The Campfire Girls on Station Island: or, The Wireless from the Steam Yacht

Jessie ran down the steps and the path to the street. When the freckled child saw her coming she stood up and waved the parasol at the Roselawn girl.

Henrietta Haney was a child in whom the two Roselawn girls had become much interested while she had lived in the Dogtown district of New Melford with Mrs. Foley and her family. Montmorency Shannon was a red-haired urchin from the same poor quarters, and he and Henrietta were the best of friends.

“Oh, Miss Jessie! Miss Jessie! What d’you think? I’m rich!”

“She certainly is rich,” choked Amy, following her chum with Nell Stanley. “She’s a scream.”

“What do you mean – that you are rich, Henrietta?” Jessie asked, smiling at her little protégé.

“I tell you, I am rich. Or, I am goin’ to be. I own an island and everything. And there’s bungleloos on it, and fishing, and a golf course, and everything. I am rich.”

“What can the child mean?” asked Jessie Norwood, looking back at her friends. “She sounds as though she believed it was actually so.”

CHAPTER II – A PUZZLING QUESTION

Little Henrietta Haney, with her green parasol and her freckles, came stumbling out of the low phaeton, so eager to tell Jessie the news that excited her that she could scarcely make herself understood at all. She fairly stuttered.

“I’m rich! I got an island and everything!” she crowed, over and over again. Then she saw Amy Drew’s delighted countenance and she added: “Don’t you laugh, Miss Amy, or I won’t let you go to my island at all. And there’s radio there.”

“For pity’s sake, Henrietta!” cried Jessie. “Where is this island?”

“Where would it be? Out in the water, of course. There’s water all around it,” declared the freckle-faced child in vigorous language. “Don’t you s’pose I know where an island ought to be?”

At that Amy Drew burst into laughter. In fact, Jessie Norwood’s chum found it very difficult on most occasions to be sober when there was any possibility of seeing an occasion for laughter. She found amusement in almost everything that happened.

But that made her no less helpful to Jessie when the latter had gained her first interest in radio telephony. Whatever these two Roselawn girls did, they did together. If Jessie planned to establish a radio set, Amy Drew was bound to assist in the actual stringing of the antenna and in the other work connected therewith. They always worked hand in hand.

In the first volume of this series, entitled “The Radio Girls of Roselawn,” the chums and their friends fell in with a wealth of adventures, and one of the most interesting of those adventures was connected with little Henrietta Haney, whom Amy had just now called “O-Be-Joyful” Henrietta.

The more fortunate girls had been able to assist Henrietta, and finally had found her cousin, Bertha Blair, with whom little Henrietta now lived. By the aid of radio telephony, too, Jessie and Amy and their friends were able to help in several charitable causes, including that of the building of the new hospital.

In the second volume, “The Radio Girls on the Program,” the friends had the chance to speak and sing at the Stratfordtown broadcasting station. It was an opportunity toward which they had long looked forward, and that exciting day they were not likely soon to forget.

A week had passed, and during that time Jessie knew that little Henrietta had been taken to Stratfordtown by her Cousin Bertha, where they were to live with Bertha’s uncle, who was the superintendent of the Stratford Electric Company’s sending station. The appearance of the wildly excited little girl here in Roselawn on this occasion was, therefore, a surprise.

Jessie Norwood seized hold of Henrietta by the shoulders and halted her wild career of dancing. She looked at Montmorency Shannon accusingly and asked:

“Do you know what she is talking about?”

“Sure, I do.”

“Well, what does she mean?”

“She’s been talking like that ever since I picked her up. This is Cabbage-head Tony’s pony. You know, he sells vegetables down on the edge of town. Spotted Snake – ”

“Don’t call Henrietta that!” cried Jessie, reprovingly.

“Well, she gave the name to herself when she played being a witch,” declared the Shannon boy defensively. “Anyway, Hen came down to Dogtown last evening and hired me to drive her over here this morning.”

“And when I get some of my money that’s coming to me with that island,” broke in Henrietta, “I’ll buy Montmorency an automobile to drive me around in. This old pony is too slow – a lot too slow!”

“Listen to that!” crowed Amy, in delight.

“But do tell us about the island, child,” urged Nell Stanley, likewise interested.

“A man came to Cousin Bertha’s house, where we live with her uncle. His name is Blair, too; it isn’t Haney. Well, this man said: ‘Are you Padriac Haney’s little girl?’ And I told him yes, that I wasn’t grown up yet like Bertha. And so he asked a lot of questions of Mr. Blair. They was questions about my father and where he was married to my mother, and where I was born, and all that.”

“But where does the island come in?” demanded Amy.

“Now, don’t you fuss me all up, Miss Amy,” admonished the child. “Where was I at!”

“You was at the Norwood place. I brought you,” said young Shannon.

“Don’t you think I know that?” demanded the little girl scornfully. “Well, it’s about Padriac Haney’s great uncle,” she hastened to say. “Padriac was my father’s name and his great uncle – I suppose that means that he was awful big – p’r’aps like that fat man in the circus we saw. But his name was Padriac too, and he left all his money and islands and golf courses to my father. So it is coming to me.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Nell Stanley. “Did you ever hear such a jumbled-up affair?”

But Montmorency Shannon nodded solemnly. “Guess it’s so. Mrs. Foley was telling my mother something about it. And Spot – I mean, Hen, must have fallen heiress to money, for she give me a whole half dollar to drive her over here,” and his grin appeared again.

“What I want to know is the name of the island, child?” demanded Amy, recovering from her laughter.

“Well, it’s got a name all right,” said Henrietta. “It is Station Island. And there’s a hotel on it. But that hotel don’t belong to me. And the radio station don’t belong to me.”

“O-oh! A radio station!” repeated Jessie. “That sounds awfully interesting. I wonder where it is!”

“But the golf course belongs to me, and some bungleloos,” added the child, mispronouncing the word with her usual emphasis. “And we are going out to this island to spend the summer – Bertha and me. Mrs. Blair says we can. And she will go, too. The man that knows about it has told the Blairs how to get there and – and – I invite you, Miss Jessie, and you, Miss Amy, to come out on Station Island and visit us. Oh, we’ll have fun!”

“That sounds better than any old farm,” cried Amy, gaily. “I accept, Hen, on the spot. You can count on me.”

“If it is all right so that we can go, I will promise to visit you, dear,” Jessie agreed. “But, you know, we really will have to learn more about it.”

“Cousin Bertha will tell you,” said the freckle-faced child, eagerly. “I run away to come down here to the Foleys, so as to tell you first. You are the very first folks I have ever invited to come to live on my island.”

“Ain’t you going to let me come, Spot – I mean, Hen?” asked Monty Shannon, who sat sidewise on the seat and was paying very little attention to the pony.

As a matter of fact, the pony belonging to the vegetable vender was so old and sedate that one would scarcely think it necessary to watch him. But at this very moment a red car, traveling at a pace much over the legal speed on a public highway, came dashing around the turn just below the Norwood house. It took the turn on two wheels, and as it swerved dangerously toward the curb where the pony stood, its rear wheels skidded. “Look out!” shrieked Amy. “That car is out of control! Look, Jess!”

Her chum, by looking at it, nor the observation of any other bystander, could scarcely avert the disaster that Amy Drew feared. But she was so excited that she scarcely knew what she shouted. And her mad gestures and actions utterly amazed Jessie.

“Have you got Saint Vitus’s dance, Amy Drew?” Jessie demanded.

The red, low-hung car wabbled several times back and forth across the oiled driveway. They saw a hatless young fellow in front behind the wheel. In the narrow tonneau were two girls, and if they were not exactly frightened they did not look happy.

Nell Stanley cried: “It’s Bill Brewster’s racing car; and he’s got Belle and Sally with him.”

“Belle and Sally!” shrieked Amy.

Belle Ringold and her follower, Sally Moon, were not much older than Amy and Jessie, but they were overbearing and insolent and had made themselves obnoxious to many of their schoolmates. Wishing to appear grown up, and wishing, above all things, to attract Amy’s brother Darry and Darry’s chum, Burd Alling, and feeling that in some way the two Roselawn chums interfered in this design, they were especially unpleasant in their behavior toward them. Sometimes Belle and Sally had been able to make the Roselawn girls feel unhappy by their haughty speech and what Amy called their “snippy ways.” Just now, however, circumstances forbade the two unpleasant girls annoying anybody.