“My! I am not tall enough to reach the things up to you from the ground, Jess,” drawled Amy.
“Silly!” laughed her friend. “I am going up there to the top window in the tower. I can stand on the window sill and drive in the hook, and hang the aerial from there. See! We’ve got it all fixed on the ground here. I’ll haul it up with another rope. You stay down here and tie it on. You’ll see.”
“Well, don’t fall,” advised Amy. “The ground is hard.”
It had been no easy matter for the two girls to construct their aerial. The wire persisted in getting twisted and they had all they could do to keep it from kinking. Then, too, they wanted to fasten the porcelain insulators just right and had to consult one of the books several times. Then there came more trouble over the lead-in wire, which should have been soldered to the aerial but was only twisted tight instead.
The girls worked all the forenoon. When one end of the aerial was attached properly to the tower, Amy ran in and upstairs to her chum’s room and dropped a length of rope from one of the windows. Jessie came down from her perch and attached the house-end of the aerial to the rope. When Amy had the latter hauled up and fastened to a hook driven into the outside frame of Jessie’s window, the antenna was complete.
At that (and it sounds easy, but isn’t) they got it twisted and had to lower the house-end of the aerial again. While they were thus engaged, a taxicab stopped out in front. Amy, leaning from her chum’s window, almost fell out in her sudden excitement.
“Oh, Jess! They’ve come!” she shouted.
“What do you mean?” demanded Jessie. “We were not expecting anybody, were we?”
“You weren’t, but I was. I forgot to tell you,” cried Amy. “They just went around Long Island and came up the East River and through Hell Gate and got a mooring at the Yacht Club, off City Island.”
“Who are you talking about?” gasped her chum, wonderingly.