CHAPTER I
THEY HEAR A VOICE

“Oh, it’s wonderful, Amy! Just wonderful!”

The blonde girl in the porch swing looked up with shining eyes and flushed face from her magazine to look at the dark girl who swung composedly in a rocking chair, her nimble fingers busy with the knitting of a shoulder scarf. The dark girl bobbed her head in agreement.

“So’s the Sphinx, but it’s awfully out of date, Jess.”

Jessie Norwood looked offended. “Did I ever bring to your attention, Miss Drew–”

“Why don’t you say ‘drew’ to my attention?” murmured the other girl.

“Because I perfectly loathe puns,” declared Jessie, with energy.

“Good! Miss Seymour’s favorite pupil. Go on about the wonder beast, Jess.”

“It is no beast, I’d have you understand. And it is right up to date – the very newest thing.”

“My dear Jessie,” urged her chum, gayly, “you have tickled my curiosity until it positively wriggles! What is the wonder?”

“Radio!”

“Oh! Wireless?”

“Wireless telephone. Everybody is having one.”

“Grandma used to prescribe sulphur and molasses for that.”

“Do be sensible for once, Amy Drew. You and Darry–”

“That reminds me. Darry knows all about it.”

“About what?”

“The radio telephone business. You know he was eighteen months on a destroyer in the war, even if he was only a kid. You know,” and Amy giggled, “he says that if women’s ages are always elastic, it was no crime for him to stretch his age when he enlisted. Anyhow, he knows all about the ‘listening boxes’ down in the hold. And that is all this radio is.”

“Oh, but Amy!” cried Jessie, with a toss of her blond head, “that is old stuff. The radio of to-day is very different – much improved. Anybody can have a receiving set and hear the most wonderful things out of the air. It has been brought to every home.”

“‘Have you a little radio in your home?’” chuckled Amy, her fingers still flying.

“Dear me, Amy, you are so difficult,” sighed her chum.

“Not at all, not at all,” replied the other girl. “You can understand me, just as e-e-easy! But you know, Jess, I have to act as a brake for your exuberance.”

“Don’t care,” declared Jessie. “I’m going to have one.”

“If cook isn’t looking, bring one for me, too,” suggested the irrepressible joker.

“I mean to have a radio set,” repeated Jessie quite seriously. “It says in this magazine article that one can erect the aerials and all, oneself. And place the instrument. I am going to do it.”

“Sure you can,” declared Amy, with confidence. “If you said you could rebuild the Alps – and improve on them – I’d root for you, honey.”

“I don’t want any of your joking,” declared Jessie, with emphasis. “I am in earnest.”

“So am I. About the Alps. Aunt Susan, who went over this year, says the traveling there is just as rough as it was before the war. She doesn’t see that the war did any good. If I were you, Jess, and thought of making over the Alps–”

“Now, Amy Drew! Who said anything about the Alps?”

“I did,” confessed her chum. “And I was about to suggest that, if you tackle the job of rebuilding them, you flatten ’em out a good bit so Aunt Susan can get across them easier.”

“Amy Drew! Will you ever have sense?”

“What is it, a conundrum? Something about ‘Take care of the dollars and the cents will take care of themselves?’”

“I am talking about installing a radio set in our house. And if you don’t stop funning and help me do it, I won’t let you listen in, so there!”

“I’ll be good,” proclaimed Amy at once. “I enjoy gossip just as much as the next one. And if you can get it out of the air–”

“It has to be sent from a broadcasting station,” announced Jessie.

“There’s one right in this town,” declared Amy, with vigor.

“No!”

“Yes, I tell you. She lives in the second house from the corner of Breen Street, the yellow house with green blinds–”

“Now, Amy! Listen here! Never mind local gossips. They only broadcast neighborhood news. But we can get concerts and weather reports and lectures–”

Amy painfully writhed in her chair at this point. “Say not so, Jess!” she begged. “Get lectures enough at school – and from dad, once in a while, when the dear thinks I go too far.”

“I think you go too far most of the time,” declared her chum primly. “Nobody else would have the patience with you that I have.”

“Except Burd Alling,” announced Amy composedly. “He thinks I am all right.”

“Pooh! Whoever said Burd Alling had good sense?” demanded Jessie. “Now listen!” She read a long paragraph from the magazine article. “You see, it is the very latest thing to do. Everybody is doing it. And it is the most wonderful thing!”

Amy had listened with more seriousness. She could be attentive and appreciative if she wished. The paragraph her chum read was interesting.

“Go ahead. Read some more,” she said. “Is that all sure enough so, Jess?”

“Of course it is so. Don’t you see it is printed here?”

“You mustn’t believe everything you see in print, Jess. My grandfather was reported killed in the Civil War, and he came home and pointed out several things they had got wrong in the newspaper obituary – especially the date of his demise. Now this–”

“I am going to get a book about it, and that will tell us just what to do in getting a radio set established.”

“I’ll tell you the first thing to do,” scoffed Amy. “Dig down into your pocketbook.”

“It won’t cost much. But I mean to have a good one.”

“All right, dear. I am with you. Never let it be said I deserted Poll. What is the first move?”

“Now, let me see,” murmured Jessie, staring off across the sunflecked lawn.

The Norwood estate was a grand place. The house, with its surrounding porches, stood in Roselawn upon a knoll with several acres of sloping sod surrounding it and a lovely little lake at the side. There was a long rose garden on either side of the house, and groups of summer roses in front. Roses, roses, roses, everywhere about the place! The Norwoods all loved them.

But there were more roses in this section of the pretty town of New Melford, and on that account many inhabitants of the place had gotten into the habit of calling the estates bordering the boulevard by the name of Roselawn. It was the Roselawn district, for every lawn was dotted with roses, red, pink, white, and yellow.

The Norwoods were three. Jessie, we put first because to us she is of the most importance, and her father and mother would agree. Being the only child, it is true they made much of her. But Jessie Norwood was too sweet to be easily spoiled.

Her father was a lawyer in New York, which was twenty miles from New Melford. The Norwoods had some wealth, which was good. They had culture, which was better. And they were a very loving and companionable trio, which was best.

Across the broad, shaded boulevard was a great, rambling, old house, with several broad chimneys. It had once been a better class farmstead. Mr. Wilbur Drew, who was likewise a lawyer, had rebuilt and added to and improved and otherwise transformed the farmhouse until it was an attractive and important-looking dwelling.

In it lived the lawyer and his wife, his daughter, Amy, and Darrington Drew, when he was home from college. This was another happy family – in a way. Yet they were just a little different from the Norwoods. But truly “nice people.”

When Amy Drew once gave her mind to a thing she could be earnest enough. The little her chum had read her from the magazine article began to interest her. Besides, whatever Jessie was engaged in must of necessity hold the attention of Amy.

She laid aside the knitting and went to sit beside Jessie in the swing. They turned back to the beginning of the article and read it through together, their arms wound about each other in immemorial schoolgirl fashion.

Of course, as Amy pointed out, they were not exactly schoolgirls now. They were out of school – since two days before. The long summer vacation was ahead of them. Time might hang idly on their hands. So it behooved them to find something absorbing to keep their attention keyed up to the proper pitch.

“Tell you what,” Amy suggested. “Let’s go down town to the bookstore and see if they have laid in a stock of this radio stuff. We want one or two of the books mentioned here, Jess. We are two awfully smart girls, I know; we will both admit it. But some things we have positively got to learn.”

“Silly,” crooned Jessie, patting her chum on the cheek. “Let’s go. We’ll walk. Wait till I run and see if Momsy doesn’t want something from down town.”

“We won’t ask Mrs. Drew that question, for she will be pretty sure to want a dozen things, and I refuse – positively – to be a dray horse. I ‘have drew’ more than my share from the stores already. Cyprian in the car can run the dear, forgetful lady’s errands.”

Jessie scarcely listened to this. She ran in and ran out again. She was smiling.

“Momsy says all she wants is two George Washington sundaes, to be brought home in two separate parcels, one blonde and one brunette,” and she held up half a dollar before Amy’s eyes.

“Your mother, as I have always said, Jess, is of the salt of the earth. And she is well sugared, too. Let me carry the half dollar, honey. You’ll swallow it, or lose it, or something. Aren’t to be trusted yet with money,” and Amy marched down the steps in the lead.

She always took the lead, and usually acted as though she were the moving spirit of the pair. But, really, Jessie Norwood was the more practical, and it was usually her initiative that started the chums on a new thing and always her “sticktoitiveness” that carried them through to the end.

Bonwit Boulevard, beautifully laid out, shaded with elms, with a grass path in the middle, two oiled drives, and with a bridle path on one side, was one of the finest highways in the state. At this hour of the afternoon, before the return rush of the auto-commuters from the city, the road was almost empty.

The chums chatted of many things as they went along. But Jessie came back each time to radio. She had been very much interested in the wonder of it and in the possibility of rigging the necessary aerials and setting up a receiving set at her own house.

“We can get the books to tell us how to do it, and we can buy the wire for the antenna to-day,” she said.

“‘Antenna’! Is it an insect?” demanded Amy. “Sounds crawly.”

“Those are the aerials–”

“Listen!” interrupted Amy Drew.

A sound – a shrill and compelling voice – reached their ears. Amy’s hand clutched at Jessie’s arm and held her back. There was nobody in sight, and the nearest house was some way back from the road.

“What is it?” murmured Jessie.

“Help! He-e-elp!” repeated the voice, shrilly.

“Radio!” muttered Amy, sepulchrally. “It is a voice out of the air.”

There positively was nobody in sight. But Jessie Norwood was practical. She knew there was a street branching off the boulevard just a little way ahead. Besides, she heard the throbbing of an automobile engine.

“Help!” shrieked the unknown once more.

“It is a girl,” declared Jessie, beginning to run and half dragging Amy Drew with her. “She is in trouble! We must help her!”