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

“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!”

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.