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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.
