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

A big dictionary placed in an armchair, raised little Henrietta to the proper height at the Norwood dinner table. Nothing seemed to trouble or astonish the visitor, either about the food or the service. And Jessie and Momsy wondered at the really good manners the child displayed.

Mrs. Foley had not wholly neglected her duty in Henrietta’s case. And there seemed to be, too, a natural refinement possessed by the girl that aided her through what would have seemed a trying experience.

Best of all, Henrietta could give a good description of her missing cousin. Her name was Bertha Blair, and that was the name of the girl Mr. Norwood’s clerk had interviewed before she had been whisked away by Martha Poole and Sadie Bothwell.

In addition, Mr. Norwood had brought home photographs of the two women, and both Jessie and Amy identified them as the women they had seen in Dogtown Lane, forcing the strange girl into the automobile.

“It is a pretty clear case,” the lawyer admitted. “We know the date and the place where the missing witness was. But the thing is now to trace the movements of those women and their prisoner after they drove away from Dogtown Lane.”

Nevertheless, he considered that every discovery, even a small one, was important. Detectives would be started on the trail. Jessie and Amy rode back to Dogtown in the Norwoods’ car with the excited Henrietta after dinner, leaving her at the Foleys’ with the promise that they would see her soon again.

“And if those folks you know have any clothes to give me,” said Henrietta, longingly, “I hope they’ll be fashionable.”

CHAPTER XVII

BROADCASTING

Darry and Burd were planning another trip on the Marigold, and so had little time to give to the girl chums of Roselawn. Burd wickedly declared that Darry Drew was running away from home to get rid of Belle Ringold.

“Wherever he goes down town, she pops up like a jack-in-the-box and tries to pin him. Darry is so polite he doesn’t know how to get away. But I know he wishes her mother would lock her in the nursery.”

“It is her mother’s fault that Belle is such a silly,” scoffed Amy. “She lets Belle think she is quite grown up.”

“She’ll never be grown up,” growled out Darry. “Never saw such a kid. If you acted like her, Sis, I’d put you back into rompers and feed you lollipops.”

“You’d have a big chance doing anything like that to me, Master Darry,” declared his sister, smartly. “Even Dad – bless his heart! – would not undertake to turn back the clock on me.”

Before the two young fellows left Roselawn again, they did the girls a favor that Amy and Jessie highly appreciated. It was done involuntarily but was nevertheless esteemed. Mark Stratford drifted up the Bonwit Boulevard in his big and shiny car and halted it in front of the Norwood place to hail Darry and Burd.

“Here’s the millionaire kid,” called out Alling. “Know him, girls? He’s quite the fastest thing that lingers about old Yale. Zoomed over the German lines in the war, stoking an airplane, although at that time he was only a kid. Mark Stratford. His family are the Stratford Electric Company. Oodles of money. But Mark is a patient soul.”

“‘Patient’?” repeated Jessie, wonderingly, as she and Amy accompanied the young fellows down to the street.

“Sure,” declared Burd. “Most fellows would be impatient, burdened with so much of the filthy lucre as Mark has. But not he. He is doing his little best to spend his share.”

However, and in spite of Burd’s introduction, Mark Stratford proved to be a very personable young man and did not look at all the “sport.” Jessie considered that Burd was very probably fooling them about Mark. The young folks were talking like old friends in five minutes. In five minutes more they had piled into the car for a ride.

Mark’s car “burned up the road” so fast that in half an hour they came to Stratfordtown where the huge plant of the Electric Company lay, and on the border of which was the large Stratford estate.

Jessie and Amy did not care anything about the beauties of the show place of the county. While riding over the girls had discussed one particular topic. And when Mark asked them where they wanted to go, or what they preferred to see, Jessie spoke out:

“Oh, Mr. Stratford! take us to the plant and let us go into the radio broadcasting room. Amy and I are just longing to see how it is done.”

“Oh, that!” exclaimed Mark Stratford.

“We’re crazy about radio, Mr. Stratford,” agreed Amy.

“Some radio fiends, these two,” said Darry. And he told his friend to what use the girls had already put Jessie’s set for the benefit of the church bazaar.

“If you girls want to see how it’s done, to be sure I’ll introduce you to the man in charge. Wait till we drive around there.” Stratford was as good as his word. It was a time in the afternoon when the Electric Company’s matinee concert was being broadcasted. They went up in the passenger elevator in the main building of the plant to a sort of glassed-in roof garden. There were several rooms, or compartments, with glass partitions, sound-proof, and hung with curtains to cut off any echo. The young people could stare through the windows and see the performers in front of the broadcasting sets. The girls looked at each other and clung tightly to each other’s hand.

“Oh, Amy!” sighed Jessie.

“If we could only get a chance to sing here!” whispered Amy in return.

It did not mean much to the boys. And Mark Stratford, of course, had been here time and time again. A gray-haired man with a bustling manner and wearing glasses came through the reception room and Mark stopped him.

“Oh, Mr. Blair!” the collegian said. “Here are some friends of mine who are regular radio bugs. Let me introduce you to Miss Jessie Norwood and Miss Amy Drew. Likewise,” he added, as the gentleman smilingly shook hands with the girls, “allow me to present their comrades in crime, Darry Drew and Burdwell Alling. These fellows help me kill time over at Yale, to which the governor has sentenced me for four years.”

“Mr. Blair?” repeated Jessie, looking sideways at her chum.

“Mr. Blair?” whispered Amy, who remembered the name as well as Jessie did.

“That is my name, young ladies,” replied the superintendent, smiling.

“You don’t know anything about a girl of our age named Blair, do you, Mr. Blair?” Jessie asked hesitatingly.

“I have no daughters,” returned the superintendent, and the expression of his face changed so swiftly and so strangely that Jessie did not feel that she could make any further comment upon the thought that had stabbed her mind. After all, it seemed like sheer curiosity on her part to ask the man about his family.

“Just the same,” she told Amy afterward, when they were in the automobile once more, “Blair is not such a common name, do you think?”

“But, of course, that Bertha Blair couldn’t be anything to the superintendent of the broadcasting station. Oh, Jessie! What a wonderful program he had arranged for to-day. I am coming over to-night to listen in on that orchestral concert and hear Madame Elva sing. I would not miss it for anything.”

“Suppose we could get a chance to help entertain!” Jessie sighed. “Not, of course, on the same program with such performers as these the Stratford people have. But–”

They happened to be traveling slowly and Mark overheard this. He twisted around in his seat to say:

“Why didn’t you ask Blair about it? You have no idea how many amateurs offer their services. And some of them he uses.”

“I’ll say he does!” grumbled Burd. “Some of the singers and others I have listened in on have been punk.”

“Well, I’ll have you know that Jessie and I wouldn’t sing if we could not sing well,” Amy said, with spirit.

“Sure,” agreed Burd, grinning. “Madame Elva wouldn’t be a patch on you two girls singing the ‘Morning Glories’ Buns’ or the ‘Midnight Rolls’.”

“Your taste in music is mighty poor, sure enough, Burd,” commented Darry. “Jessie sings all right. She’s got a voice like a–”

“Like a bird, I know,” chuckled Alling. “That is just the way I sing – like a Burd.”

“I’ve heard of a bird called a crow,” put in Mark Stratford, smiling on the two girl chums. Jessie thought he had a really nice smile. “That is what your voice sounds like, Alling. You couldn’t make the Glee Club in a hundred and forty years.”

“Don’t say a word!” cried Burd. “I’ll be a long time past singing before the end of that term. Ah-ha! Here we are at Roselawn.”

They got out at the Norwood place and the girls insisted upon Mark coming in to afternoon tea, which Amy and Jessie poured on the porch. The chums liked Mark Stratford and they did not believe that he was anywhere near as “sporty” as Burd had intimated. Naturally, a fellow who had driven a warplane and owned an airship now and often went up in it, would consider the driving of a motor-car rather tame. As for his college record, Jessie and Amy later discovered that Mark was a hard student and was at or near the head of his class in most of his studies.

“And he drives that wonderful car of his,” said Amy, with approval, “like a jockey on the track.”

The girl chums did not forget the concert they expected to enjoy that evening, but Darry and Burd left right after dinner for the moorings of the Marigold at City Island. They took Mark Stratford and some other college friends with them for a three days’ trip on the yacht.

Jessie and Amy were eager to see the Marigold; but their parents had forbidden any mixed parties on the yacht until either Mr. and Mrs. Drew, or Mr. and Mrs. Norwood could accompany the young people. That would come later in the summer.

Amy ran over to the Norwood place before half past eight. The concert, Mr. Blair had told them, was to begin at nine. Jessie had learned a good deal about tuning in on the ether by this time; and there is no other part of radio knowledge more necessary if the operator would make full use of his set.

“The bedtime story is just concluded, Amy,” Jessie said when her chum came in. “Sit down. I am going to get that talk on ‘Hairpins and Haricots’ by that extremely funny newspaper man – what is his name?”

“I don’t know. What’s in a name, anyhow?” answered her chum, lightly.

Amy adjusted the earphones while her friend manipulated the slides on the tuning coil. They did not catch the first of the talk, but they heard considerable of it. Then something happened – just what it was Amy had no idea. She tore off the ear-tabs and demanded:

“What are you doing, Jess? That doesn’t sound like anything I ever heard before. Is it static interference?”

“It certainly is interference,” admitted Jessie, trying to tune the set so as to get back upon the wave that had brought the funny talk about ‘Hairpins and Haricots.’

But it did not work. Jessie could not get in touch with the lecture. Instead, out of the ether came one word, over and over again. And that word in a voice that Jessie was confident must come from a woman or a girl:

“Help! He-lp! He-e-lp!”

Over and over again it was repeated. Amy who had put on her head harness again, snatched at her chum’s arm.

“Listen! Do you hear that?” she cried in an awed tone.

CHAPTER XVIII

A MYSTERY OF THE ETHER

Jessie knew that by carefully moving the slides on her tuning coil she could get into touch again with the talk to which she and Amy had been listening. But now the broadcasted cry for “Help!” seemed of so much importance that she wanted to hear more of this air mystery.

“He-lp!” The word came to their ears over and over again. Then: “I am a prisoner. They brought me here and locked me in. There is a red barn and silo and two fallen trees. He-lp! Come and find me!”

“For pity’s sake, Jess Norwood!” shrilled Amy. “Do you hear that?”

“I’m trying to,” her chum replied. “Hush!”

“It must be a hoax.”

“Wait!”

They listened and heard it repeated, almost word for word. A red barn and a silo and two fallen trees. These points the strange voice insisted on with each repetition.

“I can’t believe it!” declared Amy.

“It is a girl. I am sure it is a girl. Oh, Amy!” gasped Jessie. “Suppose it should be the girl whom we saw carried off by those two awful women?”

“Bertha Blair?”

“Yes. Of course, I suppose that is awfully far-fetched–”

“Wait! Here it comes again,” whispered Amy.

“Come and find me! Help! I am a prisoner! The red barn and the silo with the two fallen trees.”

How many times this was repeated the girls did not know. Suddenly something cluttered up the airways – some sort of interference – and the mystery of the ether died away. No matter what Jessie did to the tuning coil she could not bring that strangely broadcasted message back to their ears.

“What do you know about that?” demanded Amy, breathlessly.

“Why – why,” murmured her chum, “we don’t know much of anything about it. Only, I am sure that was a girl calling. It was a youthful voice.”

“And I feel that it is Bertha Blair!” exclaimed Amy. “Oh, Jessie, we must do something for her.”

“How can we? How can we find her?”

“A red barn with a silo and two fallen trees. Think of it! Did you ever see a place like that when you have been riding about the country?”

“I – nev-er – did!” and Jessie shook her head despondently.

“But there must be such a place. It surely is not a hoax,” said Amy, although at first she had thought it was a joke. “And there is another thing to mark, Jess.”

“What is that?”

“The place where this girl is kept a prisoner has a broadcasting station. You can’t talk into a radio set like this. There has to be electric power and a generator, and all that – such as Mark Stratford showed us there at Stratfordtown.”

“Of course.”

“Then don’t you think, Jessie, the fact that it is a broadcasting plant where the girl is imprisoned must narrow the inquiry a good deal?”

“How clever you are, dear,” declared Jessie. “But a red barn with a silo and two fallen trees! Why, Amy! we don’t know in which direction to look. Whether to the north, south, east or west!”

“No-o. I suppose–Oh, wait, Jess!” cried the excited Amy. “We don’t really know where those women took that girl we saw carried off. They drove out the boulevard as far as we could see them. But, do you remember, we met that Mrs. Bothwell again in the big French car that very evening?”

“When we went to Parkville with Nell and the Brandons!” Jessie said eagerly. “I remember she passed us. You pointed her out to me.”

“And she turned out of the very road we took to go to Parkville,” said Amy, with confidence. “I believe that red barn with the silo must be over beyond Parkville.”

“It might be so,” admitted her chum, thoughtfully. “I have never been through that section of the state. But Chapman knows every road, I guess.”

“Doesn’t your father know the roads, too?”

“But Daddy and Momsy have gone to Aunt Ann’s in New York and will not be back to-night,” Jessie explained.

“Anyhow we couldn’t go hunting around in the dark after this broadcasting station, wherever it is,” Amy observed.

“Of course not,” her chum agreed, taking the harness off her head. “Come down to the telephone and I’ll see if Chapman is in the garage.”

They ran downstairs, forgetting all about the radio concert they were to have heard, and Jessie called up the garage to which a private wire was strung.

The chauffeur, who had served the Norwoods ever since they had had a car, answered Jessie’s request quickly, and appeared at the side door. Amy was just as eager as Jessie to cross-question the man about a red barn with a silo. He had to ask the girls to stop and begin all over again, and–

“If you please, Miss Jessie,” he added, widely a-grin, “either let Miss Amy tell me or you tell me. I can’t seem to get it right when you both talk.”

“Oh, I am dumb!” announced Amy. “Go ahead, Jess; you tell him.”

So Jessie tried to put the case as plainly as possible; but from the look on Chapman’s face she knew that the chauffeur thought that this was rather a fantastic matter.

“Why, Chapman!” she cried, “you do not know much about this radio business, do you?”

“Only what I have seen of it here, Miss Jessie. I heard the music over your wires. But I did not suppose that anybody could talk into the thing and other folks could hear like–”

“Oh! You don’t understand,” Jessie interrupted. “No ordinary radio set broadcasts. It merely receives.”

As clearly as she could she explained what sort of plant there must be from which the strange girl had sent out her cry for help.

“Of course, you understand, the girl must have got a chance on the sly to speak into the broadcasting horn. Now, all the big broadcasting stations are registered with the Government. And if secret ones are established the Government agents soon find them out.

“It might be, if the people who imprisoned this girl are the ones we think, they may have a plant for the sending out of information that is illegal. For instance, it might have some connection with race track gambling. One of the women is interested in racing and the other in automobile contests. If the broadcasting plant is near a race course or an autodrome–”

“Now you give me an idea, Miss Jessie!” exclaimed Chapman suddenly. “I remember a stock farm over behind Parkville where the barns are painted red. And there is a silo or two. Besides, it is near the Harrimay Race Course. I could drive over there in the morning, if you want to go. Mr. Norwood won’t mind, I am sure.”

“Would you go, Amy?” Jessie asked, hesitatingly.

“Sure! It’s a chance. And I am awfully anxious now to find out what that mysterious voice means.”

CHAPTER XIX

A PUZZLING CIRCUMSTANCE

Jessie’s parents being away, Amy ran home and announced her desire to keep her chum company and was back again before ten o’clock. There was not much to be heard over the airways after that hour. They had missed Madame Elva and the orchestra music broadcasted from Stratfordtown.

“Nothing to do but to go to bed,” Amy declared. “The sooner we are asleep the sooner we can get up and go looking for the mysterious broadcasting station. Do you believe that cry for help was from little Hen’s cousin?”

“I have a feeling that it is,” Jessie admitted.

“Maybe we ought to take Spotted Snake, the Witch, with us,” chuckled her chum. “What do you say?”

“I think not, honey. We might only raise hopes in the child’s mind that will not be fulfilled. I think she loves her cousin Bertha very much; and of course we do not know that this is that girl whose cry for help we heard.”

“We don’t really know anything about it. Maybe it is all a joke or a mistake.”

“Do you think that girl sounded as though she were joking?” was Jessie’s scornful reply. “Anyway, we will look into it alone first. If Chapman can find the stock farm with the red barn–”

“And there are two fallen trees and a silo near it,” put in Amy, smiling. “Goodness me, Jess! I am afraid the boys would say we had another crazy notion.”

“I like that!” cried Jessie Norwood. “What is there crazy about trying to help somebody who certainly must be in trouble? Besides,” she added very sensibly, “Daddy Norwood will be very thankful to us if we should manage to find that Bertha Blair. He needs her to witness for his clients, and Momsy says the hearing before the Surrogate cannot be postponed again. The matter must soon be decided, and without Bertha Blair’s testimony Daddy’s clients may lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“We’ll be off to the rescue of the prisoner in the morning, then,” said Amy, cuddling down into one of her chum’s twin beds. “Good-night! Sweet dreams! And if you have a nightmare don’t expect me to get up and tie it to the bed-post.”

The next morning Chapman brought around the car as early as half past eight, when the girls were just finishing breakfast.

“Don’t eat any more, Amy,” begged Jessie. “Do get up for once from the table feeling that you could eat more. The doctors say that is the proper way.”

“Pooh! What do the doctors know about eating?” scoffed Amy. “Their job is to tend to you when you can’t eat. Why? honey! I feel lots better morally with a full stomach than when I am hungry.”

They climbed into the car and Chapman drove out the boulevard and turned into the Parkville road. It was a lovely morning, not too hot and with only a wind made by their passage, so that the dust only drifted behind the car. They passed the home of Mr. and Mrs. Brandon’s daughter and saw the aerials strung between the house and the flagpole on the garage.

“Keep your eyes open for aerials anywhere, Amy,” said Jessie. “Of course wherever that broadcasting station is, the aerials must be observable.”

“They’ll be longer and more important than the antenna for the usual receiving set, won’t they?” eagerly asked Amy.

“Of course.” Then Jessie leaned forward to speak to Chapman, for they were in the open car. “When you approach the stock farm you spoke of, please drive slowly. We want to look over all the surroundings.”

“Very well, Miss Jessie,” the chauffeur said.

Passing through Parkville, they struck a road called a turnpike, although there were no ticket-houses, as there are at the ferries. It was an old highway sweeping between great farms, and the country was rolling, partly wooded, and not so far off the railroad line that the latter did not touch the race-track Chapman had spoken of.

The car skirted the high fence of the Harrimay enclosure and then they ran past a long string of barns in which the racing horses were housed and trained for a part of the year. There was no meet here at this time, and consequently few horses were in evidence.

“I like to see horses race,” remarked Amy. “And they are such lovely, intelligent looking creatures. But so many people who have anything to do with horses and racing are such hard-faced people and so – so impossible! Think of the looks of that Martha Poole. She’s the limit, Jessie.”

“Neither she nor Mrs. Bothwell is nice, I admit. But don’t blame it on the poor horses,” Jessie observed, smiling. “I am sure it is not their fault. Mrs. Poole would be objectionable if she was interested in cows – or – or Pekingese pups.”

Chapman turned up a hilly road and they came out on a ridge overlooking the fenced-in track. The chauffeur shifted his position so as to glance behind him at the girls, the car running slowly.

“Now look out, Miss Jessie,” he advised. “We are coming to the old Gandy stock farm. That’s the roof of the house just ahead. Yonder is the tower they built to house the electric lighting plant like what your father used to have. See it?”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Jessie. “But – but I don’t see any aerials. No, I don’t! And the red barn–”

“There it is!” cried Amy, grabbing at her chum’s arm. “With the silo at the end.”

The car turned a corner in the road and the entrance gate to the estate came into view. Up the well kept lane, beyond the rambling house of weathered shingles, stood a long, low barn and a silo, both of a dull red color. And on either side of the entrance gate were two broken willow trees, their tall tops partly removed, but most of the trunks still lying upon the ground where they had fallen.

“Ha!” ejaculated the chauffeur. “Those trees broke down since I was past here last.”

“Do drive slower, Chapman,” Jessie cried.

But she drew Amy down when the girl stood up to stare at the barn and the tower.

“There may be somebody on watch,” Jessie hissed. “They will suspect us. And if it is either of those women, they will recognize you.”

“Cat’s foot!” ejaculated Amy. “I don’t see any signs of occupancy about the house. Nor is there anybody working around the place. It looks abandoned.”

“We don’t know. If the poor girl is shut up here–”

“Where?” snapped Amy.

“Perhaps in the house.”

“Perhaps in the barn,” scoffed her chum. “Anyway, every window of that tower, both the lower and the upper stories, is shuttered on the outside.”

“Maybe that is where Bertha is confined – if it is Bertha.”

“But, honey! Where is the radio? There is nothing but a telephone wire in sight. There is no wireless plant here.”

“Dear me, Amy! don’t you suppose we have come to the right place?”

The car was now getting away from the Gandy premises. Jessie had to confess that there was no suspicious looking wiring anywhere about the house or outbuildings.