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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.
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.
