THE THREE ROSELAWN GIRLS SANG THEIR TRIO.
“The Radio Girls on the Program” Page 197

THE RADIO GIRLS
ON THE PROGRAM

OR

Singing and Reciting at the Sending Station
BY
MARGARET PENROSE

Author of “The Radio Girls of Roselawn,” “The
Radio Girls on Station Island,” “Dorothy
Dale Series,” “Motor Girls Series,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

BOOKS FOR GIRLS

By MARGARET PENROSE

12mo. cloth. Illustrated.

RADIO GIRLS SERIES

THE RADIO GIRLS OF ROSELAWN
THE RADIO GIRLS ON THE PROGRAM
THE RADIO GIRLS ON STATION ISLAND

DOROTHY DALE SERIES

DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY
DOROTHY DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL
DOROTHY DALE’S GREAT SECRET
DOROTHY DALE AND HER CHUMS
DOROTHY DALE’S QUEER HOLIDAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S CAMPING DAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S SCHOOL RIVALS
DOROTHY DALE IN THE CITY
DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE
DOROTHY DALE IN THE WEST
DOROTHY DALE’S STRANGE DISCOVERY
DOROTHY DALE’S ENGAGEMENT

MOTOR GIRLS SERIES

THE MOTOR GIRLS
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON A TOUR
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT LOOKOUT BEACH
THE MOTOR GIRLS THROUGH NEW ENGLAND
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CEDAR LAKE
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON THE COAST
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CRYSTAL BAY
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON WATERS BLUE
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT CAMP SURPRISE
THE MOTOR GIRLS IN THE MOUNTAINS

CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY
Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1922, by
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

The Radio Girls on the Program

Printed in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

THE RADIO GIRLS ON THE PROGRAM

CHAPTER I
SOMETHING OUT OF THE AIR

“Oh, come on! We’ll listen in on the radio concert, honey, and forget it,” Amy Drew said soothingly.

“But she’s so mean!” insisted Jessie Norwood. “So awfully mean!”

“Of course she is. Did you ever hear of anybody by the name of Ringold that wasn’t mean? Not me!” And Amy tossed her head.

“But that does not do a bit of good,” complained Jessie, her face still crimson and her eyes moist. “I cannot, Amy, overlook Belle’s rudeness just because it runs in her family.”

Amy giggled and sprang one of her jokes:

“Just because meanness runs in the Ringold family, like wooden legs,” she said. “I know how you feel about that dress, Jess.”

Jessie Norwood looked down at the frock she wore so daintily with eyes that were still clouded.

“If the Ringold’s cook, as Belle says, has a Sunday dress just like this I’ll never want to wear it again. Not because her cook isn’t just as good as I am,” Jessie added quickly, as she chanced to see the expression on her chum’s face, “but because Momsy bought the goods and had it made up by her own dressmaker, and it is supposed to be a little different from what you get in the ready-to-wear shops.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amy urged. “Belle’s talk isn’t as bad as the measles, or some other fell disease. Come on. If we catch the concert at four we’ll hear Madame Elva; and you know she is the very best on the Stratford Electric Company’s program.”

The two Roselawn girls were walking up the boulevard from town on this July afternoon. The wide highway was speckled with broken bits of sunshine, patterned through the leaves of the tall elms. Now and then an automobile purred past the girls on one of the two oiled drives, or a horseman clattered by. Roselawn was distinctly the better suburban district of New Melford.

“We could have such nice times in our set,” sighed Jessie, after a long minute, “if it wasn’t for Belle Ringold and Sally Moon and their crowd. They are forever interfering.”

“Static?” suggested Amy, grinning.

“No ether interference was ever as bad as Belle and Sally. See how they are annoying the boys about that moonlight box-party they have been trying to arrange for two weeks.”

“The present moon will be quite worn out before they get around to the party,” laughed Amy. “And, anyway, Darry and Burd have gone down to Barnegat to put the Marigold in commission again. If Belle holds off her moonlight party until they get back she’ll wait till frost.”

“Oh! You don’t mean that the boys will stay away all summer, Amy?” cried her chum.

“No,” rejoined Amy demurely. “I meant it will be a frost for Belle and Sally. Darry positively refuses to be roped in by Belle and her crowd.”

“I never did feel like this about any other girl,” Jessie Norwood confessed. “But I don’t really believe there ever was such an unpleasant girl as Belle Ringold.”

“Oh, yes, there must have been at least one,” said Amy, the irrepressible, and giggling again. “Her mother, Mrs. Ringold, is beloved for the same virtues that endears Belle to us girls. Or, do I say ‘we girls’?”

“You may say what you please—grammatically,” replied Jessie, smiling again. “It is vacation, and even Miss Seymour has gone away. However, I suppose we should not criticise Belle’s mother.”

“Dear me, honey,” groaned Amy. “You are so good you make me ache. If Belle had spoken as nastily to me as she did to you, I would positively hate her and all her relatives.”

“Look!” murmured Jessie Norwood suddenly. It was evident that she had not given much attention to her chum.

“Look! I thought from the way the radio sounded last evening that the aerial was twisted.”

They were now in sight of the Norwood place, which was one of the show places of Roselawn. At one side an opening in the trees gave a view of Lake Monenset. Across the broad boulevard from the automobile entrance to the Norwood grounds, set upon another terraced lawn, was the Drew house, where Amy lived with her parents and her brother, Darrington Drew, when he was at home. The girls were high school pupils, but Darrington had just finished his first year at Yale.

Amy, staring in the direction her chum pointed, between the Norwood house and a tower at one side, shook her head with mock sadness.

“I really do believe, Jess,” said she, “that there is something in the air besides static. There must be imps that twist those wires. You know it isn’t a week since we lowered the whole thing and took the twists out.”

“I don’t suppose we really have more trouble with our radio than other amateurs. Come on, Amy! Let’s get into our working togs and do a good job while we are about it.”

“All right,” agreed Amy. “Lucky I left my radio suit over here.”

“Your what?” asked her chum, laughing, as the two ran up the veranda steps.

“Radio suit,” repeated Amy seriously. “Those overalls were once our farmerette costumes; but the war is over and the sword is beaten into a plowshare, and our farmerette overalls have become radio rigging suits. Whew! Don’t go so fast, Jess. I can’t climb stairs and talk at the same time.”

In Jessie’s bedroom the two girls changed to the overall suits Amy had mentioned. Young as Jessie Norwood was, she had a suite of rooms to herself. In the long sitting room was her radio cabinet, a much better set than the ordinary house instrument. It had a two-step amplifier and a horn, but there were the usual headphones as well.

“That concert is due right now,” Jessie said, coming out into the big room. “Let us see how it sounds before we lower the aerial. It may have been partly static last night.”

She opened the receiving switch and fastened on the head harness. Amy came over and sat down, likewise affixing one set of the phones. Jessie tuned the machine with practised hand. At first the chattering noises in the air meant nothing intelligible.

“But it’s awfully loud,” murmured the puzzled Amy. “Why, Jess! I never heard your set so loud.”

“Goodness! That isn’t radio,” Jessie declared suddenly.

“Wha-a-at?” drawled the puzzled Amy.

“That’s an airplane!” cried Jessie. “It must be coming right this way.”

“Oh! Over the house!” gasped her chum. “It’s zooming, Jess! Look!”

She tore the phone-tabs from her ears and darted to the window. Jessie could see out from where she sat. The noise of the aeroplane grew louder.

It was swooping so low that involuntarily the girls screamed.

“It—it will hit the house!” gasped Jessie.

“What can he be thinking of?” Amy demanded in equal amazement. “He is swooping so low——”

In seeming recklessness the aviator volplaned downward. Suddenly the roaring of the engine passed. If the pilot did not manage his controls within a dozen seconds in a way to shoot the plane upward again, there must surely be a catastrophe.

Jessie left her seat at the radio and thrust her head and shoulders out of the open window beside her chum. The nose of the plane continued to slant downward. The girls screamed again, for a wing of the plane struck the roof of the tower to which the farther end of the radio aerial was fastened.

“He’ll be killed!” shrieked Jessie.

The plane seemed about to turn turtle. It crashed against the radio antenna and tore it from its fastenings. Then with a deafening crash the machine landed on the lawn, utterly wrecking one of the big rose gardens.

What had become of the reckless pilot the two girls at the window could not see.

CHAPTER II
THE HURT AVIATOR

The two girls did not stand long at the open window of Jessie Norwood’s sitting room. That crash of the airplane spurred them to excited activity.

Amy Drew led the way, and she led it shrieking. Mrs. Norwood appeared at the door of the library, demanding:

“What has happened, girls? Stop shouting, Amy, please! You will raise the neighborhood.”

“That’s what we want to do, Momsy!” Jessie cried. “Something dreadful has happened!”

“That radio set! I knew something would happen because of it,” gasped the kindly but rather nervous woman.

In fact, when Jessie Norwood and her chum, Amy Drew, had first become interested in radio telephony Mrs. Norwood had been rather fearful of the new apparatus. Not that she would forbid her only child—nor would Mr. Norwood, who was a lawyer in New York—anything that might amuse her without doing others harm. But “Momsy,” as Jessie always called her mother, was very much afraid of lightning and she feared that the radio aerial would lead lightning, as well as radio broadcasting, into the house.

Jessie, however, although she had strung the aerial and set up the machine in her own room with very little help save what her chum gave her, had studied advisory radio books with care and had so placed and guarded the thing that there was positively no danger from lightning.

Indeed, so careful was she, and quite by instinct now, that before she had left the room to run down to see what had happened to the fallen airplane pilot, she had closed the receiving switch. And there was not a cloud in the sky!

Roselawn people had become vastly interested in radio telephony since Jessie Norwood had got her outfit. The Norwoods were popular anyway, but since the church bazaar, which had been held on the Norwood lawn on the recent Fourth of July, Jessie found herself more than usually sought after.

At that time, and by her suggestion, a tent had been raised upon the lawn and her radio set disconnected, brought down into the tent, and linked up again with the aerial. The tent seated a hundred people, and it was filled to capacity at each show. Immediately radio telephony became “all the rage,” Amy said, “all over Roselawn.”

The practical uses of the new interest were not alone discovered in the first volume of this series, called “The Radio Girls of Roselawn”; but through radio, or because of it, the two chums and their friends fell in with a wealth of adventure.

Associated with Jessie and Amy in the incidents of the former book were Amy’s older brother, Darrington, and his college friend, Burd Alling. And for the very reason that these young men were older than the high school girls, some of the classmates of the latter were convinced that they should likewise have the privilege of chumming with the two collegians.

Belle Ringold, a girl not far from the age of the radio girls of Roselawn, but who dressed in a fashion much older than her years, had shown her spleen on this very day by saying something very unpleasant regarding Jessie’s dress.

Jessie had quite forgotten this, however, as she plunged down the stairway and out of the door after Amy.

The wrecked plane looked a ruin. Every part of it seemed to have been torn to bits. Both wings were twisted into scraps and the woodwork was splintered into matchwood. It did not seem, to the horrified eyes of the two girls, that any human being could have come down in that plane and lived.

Amy halted on the top step of the wide porch, clasping her hands.

“Oh, Jess!” she groaned. “That bed of beautiful Marshal Niel roses your mother thought so much of!”

Jessie knew that her chum was too excited to realize just how this sounded. The roses—the whole great bed of them—were uprooted and crushed. But there was greater disaster than that.

“The pilot! The pilot, Amy!” Jessie gasped. “He must be killed.”

“If he didn’t get out before the crash, he must be,” rejoined Amy.

“Goodness! How could he get out?”

Jessie was ahead. She ran to the far side of the heap of rubbish that was the collapsed aeroplane. There seemed no part of the machine left intact. And just as the girls reached the spot a curl of smoke ascended from the midst of the wreck.

“It’s on fire! Oh, Amy, the thing will be burned up! And the poor man!”

“Oh, he mustn’t!” groaned Amy.

Jessie suddenly saw an arm sticking out from under some of the lighter wreckage. It was clothed in the olive-drab uniform coat of an aviator. She seized the gauntleted hand and began to tug with all her strength.

“Where are you going, Amy?” she cried. “Come and help me.”

“Going to get the lawn hose. We’ll put out the fire, Jess.”

“But let’s get this man out first. He may roast while you are wetting down the plane with the hose.”

This seemed practical even to Amy. She lent her strength to Jessie’s and fortunately they were able to drag the unconscious pilot forth. He wore the usual helmet, the tabs of which were fastened over his ears. It was plain that he had been up to a high altitude before making this unfortunate swoop that had ended so disastrously.

“Is he dead? Oh! is he dead?” murmured Jessie Norwood.

“Oh, I hope not,” gasped her chum. “Who is he? Anybody we know, Jess?”

Jessie waved her away. “Run for Chapman or the gardener. Where can they be? Let them get out the hose and put out this fire. Do, Amy!”

“I’ll do that myself,” declared the other girl. “I thought of it first,” and away she went to where the hose was reeled beside the house-plug.

Mrs. Norwood had come out on the veranda, and, seeing that the girls were doing all they could, had herself gone in search of Chapman or the gardener. Jessie unfastened the aviator’s helmet and carefully removed it.

One look at the face of the victim of the accident, and the girl emitted a scream that startled her mother, just then coming around the corner of the house.

“For pity’s sake, child!” she cried. “Is it as bad as that? Come away, Jessie. Here comes Chapman. Let him attend to it!”

Chapman ran hastily to the spot—just in time, in fact, to get the stream of water from the hose right between the shoulders. Amy was rather reckless with the hose. But she soon got it trained upon the burning petrol tank. That scattered the flames at first, but in the end it extinguished the fire.

Chapman, meanwhile, leaned above the injured pilot and began an examination of his body. The victim remained unconscious, and Jessie continued to stare at his pale countenance, not offering to help the chauffeur in his examination. She had recognized the young man lying there on the ground.

“Oh, Momsy! it’s Mark Stratford,” the girl murmured. “Poor Mark! What will his father do if he’s killed?”

“‘The millionaire kid’,” the chauffeur said, kneeling beside the injured pilot. Nor did he use the nickname given to Mark Stratford by his college chums in any tone of scorn. The heir to the great Stratford estate, as well as to the controlling interest in the Stratford Electric Company at Stratfordtown, was well liked by everybody who knew him. Then Chapman added: “It’s a bad tumble he took, Miss Jessie; but he ain’t dead.”

“Chapman,” said Mrs. Norwood, “you and Bill bring him in. We will take him up to bed.” She started the women servants to making indoor preparations. She, too, knew the millionaire’s son and liked him.

“Jessie,” Mrs. Norwood commanded her daughter, “go to the ’phone and telephone to Doctor Ankers. Perhaps you had better call Doctor Leffert, too.”

“Yes, Momsy. And I’ll get Stratfordtown on the line and tell somebody there—somebody of the family, I mean.”

Jessie and her mother hurried in ahead of the men bearing Mark Stratford. Amy, having extinguished the fire and now having nothing better to do, followed after, carrying the discarded flying helmet.

Jessie ran at once to the telephone. “It would be great,” she thought, “if we had a sending instrument as well as a receiving radio set. We could broadcast the news of Mark’s accident and his family would get it promptly.”

However, she had enough to do during the next few minutes calling the two doctors and telling them what was wanted of them and urging the necessity for haste. It took longer to reach the Stratford home beyond Stratfordtown. And there Jessie could talk only with a servant whose sympathy, if he felt any, for his young master’s case was hidden behind the unemotional exterior of the well-trained English servant.

She knew that Mark Stratford had no mother, and although his father and his other relatives might consider him the apple of their eyes, they were not likely to influence him against taking risks. Mark, had he had a mother, would possibly, for her sake, have been a little less reckless in his activities as an aviator after the war was ended.

“And just see what has come of it, poor fellow,” murmured the Roselawn girl, as she hung up the receiver and enclosed the telephone instrument again in the bisque doll which housed it on the hall table. “Suppose he is killed or seriously hurt? Dear, dear! What a frightful tragedy!”

“It’s all of that,” half sobbed Amy, who was standing behind her chum. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. “And your radio antenna, Jess, is completely wrecked.”

CHAPTER III
NOT SO BAD

The next two hours was rather a trying time for everybody at the Norwood place. That brought the time around to six o’clock, and Mr. Norwood himself had returned from town, Chapman having driven down to the station to meet him.

Meanwhile the two physicians had come together to the house and had made a searching examination of the young fellow who had descended so abruptly out of the air and crashed upon the Norwood lawn.

“He is a lucky chap,” Dr. Ankers declared, when the examination had been completed and it was found that not a bone was broken.

But Mark was painfully bruised and it might be possible, as both doctors agreed, that he was injured internally. It seemed all but impossible that an aeroplane could be so effectually crushed and its pilot not be more seriously hurt.

Soon after Mr. Norwood arrived home a big limousine came tearing along Bonwit Boulevard and halted before the Norwood house. A big man with ruddy face and white hair got out before the chauffeur could alight, and strode up the path to the front door of the lawyer’s home. Jessie and Amy were on the veranda. They had never seen Mark’s father before but——

“It must be Mr. Stratford, he’s so handsome,” whispered Amy swiftly. “He’s a senator, too, you know, Jess.”

The maid had just come downstairs to announce that Mark had spoken for the first time, and Jessie went eagerly forward to meet the big man and tell him the good news.

“He has spoken, Mr. Stratford. The doctors say he hasn’t broken a bone.”

“That’s good!” exclaimed the caller. “What ran into him?”

“Why—why, nothing ran into him!” Jessie exclaimed. “How could it?”

“I don’t know how it could, but I am always expecting something to,” declared the big man. “Mark is a good driver— By the way, young lady, what’s all that mess on your lawn?” and he pointed to the wrecked aeroplane.

“Why, that’s it!” gasped Jessie.

“Er—indeed?” said Mr. Stratford.

Amy suddenly found her voice. As usual, she used it to laugh with.

“My goodness!” she cried, when she could speak. “He thinks Mark was driving his car.”

“Well, wasn’t he?” Mr. Stratford demanded. “I have always been afraid that that racer would bring him to grief.”

“Look! Look!” gasped Amy hysterically. She pointed to the wreck of the aeroplane. “He—he was driving that.”

“What under the sun was it?” murmured Mr. Stratford. Then, suddenly, he realized the nature of the wreck. “Not the plane?”

“Yes, Mr. Stratford,” Jessie interposed. “He fell with that thing. But, as I tell you, Doctor Ankers and Doctor Leffert say they can find nothing very serious the matter with him.”

There was a quizzical twist to the corners of Mr. Stratford’s lips as there was to Mark’s. Jessie thought that he must be just as likable as his son was. And now that he was reassured about Mark’s accident and his condition, he gave more attention to the two girls.

“You are Robert Norwood’s girl, I have no doubt?” he said to Jessie. “You have some look of your father. I have met him on the Country Club links.”

“Yes, sir, I am Jessie Norwood,” Jessie said, flushing a little. As she expressed it to Momsy, she just would blush, no matter who spoke to her! “And this,” Jessie added, turning to her chum, “is Amy Drew, who lives across the street.”

“And belongs to Wilbur Drew, I have no doubt?”

“Only half, if you please,” Amy said demurely. “Mrs. Sarah Drew likewise claims a share in me.”

Mr. Stratford seemed much amused by this statement. But he turned with some impatience toward the house door. Mr. Norwood was just coming out.

“Glad you are here, Mr. Stratford,” said the lawyer. “They tell me the boy has been asking for you. The consensus of opinion is that shock and a general shaking up is about the worst that has happened to him.”

“He always was a lucky young scamp,” replied Mr. Stratford. “And if there is a reckless thing to do, he’ll find it. Yet I’m sort of proud of him, Norwood. There aren’t many boys of his age that have done the things he has.”

“I grant you that,” said Mr. Norwood, yet doubtfully. “Just the same,” and he pinched Jessie’s ear, who stood beside him, “I am glad my son is a girl.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed Mr. Stratford. “I have been noticing that both these girls seem to be aping the boys pretty closely as to dress. And very fetching costumes they are.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Amy, with vast coolness (Jessie was for the moment confused), “we have to clear up Jessie’s radio aerial and hang it up again. That old aeroplane smashed right through it when it fell. That is how we come to be wearing our radio suits, Mr. Stratford.”

She tucked her hand in the crook of her chum’s elbow and led her away. They heard the gentlemen laughing as they went indoors. Jessie was secretly very glad that her father and Mr. Stratford could laugh. Suppose Mark had been killed!

“Mrs. Norwood says that you and Mark are perfectly welcome here,” Mr. Norwood said to the senator. “If the doctors think he should remain, I think you had better leave him.”

Both Dr. Ankers and Dr. Leffert had stayed to confer with the father of the injured young man. After this conference it was decided that an ambulance should be sent for and Mark removed to his own home. He asked for the girls and seemed to feel that somehow he owed them something for smashing the radio antenna.

“I’ll make it up to you, Miss Jessie,” was one of the last remarks he made as they carried him out of the house that evening. “It’s a shame you should have all that trouble because of me.”

Jessie stood on the veranda as the ambulance rolled away and gravely announced:

“Do you know what I just wish, Amy Drew?”

“I haven’t the first idea. Wish for a million; then if you get it, we’ll go fifty-fifty.”

“Nothing so common as that,” pursued Jessie, with continued gravity. “Money isn’t everything in this world. No,” she went on. “My thought is of something entirely different. I just wish——”

“So you do. What is your wish, honey?”

“If Mark Stratford thinks he owes us something for tumbling down here and smashing our aerial, I wish he would make it up to us in just one way.”

Amy arched her brows and looked curiously at her friend. “I don’t get your meaning at all, Jess,” she said.

“Why, we’ve talked enough about it, Amy. It is in his power—and in his father’s power—to do us the greatest favor.”

“Goodness me, Jess! It must be a million dollars you are talking about.”

“Nothing of the kind,” returned Jessie. “I should think you would see what I mean. We have talked enough about it. Think! If they would only ask Mr. Blair, their radio superintendent, to let us sing and recite on the Stratford program. Wouldn’t that be fine?”

“It certainly would be scrumptious,” Amy agreed. “I never! Why can’t we ask him the very next time we see Mark? Mr. Stratford, I mean.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t like to do that. We don’t know Mark’s father well enough.”

“How well have we got to know him to ask?” demanded Amy.

“We-ell, he might not like it. But if Mark says anything again about feeling that he has put us to trouble about the wires, I shall feel just like asking him.”

“Pooh!” exclaimed Amy. “I’ll not only feel like asking him, but I will do so. Why not? He’s only a boy like Darry. I’m not afraid of any boy.”

CHAPTER IV
THE LOST WATCH

It was, after all, too late that evening to do any repairing of Jessie’s radio antenna. The girls had changed back into their ordinary wear for dinner. That meal at the Norwood house was set back an hour or more because of the confusion attending the wreck of the airplane and the departure of the Stratfords in the private ambulance.

The exciting incidents of the evening were not concluded by the departure of the injured Mark and the despatch of dinner. As the Norwoods came out upon the lighted porch they heard voices on the lawn near the wrecked aeroplane.

“Who is Chapman shooing off the place?” asked Mrs. Norwood of her husband.

“Neighborhood children, I suppose,” said Jessie’s father carelessly. “Come to see the wreck. Better not let them stay to-night—Mr. Stratford said he would send a truck and men to pick up the pieces in the morning—for there are small parts of the plane that might be carried away by inquisitive boys.”

“Oh, Daddy, that isn’t a boy!” Jessie suddenly declared, and darted down the steps.

The chauffeur had evidently been peremptory in his remarks to the uninvited callers. A shrill voice replied to Chapman’s warning:

“You needn’t be so grouchy about it. We wouldn’t carry off anything. It ain’t no good, anyway—not even for kindling. We just wanted to look at it.”

“Well, now you’ve seen it, beat it,” growled out Chapman.

“Ain’t we going?” demanded the same sharp voice. “We seen the old thing fall from clear over to Dogtown, and we jest wanted to see if it did any damage to Miss Jessie’s wires and things. And it did.”

“Oh, Henrietta!” cried Jessie, running across the lawn. “Don’t go. We haven’t seen you for a week.”

“And you ain’t going to see me for another, if that man is going to chase us off your place, Miss Jessie,” said the sharp little voice. “We wasn’t doing anything.”

“Of course you weren’t, Henrietta,” agreed Jessie. “And Chapman did not understand.”

“Oh, I understand all right, Miss Jessie,” the chauffeur said. “I know those Dogtown kids.”

“Be careful!” commanded Jessie, warmly. “You know I am fond of Henrietta, Chapman.”

“Well, maybe she is all right,” said the man grudgingly. “But those others——”

“Ain’t nobody here but Charlie Foley and the Costello twins and Montmorency Shannon, and me,” declared Henrietta promptly. “Who does he think is a thief, I’d like to know?”

“Now, Henrietta!” admonished Jessie. “That isn’t nice, and you know it. You mustn’t meddle with any part of the broken aeroplane, for the man who owns it is going to come for it to-morrow and will want all the parts.”

“They were poking around in the ruins all right,” grumbled Chapman, moving away.

“If he thinks I took anything, he can search me,” said one of the Dogtown boys.

Jessie did not know which one spoke. She never had been able to distinguish between them. But by this time she should have been pretty well acquainted with Henrietta Haney and her friends.

The Roselawn radio girls had become acquainted with this queer, little, half wild and wholly untaught child through certain odd circumstances related in detail in “The Radio Girls of Roselawn”; and Henrietta had proved to be both an amusing and a helpful child. She was particularly enamored of Jessie Norwood because of the latter’s kindness to her, and because Jessie had aided in recovering the freedom of Henrietta’s cousin, Bertha Blair, who had been restrained illegally so that she might not testify in an important court case in which Jessie’s father was interested.

It was of Bertha Blair that the Roselawn girl now questioned little Henrietta.

“Did Bertha go to see that lady about a place, where she could have you with her, Henrietta?”

“She went once, but the woman was out. And when we went the second time, Billy Foley had burned a hole in my nice silk dress and my stockings got tored, and I looked a sight. So the lady says: ‘Who’s that awful little thing you’ve got with you, girl?’ So we didn’t get that job.”

“Oh, dear, me! How unfortunate,” sighed Jessie. “And Mrs. Curtis really wanted young people about her. The doctor said it would be the best thing in the world for her.”

“Huh!” said the abrupt Henrietta. “She didn’t want any raggedy kid like me. I was sorry about the taffeta silk, Miss Jessie.”

“I am sorry, too, that you were not more careful,” Jessie told her. “How did Billy come to burn the dress?”

“With a hot poker. I was back to him. And he burned a patch of me, too!”

Had Amy Drew heard that she would have screamed. But Jessie knew that the odd little Henrietta had no intention of being comical. The hole burned in the only silk dress she had ever owned was a tragedy to Henrietta’s mind.

“Can’t it be mended?” Jessie asked.

“I tried to. But I’ve only a piece of yellow silk and that don’t match very well,” sighed the child.

“I should say not!” gasped Jessie. “The taffeta is blue.”

“And I can’t sew small stitches,” confessed Henrietta. “I try, but I bungle, Mrs. Foley says.”

“Wouldn’t Mrs. Foley mend the dress for you?”

“She would if she could find the time. But you know how it is yourself—with six kids, and all of ’em boys, and a man that drinks.”

Jessie remembered to tell that to Amy the next morning when she ran over early to begin the radio repairs. Again the chums were in the overall suits that Mr. Stratford had joked about.

Men from Stratfordtown, with a big autotruck, had already arrived to remove the débris of the smashed plane. From under the débris Chapman and the gardener had rescued most of the radio antenna. But Jessie saw at once that the aerial would have to be entirely rearranged, and some new wire added.

“We will put it up differently this time, anyway,” she said to Amy, but the latter asked, complainingly:

“Wasn’t the other way good enough? I am sure we heard the concerts and other things from the broadcasting stations all right. Think how nicely it worked when the ladies of our church gave the bazaar here and you rigged the receiving set in the tent.”

“I don’t mean to change the rigging to aid in the distinctness of our receiving,” said her more enthusiastic friend. “But you know Momsy has always been a little afraid of lightning striking the house because of the tangle of wires outside.”

“He, he!” chuckled Amy. “Remember how the Stanley boys got into trouble rigging their set in that thunderstorm and we thought the minister’s house was on fire?”

“I do. And wasn’t it ridiculous?” Jessie observed. “But I read of a way to rig the antenna which will make a positive ‘lightning break,’ and I want to look it up in the magazine and see if I can use the idea.”

“But,” proclaimed Amy, who objected to any additional work, “if you are always careful to close the switch at the set there is never any danger from lightning.”

“But Momsy will feel happier if I do this. She said so last night,” and Jessie nodded a determined head. “There!” She heard her mother calling. “I wonder what she wants?”

“I hope she wants two George Washington sundaes brought from the Dainties Shop,” declared Amy, eagerly, following her friend toward the house.

“And would you go for them in this costume?” laughed Jessie.

“We-ell, I’m fond of sundaes,” confessed the impish Amy.

“Oh, girls,” Mrs. Norwood greeted them. “Think how unfortunate! Mr. Stratford’s secretary has just telephoned me, and——”

“You don’t mean, Momsy, that Mark is not so well?” Jessie interrupted.

“No. It is not that. Mark is hard to keep in bed this morning, Mr. Theron says. But he misses his watch—that beautiful diamond-set hunting-case watch that you have seen him wear.”

“Momsy!” cried Jessie. “That handsome watch that his grandmother gave Mark when he returned from France?”

“Yes. It really is a misfortune. But I wonder that his clothes were left on him when he came down with such a crash, let alone his watch,” said Mrs. Norwood. “Now we shall have to search all around here——”

“But surely, Mrs. Norwood, it was not lost inside the house—when they took off his clothes to put him to bed, for instance?” Amy said wonderingly.

“Quite true. We know he must have dropped it when the plane landed. But it might have been flung fifty feet away when the machine came down with such a crash.”

“Oh, Momsy!” exclaimed Jessie. “Or it might be buried in the dirt of the rose garden where the plane landed. I’m going to look. Come on, Amy!” and Jessie ran down the veranda steps again.

Amy was right at her shoulder when her friend reached the place between the house and the tower where the aeroplane had fallen. The men had now removed everything but some worthless bits of the machine. The rose bushes were flattened, and the sod was torn up for some yards around. That part of the Norwood place would not look as it had before until the next season.

“Now, let’s look carefully, everywhere,” Jessie said. “Those workmen, of course, would not find the watch and say nothing about it?”

“They came from Stratfordtown, and I’m sure they are fond of Mark,” said Amy reflectively. “They say everybody is fond of Mark over there, and proud of him, too.”

“Then the watch must be here,” Jessie declared.

“Perhaps,” her chum said, with continued gravity. “But what you just told me about little Hen and those Dogtown kids being up here last evening and poking around, gives me a worried thought, honey.”

“Oh, Amy! Little Henrietta? Never!”

“Perhaps not,” said her friend. “And we haven’t begun to look for Mark’s watch yet. But just the same, I believe Chapman was quite right in chasing them away from the plane, as you say he did.”

“Oh, but I would never believe such a thing of Henrietta,” declared Jessie Norwood. “Never in this world.”

CHAPTER V
THE HOSPITAL DRIVE

“Really, girls, unless you were moles, you could scarcely have searched more faithfully for Mark’s watch,” Mrs. Norwood said, coming out to preside over the activities of Jessie and Amy.

“What do you suppose has become of the thing?” sighed her daughter.

“I’ve dug my fingernails full of dirt. Manicuring will never repair the ravages of it,” Amy said ruefully, looking at her hands.

The rubbish left from the wrecked plane had all been removed. The workmen from Stratfordtown had seen nothing of Mark’s lovely watch. Although it was rather an old-fashioned piece of jewelry for a young man to wear, the girls knew that it was very valuable. But it was the associations connected with the gift that made it particularly valuable in the consideration of the senator’s injured son.

“It is too bad,” sighed Jessie again. “Mark was almost killed by his tumble, and now he must give up his watch.”

“Say!” drawled Amy. “Did you ever think that he has lost his nice shiny aeroplane, too? That is scarcely worth carting back to Stratfordtown. I heard one of the men say so.”

“Have you looked everywhere for the watch, girls?” Mrs. Norwood asked. “I dread telephoning over to tell him that we cannot find it.”

“Maybe we would better look again,” Jessie observed doubtfully.

“But you have already dug over the whole garden. My poor Marshal Niels!” murmured her mother.

“It is no use,” declared Amy, with briskness. “Somebody came along and picked it up.”

“Oh! Don’t say that!” cried Jessie.

“It might be so,” her mother observed. “There have been people around to view the wreck. Those children, for instance, last evening.”

“That’s just what I said; but Jess won’t hear to it,” Amy cried. “We don’t know how honest those Dogtown kids are.”

“Little Henrietta is no thief,” Jessie declared earnestly.

“I don’t believe she is, either,” her mother said, smiling. “That funny little thing could not possibly be mean, if she is untamed. But those children with her—especially those boys. A watch such as this that has been lost would be a great temptation.”

“But, Momsy! They would not even know the value of it.”

“Leave it to Henrietta, or to Montmorency Shannon,” said Amy quickly. “That Shannon boy doesn’t have to be led about by a little dog,” and Amy laughed again.

“Of course he is smart enough,” agreed Jessie. “But being smart and poor does not prove his dishonesty,” she added severely.

“That is true, Jessie,” her mother said approvingly. “Poverty does not walk hand-in-hand with dishonesty by any manner of means. And the poor need our help in any event. That is what we are trying to establish the new hospital for. That fund is worrying me,” and the good woman sighed.

“It’s a far cry from Mark’s watch and Montmorency Shannon to the New Melford’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital,” laughed Amy, immediately recovering her spirits.

“And a still farther cry to our new aerial,” Jessie said. “Come, Amy, there is no use grubbing here any more. We might as well get to work erecting the wires again. I know where there is part of a roll of number fourteen wire in the garage. We’ll need some of that.”

“Radio?” said Mrs. Norwood, hesitatingly. “I wonder, Jessie, if that isn’t the way to help us out?”

“What do you mean, Momsy?” her daughter asked.

“The hospital fund need is on my mind. If we could give some new entertainment by which to raise money—and what is newer than radio?”

“Radio telephony is not exactly new,” Jessie said reflectively. “You know that, Momsy. But I suppose we could give a radio entertainment again. It would not be exactly new——”

“Oh! Oh!” cried Amy Drew suddenly, and she pirouetted about on the torn sward and clapped her hands.

“My dear Amy,” laughed Jessie, “has something bitten you?”

“Exactly,” agreed the excited Amy. “And it is an awful bite—believe me!”

“That sounds very much like slang to me, Amy,” laughed Jessie’s mother. “What do you mean? What is it that has bitten you?”

“An idea,” replied Amy energetically. “And the finest ever! Listen, folkses!”

“Do tell us, dear,” said her chum warmly.

“At the bazaar, you know,” Amy said earnestly, “Jess just connected up with whatever chanced to be coming through the ether. It was bits of program from all over. But why not have a regular program—a big one—broadcasted from one station for the special purpose of attracting attention to your drive for the hospital fund, Mrs. Norwood?”

“I don’t just see, Amy——”

“I do! I do!” cried Jessie delightedly. “Oh, Momsy, don’t you see? Get big singers like Madame Elva, and other musicians, and all those interested in your hospital. Then find some sending station where they will let you give the concert——”

“The Stratford Electric Company,” interrupted Amy.

“Good! Fine!” crowed Jessie.

“Can such a thing be done?” asked the wondering Mrs. Norwood, who had a rather confused idea of the uses of radio telephony.

“Of course it can be done, Momsy. It is a wonderful idea. Think! Thousands and thousands of people will be listening in.”

“But won’t the concert have to be given in a hall—like your entertainment in the tent?”

“Nothing like that, Momsy,” declared her energetic daughter. “Understand that if you get your entertainers together at a certain hour at the sending station—say eight o’clock in the evening—and arrange to have them sing and play and recite just as though the audience were before them, you will be able to get many, many people to listen in who understand that, although they are getting a free concert, it is one to advertise the need of the New Melford Women’s and Children’s Hospital.”

“Oh! How ingenious you two girls are,” said Mrs. Norwood with more than slight approval. “But do you suppose the people who have radio sets will understand?”

“They will if there is not too much atmospherics,” Amy said, grinning.

“Stop joking, Amy. Don’t spoil it all,” cried Jessie. “You have started a perfectly fine idea. And we must help Momsy carry it out.”

“Oh, my dears,” Mrs. Norwood hastened to say, “you must understand that I cannot decide this thing myself. I am only one of the committee. But it does seem as though Amy’s thought were really inspired.”

“That’s all the thoughts I have—the inspired kind,” declared Amy gravely. “And they are at your service, Mrs. Norwood.”

That was the start of it. Mrs. Norwood began calling up the other ladies of the hospital fund committee and explaining Amy’s idea to them. She really forgot, for the time, that she was supposed to report to Stratfordtown that Mark’s beautiful watch was not to be found anywhere about the Norwood premises.

“And do you suppose,” said Jessie to her chum, in a worried tone, as they set to work to string again the radio antenna, “that somebody picked up that watch Mark lost? I hate to think any one about here would steal it.”

“What do you mean—steal it?” asked Amy briskly. “If it was merely picked up—why, I would do that myself. I certainly would not leave a diamond-studded watch lying on the ground. Not much!”

“But you would not pick it up and walk off without saying anything about it,” objected Jessie. “No, you wouldn’t. And nobody else who really was honest.”

“Well, those kids from Dogtown don’t know as much about honesty as we do, I suppose.”

“I don’t want to believe such a thing about them, especially about little Henrietta.”

“She’s awfully cute, I admit,” said Amy. “But after all, we do not know just how good she is.”

Jessie sighed. The very reason why she would not admit the possibility of Henrietta’s knowing anything about the lost watch was based on this point that Amy had brought up. They did not know much about Henrietta Haney’s moral character, and nothing at all of the characters of the children she associated with at Dogtown.

“It seems reasonable that the lost watch would be a great temptation to any of those kids who were poking about the wrecked aeroplane last night,” said Amy, after a pause in the conversation, during which the girls were busy with the antenna.

“A whole lot of things that are reasonable aren’t true,” responded Jessie, a little sharply for her.

“Yes, and a whole lot that are unreasonable are true, I suppose,” agreed her chum.