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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.

“It does not seem as though that could be the place after all. What do you think, Chapman?” she added, leaning forward again. “Don’t you think that place looked deserted?”

“It often does between racing seasons, Miss Jessie,” the man said. “Whoever owns it now does not occupy it all the year.”

Suddenly Jessie sat up very straight and her face flamed again with excitement. She cried aloud:

“Chapman! Isn’t there a village near? And a real estate office?”

“Harrimay is right over the hills, Miss Jessie,” said the chauffeur.

“Drive there at once, please,” said the girl. “And stop at the office of the first real estate agent whose sign you see.”

“For goodness sake, Jess!” drawled Amy, her eyes twinkling, “you don’t mean to buy the Gandy farm, do you?”

CHAPTER XX
SOMETHING DOING AT THE STANLEYS’

Chapman drove the automobile down into Harrimay only ten minutes later. It was a pretty but rather somnolent place, just a string of white-painted, green-blinded houses and two or three stores along both sides of an oiled highway. It was a long ten-minute jitney ride from the railway station.

“Perkins, Real Estate” faced the travelers from a signboard as they drove into the village. Chapman stopped before the office door, and the eager Jessie hopped out.

“I’m coming, too! I’m coming, too!” squealed Amy, running across the walk after her.

“Do be quiet,” begged her chum. “And for once let me do the talking.”

“Oui, oui, Mademoiselle! As I haven’t the least idea what the topic of the conversation will be, I can easily promise that,” whispered Amy.

A high-collared man with eyeglasses and an ingratiating smile arose from behind a flat-topped desk facing the door and rubbed his hands as he addressed the two girls.

“What can I do for you, young ladies?”

“Why, why–Oh, I want to ask you – ” Jessie stammered. “Do you know who owns the farm over there by the track? The Gandy place?”

“The old Gandy stock farm, Miss?” asked the real estate man with a distinct lowering of tone. “It is not in the market. The Gandy place never has been in the market.”

“I just wish to know who owns it,” repeated Jessie, while Amy stared.

“The Gandys still own it. At least old man Gandy’s daughter is in possession I believe. Horse people, all of them. This woman–”

“Please tell me her name?”

“Poole, Martha Poole, is her name.”

“Oh!” cried Amy, seeing now what Jessie wanted.

But Jessie shook her head at her chum warningly, and asked the man:

“Do you know if Mrs. Poole is at the place now?”

“Couldn’t say. She comes and goes. She is always there when the racing is going on. It is supposed that some things that go on there at the Gandy place are not entirely regular,” said the real estate man stiffly. “If you are a friend of Mrs. Poole–”

“I am Jessie Norwood. My father, Mr. Robert Norwood, is a lawyer, and we live in the Roselawn section of New Melford.”

“Oh, ah, indeed!” murmured the real estate man. “Then I guess it is safe to tell you that the people around here do not approve of Mrs. Poole and what goes on at the Gandy place during the racing season. It is whispered that people there are interested in pool rooms in the city. You know, where betting on the races is conducted.”

“I do not know anything about that,” replied Jessie, in some excitement. “But I thank you for telling me about Martha Poole.”

She seized Amy by the arm and hurried back to the automobile.

“What do you think of that?” gasped Amy, quite as much amazed as was her chum.

“I do wish Daddy was coming home to-day. But he isn’t. Not until dinner time, anyway. I do believe, Amy Drew, that poor Bertha is hidden away somewhere at that farm.”

“But – but–how could she get at any sending station to tell her troubles to – to the air?” and Amy suddenly giggled.

“Don’t laugh. It is a very serious matter, I feel sure. If the poor girl actually isn’t being abused, those women are hiding her away so that they can cheat Daddy’s clients out of a lot of money.”

“Again I ask,” repeated Amy, more earnestly, “how could that girl, whoever she is, get to a sending station? We did not see the first sign of an aerial anywhere near that house and barn, or above the tower, either.”

“I don’t know what it means. It is a mystery,” confessed Jessie. “But I just feel that what we heard over the radio had to do with that missing girl – that it was Bertha Blair calling for help, and that in some way she is connected with that red barn and the silo and the two fallen trees. We traced the place from her description.”

“So we did!”

“And unless it is all a big hoax, somewhere near that place Bertha is held a prisoner. If that Martha Poole is in with some crooked people who break the state gambling law by radio, sending news of the races to city gambling rooms, she would commit other things against the law.”

“Oh!” cried Amy. “Both she and that Mrs. Bothwell look like hard characters. But there were no aerials in sight!”

Jessie thought for a moment. Then she flashed at her chum:

“Well, that might be, too. Some people string their aerials indoors. I don’t know if that can be done at a sending station. But it may be. They are inventing new things about radio all the time. You know that, dear.”

“I know it,” agreed Amy.

“And if that broadcasting station up there at the Gandy farm is used for the sending of private racing information, in all probability the people who set it up would want to keep it secret.”

“I see! So they would.”

“It is not registered, you can make up your mind. And as it is only used much when the racing season is on at the Harrimay track, the Government has probably given it little attention.”

“Could they find it, do you think, Jessie?” asked her chum.

“I have read that the Government has wonderful means of locating any ‘squeak-box’, as they call it, that is not registered and which litters up the airways with either unimportant or absolutely evil communications. These methods of tracing unregistered sending stations were discovered during the war and were proved thoroughly before the Government allowed any small stations to be established since.”

“Do you suppose the police knew that that woman was sending racing news to gambling rooms from up there at her farm?”

“We don’t know that she is. Mr. Perkins was only repeating gossip. And we did not see aerials up there.”

“But you say that maybe they could have rigging for the station without any aerials in the open?”

“It might be. I am all confused. There certainly is a mystery about it, and Daddy Norwood ought to know at once. Oh, Chapman! That was thunder. We must hurry home.”

“Yes, Miss Jessie,” said the chauffeur, looking up at the clouds that had been gathering. “I think I can get you home before it rains.”

He increased the speed of the car. They had circled around by another way than the Parkville road, and they came through the edge of New Melford. When the automobile shot into Bonwit Boulevard and headed toward Roselawn the first flash of lightning made the girls jump.

Chapman stepped on the accelerator and the car shot up the oiled way. The thunder seemed to explode right overhead. Before the first peal rolled away there was another sharp flash. Although the rain still held off, the tempest was near.

“Oh!” gasped Jessie, covering her eyes.

“There’s the church,” said Amy. “We’ll soon be home now.”

Even as she spoke another crackling stroke burst overhead. The green glare of it almost blinded them. The thunder shook the air. Jessie screamed.

“See! See! Look at the parsonage!” she cried in Amy’s ear.

“Why, the boys must have already strung their wires and got a radio set established,” said Amy.

“Look at the window – that attic window!” Jessie exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I see, Amy Drew?”

“It’s smoke!” said the other girl, amazed.

“The house is afire! In the attic! That lightning must have struck there. It must have been led in by the wires, just as Momsy feared.”

“Then the boys never closed their switch!” cried Amy. “Oh! I wonder if Doctor Stanley or Nell knows that the house is on fire?”