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.”