The two girls did not stand long at the open window of Jessie Norwood’s sitting room. That crash of the airplane spurred them to excited activity.
Amy Drew led the way, and she led it shrieking. Mrs. Norwood appeared at the door of the library, demanding:
“What has happened, girls? Stop shouting, Amy, please! You will raise the neighborhood.”
“That’s what we want to do, Momsy!” Jessie cried. “Something dreadful has happened!”
“That radio set! I knew something would happen because of it,” gasped the kindly but rather nervous woman.
In fact, when Jessie Norwood and her chum, Amy Drew, had first become interested in radio telephony Mrs. Norwood had been rather fearful of the new apparatus. Not that she would forbid her only child—nor would Mr. Norwood, who was a lawyer in New York—anything that might amuse her without doing others harm. But “Momsy,” as Jessie always called her mother, was very much afraid of lightning and she feared that the radio aerial would lead lightning, as well as radio broadcasting, into the house.
Jessie, however, although she had strung the aerial and set up the machine in her own room with very little help save what her chum gave her, had studied advisory radio books with care and had so placed and guarded the thing that there was positively no danger from lightning.
Indeed, so careful was she, and quite by instinct now, that before she had left the room to run down to see what had happened to the fallen airplane pilot, she had closed the receiving switch. And there was not a cloud in the sky!
Roselawn people had become vastly interested in radio telephony since Jessie Norwood had got her outfit. The Norwoods were popular anyway, but since the church bazaar, which had been held on the Norwood lawn on the recent Fourth of July, Jessie found herself more than usually sought after.
At that time, and by her suggestion, a tent had been raised upon the lawn and her radio set disconnected, brought down into the tent, and linked up again with the aerial. The tent seated a hundred people, and it was filled to capacity at each show. Immediately radio telephony became “all the rage,” Amy said, “all over Roselawn.”