“There, spiteful!” gasped the lean woman. “I’ll show you!”
She hopped back behind the steering wheel. The fleshy woman climbed into the tonneau and held the still shrieking girl. The car started with a dash, the door of the tonneau flapping.
“Oh! This isn’t right!” gasped Jessie.
“They are running away with her, Jess,” murmured Amy. “Isn’t it exciting?”
“It’s mean!” declared her chum with conviction. “How dare they?”
“Why, to look at her, I think that skinny woman would dare anything,” remarked Amy. “And – haven’t – you seen her before?”
“Never! She doesn’t live around here. And that car is strange.”
The car had turned into the boulevard and headed out of town. When the girls walked back to the broad highway it was out of sight. It was being driven with small regard for the speed laws.
“I guess you are right,” reflected Amy. “I never saw that car before. It is a French car. But the woman’s face–”
“There was enough of that to remember,” declared Jessie, quite spitefully.
“I didn’t mean the fat woman’s face,” giggled Amy. “I mean that the other woman looked familiar. Maybe I have seen her picture somewhere.”
“If my face was like hers I’d never have it photographed,” snapped Jessie.
“How vinegarish,” said Amy. “Well, it was funny.”
“You do find humor in the strangest things,” returned her chum. “I guess that poor girl didn’t think it was funny.”
“Of course, they had some right to her,” Amy declared.
“How do you know they did? They did not act so,” returned the more thoughtful Jessie. “If they had really the right to make the poor girl go with them, they would not have acted in such haste nor answered me the way they did.”
“Well, of course, it wasn’t any of our business either to ask questions or to interfere,” Amy declared.
“I don’t know about that, Amy,” rejoined her chum. “I wish your brother had been here, or somebody.”
“Darry!” scoffed Amy.
“Or maybe Burd Alling,” and Jessie’s eyes twinkled.
“Well,” considered Amy demurely, “I suppose the boys might have known better what to do.”
“Oh,” said Jessie, promptly, “I knew what to do, all right; only I couldn’t do it.”
“What is that?”
“Stopped the women and made them explain before we allowed them to take the girl away. And I wonder where she was going. When and where did she run away from the women? Did you hear her beg us not to let them take her back – back–”
“Back where?”
“That is it, exactly,” sighed Jessie, as the two walked on toward town. “She did not tell us where.”
“Some institution, maybe. An orphan asylum,” suggested Amy.
“Did you think she looked like an orphan?”
“How does an orphan look?” giggled Amy. “I don’t know any except the Molly Mickford kind in the movies, and they are always too appealing for words!”
“Somehow, she didn’t look like that,” admitted Jessie.
“She fought hard. I believe I would have scratched that fat woman’s face myself, if I’d been her. Anyway, she wasn’t in any uniform. Don’t they always put orphans in blue denim?”
“Not always. And that girl would have looked awful in blue. She was too dark. She wasn’t very well dressed, but her clothes and their colors were tasteful.”
“Aren’t you the observing thing,” agreed Amy. “She was dressed nicely. And those women were never guards from an institution.”
“Oh, no!”
“It was a private kidnaping party, I guess,” said Amy.
“And we let it go on right under our noses and did not stop it,” sighed Jessie Norwood. “I’m going to tell my father about it.”
Amy grinned elfishly. “He will tell you that you had a right, under the law, to stop those women and make them explain.”
“Ye-es. I suppose so. But a right to do a thing and the ability to do it, he will likewise tell me, are two very different things.”
“Wisdom from the young owl!” laughed Amy. “Well, I don’t suppose, after all, it is any of our business, or ever will be. The poor thing is now a captive and being borne away to the dungeon-keep. Whatever that is,” she added, shrugging her shoulders.
CHAPTER III
INTEREST IN RADIO SPREADS
Over the George Washington sundaes at the New Melford Dainties Shop the girls discussed the mysterious happening on Dogtown Lane until it was, as Amy said, positively frayed.
“We do not know what it was all about, my dear, so why worry our minds? We shall probably never see that girl again, or those two women. Only, that lean one – well! I know I have seen her somewhere, or somebody who looks like her.”
“I don’t see but you are just as bad as I am,” Jessie Norwood said. “But we did not come to town because of that puzzling thing.”
“No-o. We came to get these perfectly gorgeous sundaes,” declared Amy Drew. “Your mother, Jess, is almost as nice as you are.”
“We came in to get radio books and buy wire and stops and all that for the aerials, anyway. Of course, I shall have to send for most of the parts of the house set. There is no regular radio equipment dealer in New Melford.”
“Oh, yes! Wireless!” murmured Amy. “I had almost forgotten that.”
They trotted across the street to the bookstore. Motors were coming up from the station now, and from New York. They waved their hands to several motoring acquaintances, and just outside Ye Craftsman’s Bookshop they ran into Nell Stanley, who they knew had no business at all there on Main Street at this hour of the afternoon. Nell was the minister’s daughter, and there were a number of little motherless Stanleys at the parsonage (Amy said “a whole raft of them”) who usually needed the older sister’s attention, approaching supper time.
“Oh, I’ve a holiday,” laughed Nell, who was big and strong and really handsome, Jessie thought, her coloring was so fresh, her chestnut hair so abundant, her gray eyes so brilliantly intelligent, and her teeth so dazzling. “Aunt Freda is at the house and she and the Reverend told me to go out and not to show myself back home for hours.”
“Bully-good!” declared Amy. “You’ll come home to dinner with me, and we will spend the evening with Jess helping her build a radio thing so we can do without buying the New Melford Tribune to get the local news.”
“Oh, Jess, dear, are you going to have a radio?” cried Nell. “It’s just wonderful. Reverend says he may have to broadcast his sermons pretty soon or else be without an audience.”
The pet name by which she usually spoke of her father, the Reverend Doctor Stanley, sounded all right when Nell said it. Nobody else ever called the good clergyman by it. But Nell was something between a daughter and a wife to the hard working Doctor Stanley. And she certainly was a thoughtful and “mothering” sister to the little ones.
“But,” Nell added, “you are too late inviting me to the eats, Amy, honey. It can’t be done. I’m promised. Mr. Brandon and his wife saw me first, and I am to dine with them. Then they are going to take me in their car out to the Parkville home of their daughter – Oh, say! If