“But the woman will never dare call the police,” Darry assured Jessie. “You tell your father all about it, and he’ll know what to do.”
“And we must see Daddy Norwood as soon as possible,” the girl said. “I must take Bertha to him. The case is already in court.”
“I’ll fix that for you, Miss Jessie,” Mark Stratford said. “I can get you to town just as quickly as the traffic cops will let me—and they are all my friends.”
Darry considered that he should go, too. So they dropped Amy and little Henrietta, with Burd Alling, at Roselawn, and after a word to Momsy, started like the flight of an arrow in Mark’s powerful car for New York.
Jessie and Bertha Blair had never ridden so fast before. Mark Stratford knew his car well, 199 and coaxed it along over the well-oiled roads of Westchester at a speed to make anybody gasp.
But haste was necessary. They knew where the court was, and they arrived there just after the noon recess. Mrs. Norwood had reached her husband’s chief clerk by telephone, and he had communicated the news to the lawyer. Mr. Norwood had dragged along the prosecution until the missing witness arrived. Then he introduced Bertha Blair into the witness chair most unexpectedly to McCracken and his clients.
If Mr. Norwood’s side of the argument needed any bolstering, this was supplied when Bertha was allowed to tell her story. The judge even advised the girl, or her guardians if she had any, that she had a perfectly good civil case against Martha Poole for imprisoning her in the tower on the Gandy farm.
These matters, however, did not interest Jessie Norwood and her friends much. They had been able to assist Mr. Norwood in an important legal case, and naturally everybody, both old and young, was interested in Bertha Blair, the girl who had been imprisoned. Momsy said she would put on her thinking cap about Bertha’s future.
Meanwhile Bertha and little Henrietta went back to the Foleys for a while. Henrietta was bound to be the most important person of her 200 age in all of Dogtown. No other little girl there was the possessor of such finery as she had.
What Mark Stratford had said to Jessie about Superintendent Blair kept recurring to the Roselawn girl, and she felt that she should tell the man who had charge of the Stratford Electric Corporation radio program about the girl who had been rescued from the horsewoman. As we meet Jessie and Amy and Bertha and all their friends in another volume, called “The Radio Girls on the Program; Or, Singing and Reciting at the Sending Station,” in all probability Jessie Norwood will do just that.