MONTMORENCY SHANNON
A great wave of the backwash as they struck the float came inboard
and wet both girls to their waists. Amy was now crying hysterically,
and Jessie could do nothing to any better use.
The canoe was strongly built for a canoe, but such a collision as
this was bound to do it much damage, if it did not completely wreck
it. It really was wonderful, as Amy afterward said, that the craft
was not overturned and the girls thrown into the water.
But providentially the nose of the craft hit a slanting plank of the
old float and shot right up out of the water. It saved the canoe from
being utterly smashed; but as the bow went up on the float while the
stern sank in the water, the girls were thrown screaming together in
the submerged end of the canoe.
“Oh! O-ooh! Jess! I’m d-d-d-drowning!” sputtered Amy Drew.
“Keep your mouth closed; then you won’t drown,” advised her chum
practically, and she began to scramble forward.
The spread sail had strained the canoe very badly. Jessie knew that
tiptilted as it was, and wet, it was still full of wind and was
tearing at the fastenings of the mast and at the tied rope. When she
got to the staff stepped forward, she put her shoulder to it, tugged
with both hands, and managed to dislodge the mast.
Down it and the sail came with a crash. Leaving the canvas half in
the water and half on the float, Jessie scrambled out over the bow of
the canoe. Amy, panting, was just behind her.
“If that wasn’t just the meanest job that was ever done!” groaned the
dark girl. “What a state we are in, Jess!”
“You _would_ tie the sheet in a knot when you have been warned a
dozen times to keep it in your hand,” complained Jessie.
And that was a pretty strong complaint for Jessie Norwood to make.
Hers was a very equable temper, and she was always patient with her
chum. But this seemed such a perfectly unreasonable happening. It
need not have been.
“If our canoe is utterly ruined, Amy, what shall we do?”
“Maybe Darry and Burd can fix it,” Amy rejoined, but she did not
speak with confidence.
They could see how the thwarts had been strained apart from the
framework, and the bow of the canoe was crushed in. It was a dreary
sight. Jessie Norwood did not believe Darry Drew and his chum would
be able to patch the broken craft. And she did not want her mother to
know how it had been broken.
The minute following their abrupt landing was all the time they had
then to discuss the accident. Tearing down to the float from the
bunch of houses came a shrieking crowd of boys and girls ranging from
six to sixteen, the bare brown legs of Henrietta Haney flashing in
the van. Henrietta did not wear her silk dress and silk stockings
“common.”
“Oh, Miss Jessie! Oh, Miss Jessie! Did you come to see me?” demanded
the freckled child.
“I guess we did,” Jessie Norwood said ruefully staring at the wrecked
canoe. “But we did not mean to come just in this way. Our canoe is
ruined.”
“Maybe it ain’t so bad. I’ll call Monty Shannon. He’s fixing his
wireless, but I guess he’ll leave it long enough to look at your
boat, Miss Jessie.”
“Radio?” murmured Jessie.
“To think of these kids down here having a radio set!” said Amy,
quite as surprised as her chum.
“Oh, he ain’t got the set yet,” explained Henrietta, while the other
Dogtown children proceeded to examine the canoe minutely. “But he’s
got a lot of wire and things, and he is stringing ’em from his roof
to Patsy Dugan’s barn. Monty says he can catch sounds on those wires
like you catch ’em on yours, Miss Jessie.”
“H’mm!” murmured Amy.
“Let us go see what Monty Shannon is doing,” Jessie said suddenly.
“Now, don’t you kids take anything away from Miss Jessie’s canoe, nor
do any harm here,” instructed Henrietta, as she started off in the
lead of the two Roselawn girls.
Henrietta, as the chums had seen before, had a good deal of influence
over her companions of Dogtown. That was why Jessie began to question
the child almost at once.
“Honey,” she said, “you and your little friends came up to see Mr.
Stratford’s wrecked aeroplane at my house, didn’t you?”
“And it wasn’t much more of a wreck than your canoe,” said the sharp
little thing. “I guess you’ll have to walk back to Roselawn, Miss
Jessie, and you’re all wet, too.”
Amy laughed, but Jessie said:
“That doesn’t trouble me much, Henrietta. Our skirts will dry. What
I wanted to ask you about is your being up at Roselawn the other
evening with your friends. I didn’t see you but a minute. But you had
been there some time, hadn’t you?”
“Before that chauffeur came out and chased us? Yes’m, we was.”
“Of course you didn’t touch anything?”
“What, me?” cried Henrietta. “Sure I touched things. I wanted to see
what that flying plane was made of. I never got so near one—not even
a smashed one—before. Course I touched it.”
“But you didn’t pick anything up and carry it away?” Jessie asked
earnestly.
“What you meaning, Miss Jessie? Do you think we stole something? That
chauffeur did.”
“I do not think you stole anything, Henrietta,” Jessie assured her.
“But something of value has been lost by the young man who fell in
the plane. Some of you might have seen it and taken it. And it may
still be up there at my house.”
“I guess you’d better look again, Miss Jessie,” declared the freckled
child with her old-fashioned manner. “I know I never touched nothing
to bring it away. And I didn’t see any of the other kids do it.”
“They might not have told you,” suggested Amy.
“What? Charlie Foley and the Costello twins and Monty Shannon? Huh!
They wouldn’t dare try to hide anything from me. Ain’t I Spotted
Snake, the Witch?” and she laughed elfishly. “They can’t hide
anything from me.”
“Perhaps they hid this from you,” Amy observed.
But Jessie said nothing more at the time. They came to the place
where Montmorency Shannon and two of the smaller boys were just
raising the aerial between the Shannon chimney and the Dugan barn
roof. Monty was a rather goodlooking boy of fourteen with a shock of
rusty hair. His eyes were sharp, and blue, and had a twinkle in them.
Soon after Jessie began to talk with him she discovered that he knew
quite as much about radio telephony as she did herself. He had never
had a set and he did not own one now.
“But I’m going to get this aerial up. Then I’ll be ready for the
set—when I can get it.”
“But how do you purpose getting it?” Amy asked. “They cost quite a
lot of money.”
“I know. The set I want costs fifteen dollars,” Monty declared.
“Maybe it will begin to rain radio sets when I’m ready for mine. I’m
going to set out a big tub to catch ’em, if it clouds over.”
This amused Amy, but Henrietta thought it was impolite.
“You’d better speak politer than that, Montmorency Shannon, or I’ll
tell your mother,” she declared. “Miss Jessie and Miss Amy have come
visiting me. They have to be treated nice.”
“All right,” laughed the boy. “When I get my radio rigged they can
come down here and listen in on it.”
Jessie thanked the rusty-haired boy, but she was by no means
satisfied. She and Amy went around among the houses, convoyed by
Henrietta, and were introduced to several of the housewives that they
had not met before. Of course they spent some time with Mrs. Foley,
and Jessie asked particularly about Charlie who appeared to have got
a job. He was old enough to work. The Roselawn girl could not bring
herself to the point of discussing the lost watch directly with any
of these people. She did not know which child to suspect—if any.
But when she and Amy had bade their acquaintances of Dogtown good-by
and were walking up the long lane toward Bonwit Boulevard, Jessie
noticed that her chum was very grave.
“Why the seriosity, Amy?” she asked, smiling quizzically.
“Jess, I am puzzled,” admitted the other girl.
“So am I. Are you puzzled about the same thing I am?”
“That red-haired boy!” exclaimed Amy vigorously. “He’s awfully smart.
And he is just as poverty-stricken as the other Dogtown kids, you
know he is.”
“Well?”
“Then _how_ is he going to get a fifteen dollar radio set? I want to
ask you! Isn’t that a very suspicious thing, Jessie, to your mind?”
“I hate to think the boy is dishonest,” confessed her chum slowly.
“But, of course, it does look strange. If he _had_ picked up the
watch, and sold it to some dishonest person, he might have made
fifteen dollars. Oh, Amy! it is awful to distrust anybody.”
“Humph! Maybe it is. But Mark thinks a lot of that watch and I think
we ought to tell him.”
“I suppose you are right,” agreed Jessie, with a sigh.