Jessie squinted calmly up into the giant oak whose foliage-weighted branches spread themselves above the lodge.
“As Amy so aptly remarked a few moments ago, watch and learn!” she said, and Darry walked off in high dudgeon.
Burd and Fol, feeling sure that the girls’ resolution would weaken as they watched Barry’s departure, lingered expectantly for a few moments. Then, as no requests for help were forthcoming, they followed Darry, declaring that they intended to linger no longer in a spot where their room was so evidently preferred to their company.
Left alone, the girls worked like beavers, setting up, assembling, and getting ready for the hardest part of all, the erection of the aerial.
At last all the work was done that could be done upon the ground, and the girls turned to the tree from which they intended to string their aerial. It was a convenient distance from the house, and the wires, reaching from the top of the tall tree to the lodge, should be able to record messages from a considerable distance.
Miss Alling, standing at the foot of the tree, watched the ascent with an ever-increasing interest. She was an extremely athletic person herself, and yet she doubted if she would have had the nerve to climb to the top of that tree, even in the service of radio. Now and then she cheered them on with shouted words of encouragement. By the time they were two-thirds of the way toward their goal she was fairly prancing with excitement.
The girls, intent on their work, heard her only vaguely and saw her not at all. As a matter of fact, they were not particularly anxious to look down. It was easier—and safer—to look up, for something told them they had gone a considerable distance from the ground.
Jessie, in the lead, her tool kit slung over one shoulder, climbed laboriously into a crotch of the tree, holding tightly to the coil of wire. With her free hand she beckoned to Amy, who, from various scrabbling sounds, she knew to be directly beneath her.
“Shouldn’t wonder if this would do all right,” she called. “Think we are high enough?”
“I think we are far too high,” Amy’s voice answered her. “Don’t move, Jess. I am coming up!”