A GREAT TO-DO
“Chapman! Stop!” shouted Jessie. “We must tell them!”
The chauffeur wheeled the car in toward the curb and stopped as
quickly as he could. But it was some distance past the church and the
parsonage.
The girls jumped out and ran back. They saw Dr. Stanley come out on
the porch from his study. He was in his house gown and wore a little
black cap to cover his bald spot. It was a little on one side and
gave the good clergyman a decidedly rakish appearance.
“Come in here, children! Hurry! It is going to rain,” he called in
his full and mellow voice.
“Oh, Doctor! Doctor!” Jessie gasped. “The fire! The fire!”
“Why, you are not wet. Here come the first drops. You don’t need a
fire.”
“Nor you don’t need one, Doctor,” and Amy began to laugh. “But you’ve
got one just the same.”
“In the kitchen stove. Is it a joke or a conundrum?” asked the
smiling minister, as the two chums came up under the porch roof just
as the first big drops came thudding down.
“Upstairs! The radio!” declared the earnest Jessie. “Don’t you know
it’s afire?”
“The radio afire?”
“The lightning struck it. Didn’t you feel and hear it? The boys must
have left the switch to the receiver open, and the lightning came
right in——”
“Come on!” broke in Amy, who knew the way about the parsonage as well
as she did about her own house. “We saw the smoke pouring out of the
window,” and she darted in and started up the front stairway.
“Why, why!” gasped the good doctor. “I can hardly believe Nell would
be so careless.”
“Oh, it isn’t Nell,” Jessie said, following her chum. “It is the
boys.”
“But she always knows what the boys are up to, and Sally, too,”
declared the minister, confident of his capable daughter’s oversight
of the family.
The girls raced up the two flights. They smelled the smoke strongly
as they mounted the second stairway to the garret. Then they heard
voices.
“They’ve got it right in the old lumber room, Jess!” panted Amy.
“But why don’t they give the alarm?”
“Trying to put it out themselves. We ought to have brought buckets!”
“There is no water on this floor!”
Amy banged open the door of the big room in which they knew, by the
arrangement of the outside wires, Bob and Fred must have set up the
radio set. Amy plunged in, with Jessie right behind her. The room was
unpleasantly filled with smoke.
“Why don’t you put it out?” shrieked Amy, and then began to cough.
“Hullo!” Bob Stanley exclaimed out of the smother. “We want to put it
in, not out. Hullo, Jess. You here, too?”
“The fire! The smoke!” gasped Jessie.
“Shucks,” said Fred, who was down on his knees poking at something.
“We can’t have the windows open, for the rain is beating this way.
We’ve got to solder this thing. Did you have trouble with yours,
Jess?”
“Sweetness and daylight!” groaned a voice behind them.
Dr. Stanley stood in the doorway. He was a heavy man, and mounting
the stairs at such a pace tried his temper as well as his wind.
“Is _this_ what started you girls off at such a tearing pace? Why,
the boys borrowed that soldering outfit from the plumber. It’s all
right.”
“I am so sorry we annoyed you,” said Jessie, contritely.
But Amy had begun to laugh and could say nothing. Only waved her
hands weakly and looked at the clergyman, whose cap was much more
over his ear than before.
“Right in the middle of Sunday’s sermon, young ladies,” said the
minister, with apparent sternness. “If that sermon is a failure, Amy
and Jessie, I shall call on one of you girls—perhaps both of you—to
step up into the pulpit and take my place. Remember that, now!” and
he marched away in apparent dudgeon; but they heard him singing
“Onward Christian Soldiers” before he got to the bottom of the upper
flight of stairs.
“But it certainly was a great to-do,” murmured Jessie, as she tried
to see what the boys were doing.
She was able to advise them after a minute. But Amy insisted upon
opening one of the windows and so getting more of the smoke out of
the long room.
“You boys don’t even know how to make a fire in a fire-pot without
creating a disturbance,” she said.
Nell came up from the kitchen where she had been consulting the cook
about the meals, and Sally came tagging after her, of course, with a
cookie in one hand and a rag doll in the other.
“This Sally is nothing but a yawning cavity walking on hollow
stilts,” declared Nell, who “fussed” good-naturedly, just as her
father did. “She is constantly begging from the cook between meals,
and her eyes are the biggest things about her when she comes to the
table.”
“Ain’t,” said Sally, shaking her curls in denial.
“Ain’t what?” asked Jessie.
“Ain’t—ain’t _if you please_,” declared the little girl, revealing
the fact that her sister had tried to train her in politeness.
When the girls stopped laughing—and Sally had finished the
cookie—Nell added:
“Aunt Freda came last night to dinner and we had strawberry fool.
Cook makes a delicious one. And Sally could eat her weight of that
delicacy. When I came to serve the dessert Sally was watching me
with her eagle eye and her mouth watering. I spooned out an ordinary
dishful, and Sally whispered:
“‘Oh, sister! is _that_ all I get?’
“So I told her it was for Aunt Freda, and she gasped:
“‘What! All _that_?’”
The boys got the thing they wanted soldered completed about this
time, and Bob ran down the back way with the fire-pot. The rain began
to lift. As Nell cheerfully said, a patch of blue sky soon appeared
in the west big enough to make a Scotchman a kilt, so they could be
sure that it would clear.
Jessie and Amy walked home after seeing the Stanley boys’ radio set
completed. Their minds then naturally reverted to the adventures
of the morning and what they had heard so mysteriously out of the
ether the evening before. Jessie had warned her chum to say nothing
to anybody about the mysterious prisoner and the stock farm over by
Harrimay or of their suspicions until she had talked again with Mr.
Norwood.
Momsy came home that afternoon from Aunt Ann’s, but Mr. Norwood did
not appear. The Court was sitting, and he had several cases which
needed his entire attention. He often remained away from home several
days in succession at such times.
“And one of the most important cases is that one he told us about,”
Momsy explained. “He is greatly worried about that. If he cannot find
that girl who lived with Mrs. Poole——”
“Oh, Momsy!” exclaimed Jessie, “let us find Daddy and tell him about
what Amy and I heard over the radio. I believe we learned something
about Bertha Blair, only we could not find her this morning.”
She proceeded to explain the adventure which included the automobile
trip to Harrimay and the Gandy farm. Momsy became excited. It did
not really seem to her to be so; but she agreed that Daddy Norwood
ought to hear about it.
When they tried to get him on the long distance telephone, however,
the Court had closed for the day and so had the Norwood law office.
He was not at his club, and Momsy did not know at which hotel he was
to spend the night. There really seemed to be nothing more Jessie
could do about the lost witness. And yet she feared that this delay
in getting her father’s attention would be irreparable.