“Besides, at this hour, we’ll have the atmosphere to ourselves—or nearly so—so that we may come in on something that’s broadcasted from some powerful station in town,” she added hopefully, “or we may even steal in on some fashionable amateur near by, in some one of the big camps or houses along the lake! Some radio fiend, with a costly set, who is so crazy over the new game that he has sat up all night over it and is keeping on into daylight ... with my spiked heel in the soft ground of the stream’s bank over there, by the—wood—”
“The wood!” echoed Una fearfully.
“Yes, you haven’t been ‘coming in’ on any funny murmur, uncanny murmur, there, this morning; have you? I believe you’re a brand-new sort of radio ‘bug’ yourself,” chaffingly.
“No—I haven’t.” The dark-eyed girl shivered, white-cheeked, in the dew. “If I did—if I ever should again—I’d have to try to find out what made it—though—”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’d run to earth—to Sods. I know you! Well! come along then.” Pemrose impetuously seized her friend’s hand. “With my heel in the magic carpet—the wet moss, over there—and my two hundred feet of antenna, fine, insulated wire strung out to the poor old ash-tree, we ought to be able to get results—some results, at this hour.”
“Well! you’ll promise to let me listen in, too, you won’t hold on to those magic ear-phones all the time yourself? I know you!” Una glanced at the dangling “halo”, attached to the ring, yielding as she generally did when Pemrose pulled the strings.
“But we’ll have to hurry, we won’t have much time,” she said, “as we leave here before seven, in the big car with Andrew, to pick up the other campers at Greylock village. We haven’t had breakfast yet; and, oh! are we quite sure that we have everything in our packs?” with the tremor of a novice.
“Everything—ducky! Including the last straw!” Pemrose was toying with her ring. “The rolls of colored paper for our flower costumes, the Wild Flower Pageant—your birthday, in August!” she murmured dreamily, really thinking of those radio “fiends” who might, at the moment, be handling their last few messages before broad daylight—on whom she might steal in. “We ought to have sent them up with the camp stores and extra clothing to the horse-farm—those rolls. When it comes to the last long mile—”
“Pshaw! they don’t weigh any more than two pinheads,” laughed Una, swaying like “white weed”, herself, her dark eyes, like her flowers, “dressing themselves up in gold light.” “And the farmers’ wives, their little children, they have so little in their lives!”
“Um-m. There may be very few ‘natives’ to admire us,” Pemrose was still showing off the ring to the sunrise, “unless—unless you include quack-natives,” merrily, “Treff and his father, who have a camp about ten miles from the horse-farm.”