Buch lesen: «The Campfire Girls on Station Island: or, The Wireless from the Steam Yacht», Seite 6
CHAPTER XV – HENRIETTA IN DISGRACE
Darry and Burd seemed to have little time to spend ashore these days. They said that they had a lot to do to fix up the Marigold for the proposed trip seaward. But Amy accused them of being afraid of Belle Ringold and Sally Moon.
“Belle is determined that she shall get an invitation to sail aboard your yacht, Darry,” teased his sister. “Don’t forget that.”
“Not if we see her first,” responded Burd, promptly. “And don’t you ring her in on us, for if you do we’ll not let you aboard the Marigold either. How about it, Darry?”
“Good enough,” agreed Amy’s brother. “Oh, I promise not to ring Belle Ringold in on you,” giggled Amy.
“It is perfectly disgraceful how you boys teach these girls slang,” Mrs. Drew remarked with a sigh.
“Why, Mother!” cried Darry, his eyes twinkling, “they teach it to us. You accuse Burd and me wrongfully. We couldn’t tell these girls a single thing.”
This was at breakfast at the Norwood bungalow. After breakfast the young folks separated. But Jessie and Amy had no complaint to make about the boys. They had their own interests. This day they had agreed to explore the island with Nell Stanley as far as the hotel grounds.
They took Henrietta and Sally Stanley along, and carried a picnic lunch. The older girls were rather curious to see the extent of “Henrietta’s domain,” as Amy called it. The pastures included in the Hackle Island Golf Club grounds covered all the middle of the island, and consisted of hills and dells, all “up-and-down-dilly,” Amy observed, and from a distance, at least, seemed very attractive.
Of course, they could not go fast with the two smaller girls along, although Henrietta seemed tireless.
“But Sally ain’t a tough one, like me,” declared the little girl who thought she was going to own an island. She approved of Sally Stanley very much because the minister’s little girl was dainty, and kept her dresses clean, and was soft-spoken. “I got to run and holler once in a while or I thinks I’m choking,” confessed Henrietta. “But your mamma, Miss Jessie, says I’ll get over that after a while. She says I’ll go to school and learn a lot and that maybe I’ll be as nice as Sally some day.”
“I hope you will,” said Jessie warmly. “That’s hardly to be expected,” Henrietta rejoined in her old-fashioned way. “Sally was born that way. But I always was a tough one.”
“There is a good deal in that,” sighed Jessie to the other Roselawn girls. “The poor little thing! She never did have a chance. But Momsy is already talking about sending her away to school to have her toned down and – ” “Suppose the Blairs won’t hear to it?” suggested Amy. “Leave it to Momsy to work things out her way,” said Jessie, more gaily.
They soon left the sand dunes behind them and marched up over what the natives of the island called “the downs” to a scrubby pasture at the edge of the golf links. Crossing the links watchfully they only had to dodge a couple of times when the players called “Fore!” and so got safely past the various greens and reached the patch of wood between the club premises and the hotel grounds.
There was a spring here which they had been told about, and it was near enough noon for lunch to occupy an important place in their minds. They spent an hour here; but after that, much as she had eaten, Henrietta began to run around again. She could not keep still.
Her voice was suddenly stilled and she halted in the path and stood like a pointer flushing a covey of birds. The older girls were surprised. Amy drawled:
“What’s the matter, Hen? You don’t feel sick, do you?”
“I hear something,” declared Henrietta, her freckled face clouding. “I hear somebody talk that I don’t like.”
“Who is that?” asked Nell.
“She makes me feel sick, all right,” grumbled the little girl. “Oh, yes! It’s her. And if she says again that she owns my island, I’ll – I’ll – ”
“Belle Ringold!” exclaimed Amy, much amused. “Can’t we go anywhere without Belle and Sally showing up?”
The two girls whom they all considered so unpleasant appeared at the top of the small hill and came down the path. They were rather absurdly dressed for an outing. Certainly their frocks would have looked better at dinner or at a dance than in the woods. And they strutted along as though they quite well knew they had on their very best furbelows.
“Oh, dear me! there’s that awful child again,” drawled Belle, before she saw the older girls sitting at the spring.
“She must be lost away up here,” said Sally Moon, idly. “Say, kid, run get this folding cup filled at the spring.”
“What for?” demanded Henrietta.
“Why, so I can drink from it, foolish!”
“You bring me a drink first,” said the freckle-faced girl stoutly. “Nobody didn’t make me your servant to run your errands – so now!”
“Listen to her!” laughed Belle. “She waits on Jess Norwood and Amy Drew hand and foot. Of course she is a servant.”
“You ain’t a servant when you wait on folks for love,” declared Henrietta, quickly.
Amy clapped her hands together softly at this bit of philosophy. Jessie stood up so that the girls from the hotel could see her.
“Oh! Here’s Jess Norwood now,” cried Sally. “You might know!”
Little Henrietta was backing away from the two newcomers, but eyeing them with great disfavor. She suddenly demanded of Jessie:
“Is this spring on a part of my land, Miss Jessie?”
“It may be,” said Amy, quickly answering before Jessie could do so. “Like enough all this grove is yours, Hen.”
“Why,” gasped Belle Ringold, “my father is just about to take possession of this place. He is going to have surveyors come on the island and survey it.”
“This is my woods!” cried Henrietta. “It’s my spring! You sha’n’t even have a drink out of it – neither of you girls!”
“What nonsense!” drawled Belle. “Who will stop us, please?” and she came on down the path toward the spring.
The other girls had now got up. Jessie tried to reach out and seize Henrietta; but the latter was so angry that she jerked away. She stood before Belle and Sally with flashing eyes and her hands clenched tight.
“You go away! This is my woods and my spring! You sha’n’t have a drink!”
“The child is crazy,” said Belle, harshly. “Let me pass, you mean little thing!”
At that Henrietta stooped and caught up dirt in each grubby hand. It was a little damp where she stood, and the muck stuck to her palms. She shrieked hatred and defiance at Belle and, running forward, smeared the dirt all up and down the front of the rich girl’s fine dress.
Belle shrieked quite as loudly as the angry Henrietta and threatened all manner of punishment. But she could not catch the freckled girl, who was as wriggly as an eel.
“I’ll – I’ll have you whipped! You ought to be spanked hard!” panted Belle Ringold. “And it is your fault, Jess Norwood. You egged her on.”
“I did not,” said Jessie, angrily.
But she was vexed with Henrietta, too. She ran after and caught the panting, sobbing little thing. She really was tempted to shake her.
“What do you mean, Henrietta Haney, by acting this way and talking so? Do you want to disgrace us all? For shame!”
“I don’t talk no worse than the Ringold one,” declared Henrietta.
Jessie tried a new tack. She said more quietly: “But you know better, Henrietta.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And perhaps she doesn’t,” ventured Jessie.
“Well – er – she’s got money,” pouted Henrietta. “Why doesn’t she hire somebody to teach her better? You know I never did have any chance, Miss Jessie.”
She felt she was in disgrace, however, and the older girls let her feel this without compunction. Belle was frightfully angry about her frock. She sputtered and threatened and called names that were not polite. Finally Jessie said:
“If you feel that way about it, Belle, send the dress to the cleaner’s and then send the bill to my mother. That is all I can say about it. But I think you brought it on yourself by teasing Henrietta.”
In spite of this speech to Belle, Henrietta felt that she was in disgrace as Jessie marched her away from the spring. Little Sally Stanley came to her other side and squeezed Henrietta’s dirty hand in sympathy.
“Huh!” snuffled Henrietta. “It’s too bad you’ve got the same name as that Moon girl, Sally. Why don’t you ask the minister to change it for you? He christens folks, doesn’t he?”
“Why, yes,” murmured Sally, uncertainly. “But I was christened, you know, oh, years and years ago.”
“That don’t cut no ice,” replied Henrietta, unconscious that her language was not all it ought to be. “You just have him do it over again. And don’t be no ‘Sally,’ nor no more ‘Belle.’”
CHAPTER XVI – “RADIO CONTROL”
Jessie Norwood had talked over the matter of the new super-regenerative circuit with her father and had got him interested in the idea of using one to improve their own radio receiving. It was not difficult to interest Mr. Norwood in it, for he had become a radio enthusiast like his daughter since the Roselawn girls had broken into the wireless game.
With the large party now in the Norwood’s bungalow in Station Island, it was not convenient to use only the head-phones when the radio concerts were to be received out of the ether. The two-step amplifier Mr. Norwood had formerly bought did not always work well, especially, for some unknown reason, since they had come to the seashore.
In addition, the sounds through the horn seemed to be scratchy and harsh, a good deal like the sounds from a poor talking machine. From what Jessie had read, she understood that these harsh noises would be obviated if the super-regenerative circuit was put in. Her father had telegraphed for the material to build the super-regenerative and amplifier circuit, and the material came by express the morning after the picnic on which Henrietta had disgraced herself.
“We will try the thing here on the island,” Mr. Norwood said to Jessie. “If it works here it will surely work back at Roselawn, for the temperature, or humidity, or something, is different there from what it is here. At least, so it seems to me, and the state of the air surely influences radio.”
“Static,” said Jessie, briefly, reading the instructions in the book.
Amy, of course, was quite as interested in the new invention as her chum; and Nell, too. But they were not so clear in their minds as was Jessie about what should be done in building the new set. Jessie was glad to have her father show so much interest, for he was eminently practical, and when the girls were uncertain how to proceed it was nice to have somebody like the lawyer to turn to.
He even let Mr. Drew and the two mothers go off to the golf course that day without him, while he gave his aid to the girls. The boys were cleaning up the yacht in preparation for the voyage they expected to make in a short time.
Nell’s Aunt Freda had arrived that morning, so the minister’s daughter did not have to worry at all about Bob and Fred and Sally.
“And to help out,” Amy said, with a giggle, “Henrietta is invited over to the Stanley bungalow to play with little Sally.”
“I guess Aunt Freda will get along all right with them,” observed Nell, with some amusement. “But Fred pretty nearly floored her at the start. She says it takes her several hours to get ‘acclimated’ when she comes to our house.”
“What did Fred say – or do?” asked Jessie, interested.
“There was something Aunt Freda advised him to do and he said he would – ‘to-morrow.’
“‘Don’t you know,’ she asked him, ‘that “to-morrow never comes”?’
“‘Gee! and to-morrow’s my birthday,’ grumbled Fred. ‘Now I suppose I won’t have any.’”
“What kids they are!” gasped Amy, when she had recovered from her laughter. “I don’t know whether a younger brother is worse than an older brother or not. I’ve had my troubles with Darrington,” and she sighed with mock seriousness.
“Ha!” exclaimed Jessie. “I guess he’s had his troubles with you. Do you remember when you smeared your hands all up with chocolate cake and tried to wipe them clean on Darry’s new trousers?”
Nell shouted with laughter at this revelation, but it did not trouble Amy Drew in the least.
“Yes,” she admitted. “My taste in the art of dressing, you see, was well developed even at that early age. Those trousers, I remember, were of an atrocious pattern.”
“Nonsense!” cried Jessie. “They were Darry’s first long pants, and you were mad to think he was so much older than you that he could put on men’s clothes.”
“Dear me!” sighed Amy. “You make me out an awful creature, Jess Norwood. But, never mind. Darry has paid me up and to spare for that unladylike trick. He has been a trial – and is so yet. He doesn’t know how to pick a decent necktie. His shirts – some of them – are so loud that you can see him coming clear across The Green. Why! they tell me that his shirts are as well known in New Haven, and almost as prominently mentioned by the natives, as the Hartley Memorial Hall; and almost nobody gets away from the City of Elms without being obliged to see that.”
“What a reckless talker you are, Amy!” Jessie said, smiling. “And I will not hear you run Darry down. I think too much of him myself.”
“Don’t let him guess it,” said the absent Darry’s sister, with a grin. “It will spoil him – make him proud and hard to hold.”
“That’s a good one!” laughed Nell. “You think Darry can be as easily spoiled by praise as the Chinese servant Reverend tells about that he had in California. This was before I was born. Father and mother got a Coolie right at the dock. You could do that in those days. And John scarcely knew a word of English, not even the pidgin variety.
“But Reverend says that when John acquired a few English words he was so proud that there was no holding him. He asked the name of every new object he saw and mispronounced it usually in the most absurd manner. Once John found a sparrow’s nest in the grapevine and shuffled into Reverend’s study to tell him about it.
“‘Is there anything in the nest yet, John?’ Reverend asked him.
“‘Yes,’ the Chinaman declared, puffed up with his knowledge of the new language, ‘Spallow alle samme got pups.’”
While they chattered and laughed the three girls were as busy as bees with the new radio arrangement. Amy said that Jessie kept them so hard at work that it did not seem at all as though they were “vacationing.” It was good, healthy work for all.
“It does seem awfully quiet here without Hen,” went on Amy, hammering on a board with a heavy hammer and making the big room where the radio set was, ring. “She keeps the place almost as tomb-like as a boiler shop – what?”
“You can make a little noise yourself,” Jessie told her. “What’s all the hammering for?”
“So things won’t sound too tame. How are we getting on with the new circuit?”
“Why, Amy Drew! you just helped me place this vario-coupler. Didn’t you know what you were doing?”
“Not a bit,” confessed Amy. “You are away out of my depth, Jess. And don’t try to tell me what it all means, that’s a dear. I never can remember scientific terms.”
“Put up the hammer,” said Nell, laughing. “You are a confirmed knocker, anyway, Amy. But I admit I do not understand this tangle of wires.”
They did not seek to disconnect the old regenerative set that day, for there was much of interest expected out of the ether before the day was over. One particular thing Jessie looked for, but she had said nothing about it to anybody save her very dearest chum, Amy, and the clergyman’s daughter, Nell.
Two days before she had done some telephoning over the long-distance wire. Of course there was a cable to the mainland from Station Island, and Jessie had called up and interviewed Mark Stratford at Stratfordtown.
Mark was a college friend of Darry and Burd, but he was likewise a very good friend of the Roselawn girls – and he had reason for being. As related in a previous volume, “The Radio Girls on the Program,” Jessie and Amy had found a watch Mark had lost, and as it was a valuable watch and had been given him by his grandmother, Mark was very grateful.
Through his influence – to a degree – Jessie and Amy had got on the program at the Stratfordtown broadcasting station. And now Jessie had talked with the young man and arranged for a surprise by radio that was to come off that very evening at “bedtime story hour.”
Henrietta and little Sally and Bob and Fred Stanley, as well as some of the other children of the bungalow colony, crowded into the house at that time to “listen in” on the Roselawn girls’ instrument.
The amplifier worked all right that evening, and Jessie was very glad. The little folks arranged themselves on the chairs and settees with some little confusion while Jessie tuned the set to the Stratfordtown length of wave. There was some static, but after a little that disappeared and they waited for the announcement from the faraway station.
By and by, as Henrietta whispered, the radio began to “buzz.” “Now we’ll get it!” cried the little Dogtown girl. “I hope it is about the little boy with the rabbit ears that he could wiggle.”
“S-sh!” commanded Jessie, making a gesture for silence.
And then out of the air came a deep voice:
“We have with us this evening, children, the Radio Man, who, just like Santa Claus, knows all our little shortcomings, as well as our virtues. Have you all been good boys and girls to-day? Don’t all say ‘Yes’ at once. Better stop and think about it before you speak.
“Before the bedtime story,” went on the voice out of the horn, “the Radio Man must tell some of you that you must take care, or you will get on the black list. Here is a little girl, for instance, who may be rich when she grows up. But she must have a care. People who grow up rich and own islands must be very nice.”
“Oh! Oh! That’s me!” gasped Henrietta. “How’d he know me?”
“So I have to warn Henrietta, the little girl I speak of, that there is a lot she must do if she wishes in time to enjoy the wealth which she expects.”
At that the other children began to exclaim. It was Henrietta. They almost drowned out the first of the bedtime story with their excited voices.
“Well,” exclaimed Henrietta, “I guess everybody knows about my owning this island, so that Ringold one needn’t talk! But Miss Jessie’s mother told me what I had got to do to deserve my island.”
“What have you got to do?” asked Amy, curiously. “The Radio Man says you must be good.”
“Miss Jessie’s mother says I’ve got to make folks love me or I won’t enjoy my island at all – so now. But,” she added confidentially, “I don’t believe I ever shall want that Ringold one and Sally Moon to love me. Do you s’pose that’s nec-sary?”
After the children had gone the older girls discussed a point that Amy brought up regarding the incident. Of course, Amy was in fun, for she said:
“Listen! Didn’t I read something about ‘radio control’ in one of our books, Jess? Well, there is an example of radio control – control of children. Henrietta is going to remember that she is on the Radio Man’s list. She’ll be good, all right!”
Mr. Norwood laughed. “How do we know what great developments may come within the next few years in the line of radio control? Already the control of an aeroplane has been tried, and proved successful. A submarine may be governed from the shore. The drive of a torpedo has already been successfully handled by wireless.
“In time, perhaps a farmer may sit before a keyboard in his office and manage tractors plowing and cultivating his fields. Ships of all descriptions will be managed by compass control. And automobiles – ”
“I hope Bill Brewster learns to handle his red car by wireless,” chuckled Amy. “It will then be less dangerous to himself and to his friends, if not to pedestrians,” and this quaint idea amused all the Roselawn girls.
CHAPTER XVII – THE TEMPEST
Jessie, Amy, and Nell had spied, on their hike and picnic, an inlet in the shore of the island facing the mainland, on the sands of which were several fish houses and several rowboats and small sailboats that the girls were sure might be had for hire.
“We might have shipped our new canoe down here and had some fun,” Amy said. “That bay is a wonderful place to sail in. Why, you can scarcely see the port on the other side of it. And the island defends it from the sea. It is as smooth as can be.”
Nell was very fond of rowing, and she expressed a wish that they might go out in one of the open boats. She would row. So the three chums escaped the younger children the next afternoon and slipped over to the other side of the island, across the sand dunes.
They found an old fisherman who was perfectly willing to hire them a boat, and, really, it was not a bad boat, either. At least, it had been washed out and the seats were clean. The oars were rather heavier than Nell Stanley was used to.
“You need heavy oars on this bay, young lady,” declared the boat-owner. “Nothing fancy does here. When a squall comes up – ”
“Oh, but you don’t think it looks like a squall this afternoon, do you?” Jessie interrupted.
“Dunno. Can’t tell. Ain’t nothing sartain about it,” said the pessimistic old fellow. “Sometimes you get what you don’t most expect on this bay. I been here, man and boy, all my life, and I give you my word I don’t know nothing about the weather.”
“Oh, come on!” exclaimed Amy, under her breath. “What a Job’s comforter he is! Who ever heard of a fisherman before who didn’t know all about the weather?”
“Maybe we had better not go far,” Jessie, who was easily troubled, said hesitatingly.
“Come on,” said Nell. “He just wants to keep us from going out far. He is afraid for his old tub of a boat.”
She said this rather savagely, and Jessie thought it better to say nothing more of a doubtful nature, having two against her. Besides, the sky seemed quite clear and the bay was scarcely ruffled by the wind.
The old man sat and smoked and watched them push off from the landing without offering to help. He did not even offer to ship the rudder for them, although that was a clumsy operation. When Jessie and Amy had managed to secure it in place, while Nell settled herself at the oars, the old man shouted:
“That other thing in the bow is a anchor. You don’t use that unless you want to stay hitched somewhere. Understand?”
“He must think we are very poor sailors,” said Jessie.
“I feel like making a face at him – as Henrietta does,” declared Amy. “I never saw such a cantankerous old man.”
Nell braced her feet and set to work. She was an athletic girl and she loved exercise of all kind. But rowing, she admitted, was more to her taste than sweeping and scrubbing.
Amy steered. At least, she lounged in the stern with the lines across her lap. Jessie had taken her place in the bow, to balance the boat. They moved out from shore at a fine pace, and even Amy soon forgot the grouchy old fisherman.
There were not many boats on the bay that afternoon – not small boats, at least. The steamer that plied between the port and the hotel landing at the north of the island at regular hours passed in the distance. A catboat swooped near the girls after a time, and a flaxen-haired boy in it – a boy of about Darry Drew’s age – shouted something to them.
“I suppose it is something saucy,” declared Amy. “But I didn’t hear what he said and sha’n’t reply. I don’t feel just like fighting with strange boys to-day.”
Jessie was the first to see the voluminous clouds rising from the horizon; but she thought little of them. The descending sun began to wallow in them, and first the girls were in a patch of shadow, and then in the sunlight.
“Don’t you want me to row some, Nell?” Jessie asked.
“I’m doing fine,” declared the clergyman’s daughter. “But – but I guess I am getting a blister. These old oars are heavy.”
“We ought to have made him give us two pairs,” complained Amy. “Then the two of you could row.”
“Listen to her!” cried Jessie. “She would never think of taking a turn at them. Not Miss Drew!”
“Oh, I am the captain,” declared Amy. “And the captain never does anything but steer.”
They had rowed by this time well up toward the northerly end of the island. Hackle Island Hotel sprawled upon the bluff over their heads. It was a big place, and the grounds about it were attractive.
“I don’t see Belle or Sally anywhere,” drawled Amy. “And see! There aren’t many bathers down on this beach.”
“This is the still-water beach,” explained Jessie. “I guess most of them like the surf bathing on the other side.”
There were winding steps leading up the bluff to the hotel. Not many people were on these steps, but the seabirds were flying wildly about the steps and over the brow of the bluff.
“Wonder what is going on over there?” drawled Amy, who faced the island just then.
Nell stopped rowing to look at the incipient blister on her left palm. Jessie bent near to see it, too. Nobody was looking across the bay toward the mainland.
“You’d better let me take the oars,” Jessie said. “You’ll have all the skin off your hand.”
“Why should you skin yours?” demanded Nell. “These old oars are heavy.”
“How dark it is getting!” drawled Amy. “Even the daylight saving time ought not to be blamed for this.”
Jessie looked up, startled. Over the mainland a black cloud billowed, and as she looked lightning whipped out of it and flashed for a moment like a searchlight.
“A thunderstorm is coming!” she cried. “We’d better turn back.”
But when Nell looked up and saw the coming tempest she knew she could never row back to the inlet before the wind, at least, reached them.
“We’ll go right ashore,” she said with confidence.
“What do you say, Amy?” Jessie asked.
“Far be it from me to interfere,” said the other Roselawn girl, carelessly, and without even turning around to look. “I’m in the boat and will go wherever the boat goes.”
Nell, settling to the oars again with vigor, remarked:
“One thing sure, we don’t want the boat overturned and have to follow it to the bottom. Oh! Hear that thunder, will you?”
Amy woke up at last. She twitched about in the stern and stared at the storm cloud. It was already raining over the port, and long streamers of rain were being driven by the rising wind out over the bay.
“Wonderful!” she murmured.
“Where are you going, Nell?” suddenly shrieked Jessie. “The boat is actually turning clear around!”
“Don’t blame me!” gasped Nell. “I am pulling straight on, but that girl has twisted the rudder lines. Do see what you are about, Amy, and please be careful!”
“My goodness!” gasped the girl in the stern. “It’s going to storm out here, too.”
She frantically tried to untangle the rudder lines; but while she had been lying idly there, she had twisted them together in a rope, and she was unable to untwist them immediately. Meanwhile the thunder rolled nearer, the lightning flashed more sharply, and they heard the rain drumming on the surface of the water. Little froth-streaked waves leaped up about the boat and all three of the girls realized that they were in peril.
