CHAPTER VIIIMONTMORENCY 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!”
“Youwouldtie 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 drearysight. 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 alot 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?”
“Thenhowis 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 hehadpicked 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.