The Campfire Girls of Roselawn: or, a Strange Message from the Air

“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.

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.

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.