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

“Lucky girl!” said Amy, sighing. “It’s nice to have an uncle who bosses a broadcasting station. But, never mind, Jess, we had fun the time we were on the program. Say! the boys will be home to-morrow.”

“No! Do you mean it?”

“Papa got a wireless. The Marigold now has a real radio telegraph sending and receiving set. Darry says it is great. But, of course, you and I can’t get anything from them because we do not know Morse.”

“Let’s learn!” exclaimed Jessie, excitedly.

“Sometimes when you get your set tuned wrong you hear some of the code. But the telegraph wave-length is much, much longer than the phone lengths. Guess you’d have a job listening in for anything Darry and Burd Ailing would send from that old yacht.”

“We can learn the Morse alphabet, just the same, can’t we?” demanded her chum.

“Now, there you go again!” complained Amy. “Always suggesting something that is work. I don’t want to have to learn a single thing until we go back to school in the fall. Believe me!”

Her emphasis only made Jessie laugh. She adjusted the crystal detector, or cat’s whisker, as the girls called it, and then began to tune the coil until, with the tabs at her ears, she could hear a voice rising out of the void, nearer and nearer, until it seemed speaking directly in her ear:

“With which announcement we begin our evening’s entertainment from the Stratfordtown Station. The first number on the program being – ”

“Do you hear that? It is Mr. Blair himself,” whispered Amy eagerly. “And he says – ”

Jessie held up her hand for silence as the superintendent of the broadcasting station at Stratfordtown went on to announce, “Miss Bertha Blair, who will sing ‘Will o’ the Wisp,’ Mr. Angler being at the piano. I thank you.”

The piano prelude came to the ears of the Roselawn girls almost instantly. Jessie and Amy smiled at each other. They were proud to think that they had something to do with Bertha’s becoming a favorite on the Stratfordtown programs, and likewise that their interest in the girl first served to call the superintendent’s attention to her. In “The Roselawn Girls on the Program” is told of Bertha’s first meeting with her uncle who had never before seen her.

They listened to the hour’s program and then tuned the receiver to get what was being broadcasted from a city station – a talk on economics that interested to a degree even the two high-school girls. For frivolous as Amy usually appeared to be, she was a good scholar and, like Jessie, stood well in her classes.

There was not much but a desire for fun in Amy’s mind the next morning, however, when she ran across the boulevard to the Norwood place. It was right after breakfast, and she wore her middy blouse and short skirt, with canvas ties on her feet. She trilled for Jessie under the radio-room windows:

“You-oo! You-oo! ‘Mary Ann! My Mary Ann! I’ll meet you on the corner!’ Come-on-out!”

Jessie appeared from the breakfast room, and Momsy, as Jessie always called her mother, looked out, too.

“What have you girls on your minds for this morning?” she asked.

“Our new canoe, Mrs. Norwood. You know, we gave the old one to those Dogtown youngsters, and our new one has never been christened yet.”

“Shall I bring a hat?” asked Jessie, hesitatingly.

“What for? To bail out the canoe? Bill says it is perfectly sound and safe,” laughed Amy.

“You are getting wee freckles on your nose, Jessie,” said Mrs. Norwood.

“Why worry?” demanded Amy. “You can never get as many as Hen wears – and her nose isn’t as big as yours.”

“It is by good luck, not good management, that you do not freckle, Amy Drew,” declared her chum. “I’ll take the shade hat.”

“Why not a sunbonnet?” scoffed Amy.

But Jessie laughed and ran out with her hat. It floated behind her, held by the two strings, as she raced her chum down to the boat landing. The Norwood boathouse sheltered several different craft, among others a motor-boat that Amy’s brother, Darrington Drew, owned. But Darry and his chum, Burd Alling, had lost their interest in the Water Thrush since they had been allowed to put into commission, and navigate themselves, the steam-yacht Marigold, which was a legacy to Darry from an uncle now deceased.

The girls got the new canoe out without assistance from the gardener or his helper. They were thoroughly capable out-of-door girls. They had erected the antenna for Jessie’s radio set without any help. Both were good boatmen – “if a girl can be a man,” to quote Amy – and they could handle the Water Thrush as well as the canoe.

They launched and paddled out from the shore in perfect form. The sun was scorching, but there was a tempering breeze. It was therefore cooler out toward the middle of the lake than inshore. The glare of the sun on the water troubled even the thoughtless Amy.

“Oh, aren’t you the wise little owl, Jess Norwood!” she cried. “To think of wearing a sun-hat! And here am I with nothing to shelter me from the torrid rays. I am going to burn and peel and look horrid – I know I shall! I’ll not be fit to go to Hackle Island – if we go.”

“Oh, we’re going, all right!”

“You’re mighty certain, from the way you talk. Has it been really settled? ‘There’s many a slip’ and all that, you know.”

“Father asked Momsy about it at breakfast before he went to town, and she said she had quite made up her mind,” Jessie said. “He will make the arrangements with the owner of the house.”

“Oh, goody! A bungalow?” cried Amy.

“Yes.”

“How big, dear? Can the boys come?”

“Of course. There are fourteen rooms. It is a big place. We will shut up the house here and send down most of the serving people ahead. We shall have at least one good month of salt air.”

“Hooray!” cried Amy, swinging her paddle recklessly. “And I’ve got just the most scrumptious idea, Jess. I’ll tell you – ”

But something unexpected happened just then that quite drove out of Amy Drew’s mind the idea she had to impart to her chum. She brought the paddle she had waved down with an awful smack on the water. The spray spattered all about. Jessie flung herself back to escape some of the inwash, and by so doing her gaze struck upon something on the surface of the lake, far ahead.

“Oh! Oh!” she shrieked. “What is that, Amy? Somebody is drowning!”

CHAPTER V – INTO TROUBLE AND OUT

Amy Drew sat up in the canoe as high as she could and stared ahead. Jessie’s observation suggested trouble; but Amy almost immediately burst out laughing.

“‘Drowning!’” she repeated. “Why, Jess Norwood, you know that you couldn’t drown those Dogtown kids. And if that isn’t some of them – Monty Shannon, and the Costello twins, and the rest of them – I’m much mistaken.”

“But see those barrels and tubs and what-all!” gasped her more serious friend. “Look there! It’s Henrietta!”

The fleet of strange barges that Jessie had first spied included, it seemed, almost every sort of craft that could be improvised. A rainwater barrel led the procession of “boats,” and Montmorency Shannon was in that, paddling with some kind of paddle that he wielded with no little skill.

There were two wooden washtubs in which the Costello twins voyaged. One was much lower in the water than the other, giving evidence of having shipped more water than its mate. In a water-trough that had been filched from somebody’s barnyard was little Henrietta and Charlie Foley.

“They will be overboard!” exclaimed Jessie, anxiously. “Drive ahead, Amy – do!”

The wind was blowing directly in their faces and from the direction of the Dogtown landing, where the flotilla had evidently embarked. The tubs spun around and around, the half-barrel in which Monty Shannon sat tried to perform the same gyrations, but Henrietta and the Foley boy blundered ahead. It was plain to Jessie’s mind that the reckless children could not have sailed in the other direction had they wished to do so.

“What do you come out here for?” she shrieked when the canoe drew near.

“Oh, Miss Jessie, we are going to the Carter place,” sang out Henrietta.

“But the Carter place is down the lake, not up!” exclaimed the exasperated Jessie.

“Yes. But the wind shifted,” said Henrietta.