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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.

“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!”