TO THE RESCUE
This charge was so absolutely from a clear sky that the Radio Girls
remained motionless for a moment, staring incredulously at the slanderer
and her smirking companion. They were thunderstruck. It seemed
impossible that even Belle Ringold should have said such a thing to
them.
It was little Hen who recovered first, and with a shrill shriek of rage
she charged to the attack.
“You horrid old thing!” she cried, one hand clenched and making frantic
gestures in the air while the other tugged wildly in a vain attempt to
free itself from Jessie’s grip upon it. “You know that’s a wicked fib,
you do! That’s why you said it! Oh, just wait till I get at you!
Oh—oh——” Jessie’s hand closed firmly over her mouth, choking off the
furious words.
“Stop it, Henrietta!” she commanded. “You only make it worse by talking
like that. Come on, Amy, let’s get away from here.”
“Going to meet Darry and Burd, I suppose,” sneered Belle, not moving
from the path.
“I think it is simply disgraceful—” added the sharp voice of Sally Moon,
who could always be depended upon to back up the girl she fawned upon,
“I think it is a shame the way you kids run after those two boys——”
“Especially since one of them happens to be my brother,” said Amy,
disgustedly. “Really, you girls are too absurd.”
Seeing that Belle and Sally were just warming up to a fresh display of
rudeness and knowing that Amy would soon lose her temper completely,
Jessie started once more to pass Belle. The latter did not budge an
inch, but looked at Jessie with such sneering disdain that even her mild
temper gave way to exasperation.
“Are you going to let me pass, Belle Ringold?” she asked, in a low tone.
“I would like to know why I should,” retorted the other girl, with an
impudent toss of her head. “I don’t see why I should get out of the way
for a person who passes counterfeit bills. As a matter of fact, I expect
them to get out of my way.” This was too much for Henrietta. Her face
was red with fury and every freckle seemed to stand out upon it in a
little brown blotch.
“Let me go, Miss Jessie! Just let me get at her! I’ll scratch her eyes
out, I will, the mean old thing!”
“Oh, Henrietta, Henrietta, hush. Don’t say any more.” And while she
tried to quiet the frantic child Jessie was conscious of Amy’s voice,
saying furiously:
“If you don’t get out of the way and let us by, Belle Ringold, I’ll——”
But the threat was destined never to be finished.
There was the familiar growl of a motor horn, and as the girls looked
around they saw the long low body of a touring car glide up to the curb
and slow to a standstill. At the wheel was Burd Alling, a grin upon his
cheery countenance, and in the tonneau was Darry and a lady whom the
girls did not recognize. However, it was sufficient that, at that
moment, they recognized Darry and Burd!
“Hello!” sang out the latter in a tone that showed he had estimated the
situation perfectly. “Just in time to give you a lift, girls.”
“What did I tell you?” snapped Belle, chagrined at the interruption.
“Didn’t I say they had a date with Darry and Burd?”
“Always tagging around,” Sally Moon’s voice reached them, as, without
another word, the Radio girls, with Bertha and Henrietta in tow, turned
toward the car. “Just like big kids——”
“Sorry we can’t take you all, girls,” called Burd to Belle and her crowd
as he shifted the lever to low and the car moved slowly forward. “But,
you see, we have a pretty good load as it is.”
Darry introduced the strange lady as Miss Alling, “Aunt Emma,” and the
girls were delighted at this opportunity to make her acquaintance. The
lady who was to chaperone them on the two weeks’ jaunt to Forest Lodge
was not at all the type of person that the inconsequential chatter of
the boys had led them to expect.
To be sure, Miss Alling was thin, but hers was not the thinness of the
dried-up spinster but rather the slenderness of an athletic woman who
has kept herself physically fit. Her face was not handsome, but it was
humorously alert and alive. Only around her mouth was a hint of the
obstinacy for which Burd gave her credit.
Miss Alling was unmistakably enthusiastic about having the young folks
with her at Forest Lodge, greeting them, as Burd had prophesied, as
“gifts from heaven.”
When they were nearing Nell Stanley’s house, Jessie suddenly remembered
the ice-cream cones they had promised to bring the young ones at the
parsonage, and insisted that the boys stop long enough to pay a visit to
a convenient candy store.
By that time little Hen was once more becoming an “empty void,” or at
least she declared herself to that effect, so the entire party trooped
into the store for ice cream.
Later they stopped at the parsonage, but did not stay long as “Aunt
Emma” Alling declared herself in a tremendous hurry to get home. But
Miss Alling met Nell and gave her in person a cordial invitation to join
the party at Forest Lodge.
They saw Henrietta and Bertha to the very door of Mrs. Foley’s shack in
Dogtown (for Henrietta had evinced a strong desire to visit her former
guardian), thereby arousing a good deal of interest and admiration on
the part of the dwellers there. “My, but that Henrietta Haney had come
up in the world, with her fine friends, and all. Her ownin’ an island
and visitin’ on it and drivin’ around in automobiles and the like. It’s
a credit to the neighborhood, she’s getting to be.” So tongues clacked
and heads wagged in Dogtown.
As for Henrietta, you would have thought she was a princess at least by
the way she held her freckled little nose to the sky upon entering the
humble abode of Mrs. Foley.
The girls chuckled as the machine left the squalid streets of Dogtown
and entered the exclusive residential district of Roselawn.
Jessie, Amy and Darry alighted at the gates of the Norwood estate, after
gaining a promise from Miss Alling that she would visit Jessie the
following evening and see the wireless set “in action.”
When the car bearing Burd and “Aunt Emma” had departed, the three young
people turned with common consent toward the Norwood porch.
“What were Belle Ringold and Sally Moon up to?” queried Darry, as they
reached the house. “They looked mad enough to bite nails when we first
caught a glimpse of them.”
“Humph, I guess we were the ones who should have looked mad,” grumbled
Amy as she settled herself comfortably in one of the big chairs on the
porch. “Belle Ringold has called us just about every name in the
calendar, but to-day she thought up a new one.”
“She said we were passing counterfeit money,” added Jessie, a shadow
crossing her face as she thought of that accusation.
“She said what?” asked Darry again, staring. And when Jessie repeated
Belle’s words he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“Well, that is rich!” he said, when he had recovered his breath.
“I don’t see anything to laugh about,” said Jessie, seriously. “We did
not feel very much like laughing at the time.”
“We were more inclined to throw bricks,” agreed Amy. “Those girls are
getting impossible, Darry!”
“I know they are,” returned the young fellow, seriously. “But what I was
wondering about,” he added, curiously, “was how in time they got hold of
the information that Amy got stung with the counterfeit bill!”
“I don’t know,” said Amy, indifferently, adding with a chuckle: “I’m
sure there is one girl who hasn’t told about it, and that is the tall
thin girl who gave the bill to me.”
“I have been wondering about her a good deal,” Jessie confessed. “I have
a feeling that that girl is in trouble——”
“Well, if she isn’t, she ought to be,” returned Amy, vehemently. “Just
think of my five dollars and you won’t pity her so much.”
“But she looked sick—almost as if she hadn’t had enough to eat,”
insisted Jessie. “She was so tall and thin, and that white face against
her coal black hair looked ghastly.”
“Hold on a minute!” cried Darry, leaning forward and regarding Jessie
intently. “Did this girl have blue eyes and unusually long, black
lashes?”
“Good gracious, Darry! do you suppose we studied the length of the
girl’s lashes at a time like that?” drawled Amy. “Do have a heart!” But
Jessie had made an impatient gesture.
“She did have long lashes, Darry—black like her hair,” she said,
eagerly. With a low whistle Darry sank back in his chair.
“Gosh,” he muttered, “I wonder if that could have been Link’s sister!”