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.”