+
+The question now was, had Bertha stolen her way into the tower at that
+time, or was she held prisoner there? Evidently Martha Poole and Sadie
+Bothwell were determined to hold the girl until after the court had
+settled in their favor the Ellison will case.
+
+Jessie and those with her came to the foot of the tower. All the lower
+windows were boarded up and the door was tightly closed. There were
+shades at the upper windows, and they fitted tightly.
+
+"You call Bertha, honey," said Jessie. "Tell her we've come to let her
+out. Did you try that door, Darry?"
+
+"Not much! We don't want to be arrested for trying to commit
+burglary."
+
+"Shout for Bertha, Henrietta," commanded Jessie.
+
+Immediately the little girl set up a yell that, as Burd declared,
+could have scarcely been equaled by a steam calliope.
+
+"Bertha! Bertha Haney! Come out and see my new dress!"
+
+That invitation certainly delighted Amy and Burd. They sat in the car
+and clung to each other while they laughed. Little Henrietta's face
+got rosy red while she shouted, and she was very much in earnest.
+
+"Bertha! Bertha Haney! Don't you hear me? I got a new dress! And we've
+come to take you home. Bertha!"
+
+Suddenly the lower door of the tower opened a crack. An old, old
+woman, and not at all a pleasant looking woman, appeared at the
+crack.
+
+"What you want?" she demanded. "Go 'way! Martha Poole didn't send you
+here."
+
+Jessie spoke up briskly. "We've come to see Bertha. This is her little
+cousin. You won't refuse to let her see Bertha, will you?"
+
+"There ain't nobody here but a sick girl. She ain't to be let out. She
+ain't right in her head."
+
+"I guess that is what is the matter with you," said Darry Drew,
+sternly. He had come nearer, and now, before the woman could shut the
+door, he thrust his foot between it and the jamb. "We're going to see
+Bertha Blair. Out of the way!"
+
+He thrust back the door and the old woman with it. They heard a
+muffled voice calling from upstairs. Little Henrietta flashed by the
+guardian of the tower and darted upstairs.
+
+"Bertha! Bertha! I'm coming, Bertha! I got a new dress!"
+
+"You better go up and see what's doing, Jess," said Darry. "I'll hold
+this woman down here."
+
+Jessie was giggling, although it was from nervousness.
+
+"And I thought you did not want to be considered a burglar?" she said
+as she passed hastily in at the door.
+
+"Oh, well, we're in for it now," Darry called after her. "Be as quick
+as you can."
+
+Jessie found a door open at the top of the flight. Henrietta was
+chattering at top speed somewhere ahead. The rooms were dark, but when
+Jessie found the room in which Henrietta was, she likewise found a
+girl bound to a chair in which she sat, with a towel tied across her
+mouth which muffled her speech.
+
+"Here's Bertha! Here's Bertha!" cried Henrietta eagerly.
+
+Jessie had the girl free and the towel off in half a minute. She saw
+then that the prisoner was the girl she and Amy had seen carried away
+by Martha Poole and Sadie Bothwell, out of Dogtown Lane.
+
+"Oh, Miss! is this little Hennie? And have you come to take me away?"
+gasped Bertha.
+
+"Surely. Are you Bertha Blair?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am. Hennie calls me Bertha Haney. For I lived with her mom
+after my mother died. But my name's Blair."
+
+"My father is Robert Norwood, the lawyer," said Jessie swiftly. "He
+wants you to testify in court about what you heard when that old man
+made his will at Mrs. Poole's house."
+
+"Oh! You mean Mr. Abel Ellison? A gentleman came and asked me about
+that once, and then Mrs. Poole said I'd got to keep my mouth shut
+about it or she'd put me away somewhere so that I'd never get away."
+
+"So I ran away from her," said Bertha, "and tried to go to Dogtown and
+see Hennie and the Foleys. Why! wasn't you one of the girls, Miss,
+that saw Mrs. Poole putting me into that car?"
+
+"Yes," sighed Jessie. "I saw it, but couldn't stop it."
+
+"Well, they brought me right out here, and I've been here ever since.
+When Mrs. Poole isn't here that old woman comes and keeps me from
+running away."
+
+"But once," Jessie suggested, "you had a chance to try to send out a
+cry for help?"
+
+"There's a radio here. They used it one night. Then I tried to call
+for help over it. But they heard me and stopped it at once."
+
+"Just the same, that attempt of yours is what has brought us here
+to-day. I will tell you all about it later. Come, Bertha! We will get
+you away from here before Mrs. Poole comes. And we must take you to
+the city to see my father at once."
+
+As they left the tower and the ugly old woman, they heard the latter
+calling a number into the telephone receiver. She was probably trying
+to report the outrage to Mrs. Poole.
+
+"But the woman will never dare call the police," Darry assured Jessie.
+"You tell your father all about it, and he'll know what to do."
+
+"And we must see Daddy Norwood as soon as possible," the girl said. "I
+must take Bertha to him. The case is already in court."
+
+"I'll fix that for you, Miss Jessie," Mark Stratford said. "I can get
+you to town just as quickly as the traffic cops will let me--and they
+are all my friends."
+
+Darry considered that he should go, too. So they dropped Amy and
+little Henrietta, with Burd Alling, at Roselawn, and after a word to
+Momsy, started like the flight of an arrow in Mark's powerful car for
+New York.
+
+Jessie and Bertha Blair had never ridden so fast before. Mark
+Stratford knew his car well, and coaxed it along over the well-oiled
+roads of Westchester at a speed to make anybody gasp.
+
+But haste was necessary. They knew where the court was, and they
+arrived there just after the noon recess. Mrs. Norwood had reached her
+husband's chief clerk by telephone, and he had communicated the news
+to the lawyer. Mr. Norwood had dragged along the prosecution until the
+missing witness arrived. Then he introduced Bertha Blair into the
+witness chair most unexpectedly to McCracken and his clients.
+
+If Mr. Norwood's side of the argument needed any bolstering, this was
+supplied when Bertha was allowed to tell her story. The judge even
+advised the girl, or her guardians if she had any, that she had a
+perfectly good civil case against Martha Poole for imprisoning her in
+the tower on the Gandy farm.
+
+These matters, however, did not interest Jessie Norwood and her
+friends much. They had been able to assist Mr. Norwood in an important
+legal case, and naturally everybody, both old and young, was
+interested in Bertha Blair, the girl who had been imprisoned. Momsy
+said she would put on her thinking cap about Bertha's future.
+
+Meanwhile Bertha and little Henrietta went back to the Foleys for a
+while. Henrietta was bound to be the most important person of her age
+in all of Dogtown. No other little girl there was the possessor of
+such finery as she had.
+
+What Mark Stratford had said to Jessie about Superintendent Blair kept
+recurring to the Roselawn girl, and she felt that she should tell the
+man who had charge of the Stratford Electric Corporation radio program
+about the girl who had been rescued from the horsewoman. As we meet
+Jessie and Amy and Bertha and all their friends in another volume,
+called "The Radio Girls on the Program; Or, Singing and Reciting at
+the Sending Station," in all probability Jessie Norwood will do just
+that.
+
+"You girls," Darry Drew said to Jessie and Amy, "have got more radio
+stuff in your heads than most fellows I know. Why, you are as good as
+boys at it."
+
+"I like that!" exclaimed his sister. "Is there anything, I'd like to
+know, that girls can't beat boys at?"
+
+"One thing," put in Burd Alling solemnly.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Killing snakes," said Burd.
+
+"Wrong! Wrong!" cried Jessie, laughing. "You ought to see little
+Henrietta attack a flock of snakes. She takes the palm."
+
+"Think of it, a little girl like that going after snakes!" murmured
+Burd. "She must have nerve!"
+
+"She has," declared Jessie. "And she is as clever as can be, too, in
+spite of her odd way of expressing herself."
+
+"I wonder what they'll do about Bertha Blair," came from Darry.
+
+"She certainly had an adventure," observed Burd. "Maybe the movie
+people will want her--or the vaudeville managers. They often pick up
+people like that, who have been in the limelight."
+
+"I don't think Momsy will allow anything of that sort," returned
+Jessie. "I'm sure she and Daddy will think up something better."
+
+Suddenly Amy, who was resting comfortably in the porch hammock, leaped
+to her feet.
+
+"I declare! I forgot!" she cried.
+
+"Forgot what?" came in a chorus from the others.
+
+"Forgot that special concert to-day--that one to be given over the
+radio by that noted French soprano. You know who I mean--the one with
+the unpronounceable name."
+
+"Oh, yes!" ejaculated Jessie. "Let me see--what time was it?" She
+consulted her wrist watch. "I declare! it starts in five minutes."
+
+"Then come on and tune in. I've been thinking of that concert ever
+since it was advertised. Miss Gress, the music teacher, heard her sing
+in Paris and she says she's wonderful. Come on. Will you boys come
+along?"
+
+"Might as well," answered Darry. "We haven't anything else to do."
+
+"And I like a good singer," added Burd.
+
+In another moment all were trooping up to Jessie's pretty room where
+she had her receiving set. The necessary tuning in was soon
+accomplished and in a minute more all were listening to a song from
+one of the favorite operas, rendered as only a great singer can render
+it. And here, for the time being we will say good-bye to the Radio
+Girls of Roselawn.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+CLASSIC SERIES
+
+Heidi
+ By Johanna Spyri
+
+Treasure Island
+ By Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Hans Brinker
+ By Mary Mapes Dodge
+
+Gulliver's Travels
+ By Jonathan Swift
+
+Alice in Wonderland
+ By Lewis Carroll
+
+Boys and girls the world over worship these "Classics" of all times,
+and no youth is complete without their imagination-stirring influence.
+They are the time-tested favorites loved by generations of young
+people.
+
+The Goldsmith Publishing Co.
+
+NEW YORK, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+Books for GIRLS
+
+THE PEGGY STEWART SERIES
+
+By GABRIELLE E. JACKSON
+
+Against the colorful background of Annapolis and a picturesque southern
+estate, Gabrielle E. Jackson paints the human and lovely story of a
+human and lovely girl. Real girls will revel in this wholesome tale and
+its enchanting telling.
+
+ Peggy Stewart at Home
+ Peggy Stewart at School
+
+The Motor Girls Series
+
+By MARGARET PENROSE
+
+A dashing, fun-loving girl is Cora Kimball and she is surrounded in her
+gypsy-like adventures with a group of young people that fairly sparkle.
+Girls who follow their adventurous steps will find a continuing delight
+in their doings. In the series will be found some absorbing mysteries
+that will keep the reader guessing so that the element of supense is
+added to make the perusal thoroughly enjoyable.
+
+ The Motor Girls
+ On Tour
+ At Lookout Beach
+ Through New England
+ On Cedar Lake
+ On the Coast
+ On Crystal Bay
+ On Waters Blue
+ At Camp Surprise
+ In the Mountains
+
+Helen In the Editor's Chair
+
+By RUTHE S. WHEELER
+
+"Helen in the Editor's Chair" strikes a new note in stories for girls.
+Its heroine, Helen Blair, is typical of the strong, self-reliant girl
+of to-day. When her father suffers a breakdown and is forced to go to a
+drier climate to recuperate, Helen and her brother take charge of their
+father's paper, the Rolfe Herald. They are faced with the problem of
+keeping the paper running profitably and the adventures they encounter
+in their year on the Herald will keep you tingling with excitement from
+the first page to the last.
+
+The Goldsmith Publishing Company
+
+NEW YORK, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+Books for GIRLS
+
+The Merriweather Girls Series
+
+By LIZETTE EDHOLM
+
+The Merriweather girls, Bet, Shirley, Joy and Kit are four fun-loving
+chums, who think up something exciting to do every minute.
+
+The romantic old Merriweather Manor is where their most thrilling
+adventures occur. The author has given us four exceptional titles in
+this series--absorbing mysteries and their solutions, school life,
+horseback riding, tennis, and adventures during their school vacations.
+
+EVERYGIRL'S SERIES
+
+Grouped in the Everygirl's Series are five volumes selected for
+excellence. Shirley Watkins, Caroline E. Jacobs and Blanche Elizabeth
+Wade contribute stories that are both fascinatingly real and touched
+with romance. Every girl who dips into one of these stories will find
+herself enthralled to the end.
+
+ The S. W. F. Club--By Caroline E. Jacobs
+ Jane Lends a Hand--By Shirley Watkins
+ Nancy of Paradise Cottage--By Shirley Watkins
+ Georgina Finds Herself--By Shirley Watkins
+
+THE PEGGY STEWART SERIES
+
+By GABRIELLE E. JACKSON
+
+Against the colorful background of Annapolis and a picturesque southern
+estate, Gabrielle E. Jackson paints the human and lovely story of a
+human and lovely girl. Real girls will revel in this wholesome tale and
+its enchanting telling.
+
+ Peggy Stewart at Home
+ Peggy Stewart at School
+
+The Goldsmith Publishing Company
+
+NEW YORK, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+Books for GIRLS
+
+THE MERRIWEATHER GIRLS SERIES
+
+By LIZETTE EDHOLM
+
+The Merriweather girls, Bet, Shirley, Joy and Kit are four fun-loving
+chums, who think up something exciting to do every minute.
+
+The romantic old Merriweather Manor is where their most thrilling
+adventures occur. The author has given us four exceptional titles in
+this series--absorbing mysteries and their solutions, school life,
+horseback riding, tennis and adventures during their school vacations.
+
+ The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan
+ The Merriweather Girls on Campers Trail
+ The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure
+ The Merriweather Girls at Good Old Rock Hill
+
+CAMPFIRE GIRLS SERIES
+
+By MARGARET PENROSE
+
+These stories take in the activities of several bright girls who become
+interested in all present day adventures.
+
+ Campfire Girls of Roselawn  Campfire Girls on Program
+ Campfire Girls on Station Island
+ Campfire Girls at Forest Lodge
+
+EVERYGIRL'S SERIES
+
+Grouped in the Everygirl's Series are five volumes selected for
+excellence. Shirley Watkins, Caroline E. Jacobs and Blanche Elizabeth
+Wade contribute stories that are both fascinatingly real and touched
+with romance. Every girl who dips into one of these stories will find
+herself enthralled to the end.
+
+ The S. W. F. Club----By Caroline E. Jacobs
+ Jane Lends a Hand----By Shirley Watkins
+ Nancy of Paradise College--By Shirley Watkins
+ Georgina Finds Herself--By Shirley Watkins
+
+The Goldsmith Publishing Company
+
+NEW YORK, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Campfire Girls of Roselawn, by Margaret Penrose
+
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