The Radio Girls on the program

The two girls did not stand long at the open window of Jessie Norwood’s sitting room. That crash of the airplane spurred them to excited activity.

Amy Drew led the way, and she led it shrieking. Mrs. Norwood appeared at the door of the library, demanding:

“What has happened, girls? Stop shouting, Amy, please! You will raise the neighborhood.”

“That’s what we want to do, Momsy!” Jessie cried. “Something dreadful has happened!”

“That radio set! I knew something would happen because of it,” gasped the kindly but rather nervous woman.

In fact, when Jessie Norwood and her chum, Amy Drew, had first become interested in radio telephony Mrs. Norwood had been rather fearful of the new apparatus. Not that she would forbid her only child—nor would Mr. Norwood, who was a lawyer in New York—anything that might amuse her without doing others harm. But “Momsy,” as Jessie always called her mother, was very much afraid of lightning and she feared that the radio aerial would lead lightning, as well as radio broadcasting, into the house.

Jessie, however, although she had strung the aerial and set up the machine in her own room with very little help save what her chum gave her, had studied advisory radio books with care and had so placed and guarded the thing that there was positively no danger from lightning.

Indeed, so careful was she, and quite by instinct now, that before she had left the room to run down to see what had happened to the fallen airplane pilot, she had closed the receiving switch. And there was not a cloud in the sky!

Roselawn people had become vastly interested in radio telephony since Jessie Norwood had got her outfit. The Norwoods were popular anyway, but since the church bazaar, which had been held on the Norwood lawn on the recent Fourth of July, Jessie found herself more than usually sought after.

At that time, and by her suggestion, a tent had been raised upon the lawn and her radio set disconnected, brought down into the tent, and linked up again with the aerial. The tent seated a hundred people, and it was filled to capacity at each show. Immediately radio telephony became “all the rage,” Amy said, “all over Roselawn.”

The practical uses of the new interest were not alone discovered in the first volume of this series, called “The Radio Girls of Roselawn”; but through radio, or because of it, the two chums and their friends fell in with a wealth of adventure.

Associated with Jessie and Amy in the incidents of the former book were Amy’s older brother, Darrington, and his college friend, Burd Alling. And for the very reason that these young men were older than the high school girls, some of the classmates of the latter were convinced that they should likewise have the privilege of chumming with the two collegians.

Belle Ringold, a girl not far from the age of the radio girls of Roselawn, but who dressed in a fashion much older than her years, had shown her spleen on this very day by saying something very unpleasant regarding Jessie’s dress.

Jessie had quite forgotten this, however, as she plunged down the stairway and out of the door after Amy.

The wrecked plane looked a ruin. Every part of it seemed to have been torn to bits. Both wings were twisted into scraps and the woodwork was splintered into matchwood. It did not seem, to the horrified eyes of the two girls, that any human being could have come down in that plane and lived.

Amy halted on the top step of the wide porch, clasping her hands.

“Oh, Jess!” she groaned. “That bed of beautiful Marshal Niel roses your mother thought so much of!”

Jessie knew that her chum was too excited to realize just how this sounded. The roses—the whole great bed of them—were uprooted and crushed. But there was greater disaster than that.

“The pilot! The pilot, Amy!” Jessie gasped. “He must be killed.”

“If he didn’t get out before the crash, he must be,” rejoined Amy.

“Goodness! How could he get out?”

Jessie was ahead. She ran to the far side of the heap of rubbish that was the collapsed aeroplane. There seemed no part of the machine left intact. And just as the girls reached the spot a curl of smoke ascended from the midst of the wreck.

“It’s on fire! Oh, Amy, the thing will be burned up! And the poor man!”

“Oh, he mustn’t!” groaned Amy.

Jessie suddenly saw an arm sticking out from under some of the lighter wreckage. It was clothed in the olive-drab uniform coat of an aviator. She seized the gauntleted hand and began to tug with all her strength.

“Where are you going, Amy?” she cried. “Come and help me.”

“Going to get the lawn hose. We’ll put out the fire, Jess.”

“But let’s get this man out first. He may roast while you are wetting down the plane with the hose.”

This seemed practical even to Amy. She lent her strength to Jessie’s and fortunately they were able to drag the unconscious pilot forth. He wore the usual helmet, the tabs of which were fastened over his ears. It was plain that he had been up to a high altitude before making this unfortunate swoop that had ended so disastrously.

“Is he dead? Oh! is he dead?” murmured Jessie Norwood.

“Oh, I hope not,” gasped her chum. “Who is he? Anybody we know, Jess?”

Jessie waved her away. “Run for Chapman or the gardener. Where can they be? Let them get out the hose and put out this fire. Do, Amy!”

“I’ll do that myself,” declared the other girl. “I thought of it first,” and away she went to where the hose was reeled beside the house-plug.

Mrs. Norwood had come out on the veranda, and, seeing that the girls were doing all they could, had herself gone in search of Chapman or the gardener. Jessie unfastened the aviator’s helmet and carefully removed it.

One look at the face of the victim of the accident, and the girl emitted a scream that startled her mother, just then coming around the corner of the house.

“For pity’s sake, child!” she cried. “Is it as bad as that? Come away, Jessie. Here comes Chapman. Let him attend to it!”

Chapman ran hastily to the spot—just in time, in fact, to get the stream of water from the hose right between the shoulders. Amy was rather reckless with the hose. But she soon got it trained upon the burning petrol tank. That scattered the flames at first, but in the end it extinguished the fire.

Chapman, meanwhile, leaned above the injured pilot and began an examination of his body. The victim remained unconscious, and Jessie continued to stare at his pale countenance, not offering to help the chauffeur in his examination. She had recognized the young man lying there on the ground.

“Oh, Momsy! it’s Mark Stratford,” the girl murmured. “Poor Mark! What will his father do if he’s killed?”

“‘The millionaire kid’,” the chauffeur said, kneeling beside the injured pilot. Nor did he use the nickname given to Mark Stratford by his college chums in any tone of scorn. The heir to the great Stratford estate, as well as to the controlling interest in the Stratford Electric Company at Stratfordtown, was well liked by everybody who knew him. Then Chapman added: “It’s a bad tumble he took, Miss Jessie; but he ain’t dead.”

“Chapman,” said Mrs. Norwood, “you and Bill bring him in. We will take him up to bed.” She started the women servants to making indoor preparations. She, too, knew the millionaire’s son and liked him.

“Jessie,” Mrs. Norwood commanded her daughter, “go to the ’phone and telephone to Doctor Ankers. Perhaps you had better call Doctor Leffert, too.”

“Yes, Momsy. And I’ll get Stratfordtown on the line and tell somebody there—somebody of the family, I mean.”

Jessie and her mother hurried in ahead of the men bearing Mark Stratford. Amy, having extinguished the fire and now having nothing better to do, followed after, carrying the discarded flying helmet.

Jessie ran at once to the telephone. “It would be great,” she thought, “if we had a sending instrument as well as a receiving radio set. We could broadcast the news of Mark’s accident and his family would get it promptly.”

However, she had enough to do during the next few minutes calling the two doctors and telling them what was wanted of them and urging the necessity for haste. It took longer to reach the Stratford home beyond Stratfordtown. And there Jessie could talk only with a servant whose sympathy, if he felt any, for his young master’s case was hidden behind the unemotional exterior of the well-trained English servant.

She knew that Mark Stratford had no mother, and although his father and his other relatives might consider him the apple of their eyes, they were not likely to influence him against taking risks. Mark, had he had a mother, would possibly, for her sake, have been a little less reckless in his activities as an aviator after the war was ended.

“And just see what has come of it, poor fellow,” murmured the Roselawn girl, as she hung up the receiver and enclosed the telephone instrument again in the bisque doll which housed it on the hall table. “Suppose he is killed or seriously hurt? Dear, dear! What a frightful tragedy!”

“It’s all of that,” half sobbed Amy, who was standing behind her chum. She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. “And your radio antenna, Jess, is completely wrecked.”