CHAPTER XIXA PUZZLING CIRCUMSTANCE
Jessie’s parents being away, Amy ran home and announced her desire to keep her chum company and was back again before ten o’clock. There was not much to be heard over the airways after that hour. They had missed Madame Elva and the orchestra music broadcasted from Stratfordtown.
“Nothing to do but to go to bed,” Amy declared. “The sooner we are asleep the sooner we can get up and go looking for the mysterious broadcasting station. Do you believe that cry for help was from little Hen’s cousin?”
“I have a feeling that it is,” Jessie admitted.
“Maybe we ought to take Spotted Snake, the Witch, with us,” chuckled her chum. “What do you say?”
“I think not, honey. We might only raise hopes in the child’s mind that will not be fulfilled. I think she loves her cousin Bertha very much; and of course we do not know that this is that girl whose cry for help we heard.”
“We don’t really know anything about it. Maybe it is all a joke or a mistake.”
“Do you think that girl sounded as though she were joking?” was Jessie’s scornful reply. “Anyway, we will look into it alone first. If Chapman can find the stock farm with the red barn——”
“And there are two fallen trees and a silo near it,” put in Amy, smiling. “Goodness me, Jess! I am afraid the boys would say we had another crazy notion.”
“I like that!” cried Jessie Norwood. “What is there crazy about trying to help somebody who certainly must be in trouble? Besides,” she added very sensibly, “Daddy Norwood will be very thankful to us if we should manage to find that Bertha Blair. He needs her to witness for his clients, and Momsy says the hearing before the Surrogate cannot be postponed again. The matter must soon be decided, and without Bertha Blair’s testimony Daddy’s clients may lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“We’ll be off to the rescue of the prisoner in the morning, then,” said Amy, cuddling down into one of her chum’s twin beds. “Good-night! Sweet dreams! And if you have a nightmare don’t expect me to get up and tie it to the bedpost.”
The next morning Chapman brought around the car as early as half past eight, when the girls were just finishing breakfast.
“Don’t eat any more, Amy,” begged Jessie. “Doget up for once from the table feeling that you could eat more. The doctors say that is the proper way.”
“Pooh! What do the doctors know about eating?” scoffed Amy. “Their job is to tend to you when you can’t eat. Why? honey! I feel lots better morally with a full stomach than when I am hungry.”
They climbed into the car and Chapman drove out the boulevard and turned into the Parkville road. It was a lovely morning, not too hot and with only a wind made by their passage, so that the dust only drifted behind the car. They passed the home of Mr. and Mrs. Brandon’s daughter and saw the aerials strung between the house and the flagpole on the garage.
“Keep your eyes open for aerials anywhere, Amy,” said Jessie. “Of course wherever that broadcasting station is, the aerials must be observable.”
“They’ll be longer and more important than the antenna for the usual receiving set, won’t they?” eagerly asked Amy.
“Of course.” Then Jessie leaned forward to speak to Chapman, for they were in the open car. “When you approach the stock farm you spoke of, please drive slowly. We want to look over all the surroundings.”
“Very well, Miss Jessie,” the chauffeur said.
Passing through Parkville, they struck a road called a turnpike, although there were no ticket-houses, as there are at the ferries. It was an old highway sweeping between great farms, and the country was rolling, partly wooded, and not so far off the railroad line that the latter did not touch the race track Chapman had spoken of.
The car skirted the high fence of the Harrimay enclosure and then they ran past a long string of barns in which the racing horses were housed and trained for a part of the year. There was no meet here at this time, and consequently few horses were in evidence.
“I like to see horses race,” remarked Amy. “And they are such lovely, intelligent looking creatures. But so many people who have anything to do with horses and racing are such hard-faced people and so—so impossible! Think of the looks of that Martha Poole. She’s the limit, Jessie.”
“Neither she nor Mrs. Bothwell is nice, I admit. But don’t blame it on the poor horses,” Jessie observed, smiling. “I am sure it is not their fault. Mrs. Poole would be objectionable if she was interested in cows—or—or Pekingese pups.”
Chapman turned up a hilly road and they came out on a ridge overlooking the fenced-in track. The chauffeur shifted his position so as to glance behind him at the girls, the car running slowly.
“Now look out, Miss Jessie,” he advised. “We are coming to the old Gandy stock farm. That’s the roof of the house just ahead. Yonder is the tower they built to house the electric lighting plant like what your father used to have. See it?”
“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Jessie. “But—but I don’t see any aerials. No, I don’t! And the red barn——”
“There it is!” cried Amy, grabbing at her chum’s arm. “With the silo at the end.”
The car turned a corner in the road and the entrance gate to the estate came into view. Up the well kept lane, beyond the rambling house of weathered shingles, stood a long, low barn and a silo, both of a dull red color. And on either side of the entrance gate were two broken willow trees, their tall tops partly removed, but most of the trunks still lying upon the ground where they had fallen.
“Ha!” ejaculated the chauffeur. “Those trees broke down since I was past here last.”
“Do drive slower, Chapman,” Jessie cried.
But she drew Amy down when the girl stood up to stare at the barn and the tower.
“There may be somebody on watch,” Jessie hissed. “They will suspect us. And if it is either of those women, they will recognize you.”
“Cat’s foot!” ejaculated Amy. “I don’t see any signs of occupancy about the house. Nor isthere anybody working around the place. It looks abandoned.”
“We don’t know. If the poor girl is shut up here——”
“Where?” snapped Amy.
“Perhaps in the house.”
“Perhaps in the barn,” scoffed her chum. “Anyway, every window of that tower, both the lower and the upper stories, is shuttered on the outside.”
“Maybe that is where Bertha is confined—if it is Bertha.”
“But, honey! Where is the radio? There is nothing but a telephone wire in sight. There is no wireless plant here.”
“Dear me, Amy! don’t you suppose we have come to the right place?”
The car was now getting away from the Gandy premises. Jessie had to confess that there was no suspicious looking wiring anywhere about the house or outbuildings.
“It does not seem as though that could be the place after all. What do you think, Chapman?” she added, leaning forward again. “Don’t you think that place looked deserted?”
“It often does between racing seasons, Miss Jessie,” the man said. “Whoever owns it now does not occupy it all the year.”
Suddenly Jessie sat up very straight and herface flamed again with excitement. She cried aloud:
“Chapman! Isn’t there a village near? And a real estate office?”
“Harrimay is right over the hills, Miss Jessie,” said the chauffeur.
“Drive there at once, please,” said the girl. “And stop at the office of the first real estate agent whose sign you see.”
“For goodness sake, Jess!” drawled Amy, her eyes twinkling, “you don’t mean to buy the Gandy farm, do you?”