How the girl managed to reach a sending set in the tower of the old house where she was kept captive and send out a cry for help over the airways, and how the Radio Girls heard the cry for help over their own receiving set and hurried to the rescue, formed an incident of thrilling interest. Later, this same Bertha Blair had been revealed to the girls as the niece of Mr. Blair, superintendent of the Stratford Electric Company.
At that moment Jessie saw Bertha coming toward them, holding the freckle-faced child by the arm and looking decidedly angry and out of sorts.
“Henrietta is certainly ruining my disposition,” was her greeting to the two sympathetic girls. “I never know where she is from one moment to the next. I would rather take a nest of hornets shopping than Hen.”
“That seems kind of foolish, Bertha,” remarked the strange child, gravely. “’Cause, you know, hornets don’t need clothes near as much as me!”
Seeing that Amy was about to go into another paroxysm of mirth, Jessie hastily suggested lunch, a suggestion received with relief by Bertha and exuberance by Henrietta.
“Miss Jessie seems to know just the sort of thing a body wants,” remarked the child, and Bertha, looking at Jessie, smiled.
“I really don’t know what I shall do with her,” she said, in a low tone, as, after Jessie and Amy had each telephoned that they would stay in town for lunch, they all walked toward the restaurant. “She used to be bad enough, that’s a fact, but now there is no doing anything with her. Since she found out she owns that island——”
“I own a island, I own a island, I own a island,” chanted the child, catching the last part of Bertha’s low-spoken sentence. “I own a island, I own a——” But the last words had risen to so shrill a tone that people were glancing curiously at them and Jessie felt called upon to interfere.
“Even if you do own an island, or part of one,” she said gently, “you don’t need to tell everybody about it, dear.”
“Well,” said the child, wrinkling up her funny little nose, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell everybody as long as it ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed about.”