"But she always knows what the boys are up to, and Sally, too,"

declared the minister, confident of his capable daughter's oversight of the family.

The girls raced up the two flights. They smelled the smoke strongly as they mounted the second stairway to the garret. Then they heard voices.

"They've got it right in the old lumber room, Jess!" panted Amy.

"But why don't they give the alarm?"

"Trying to put it out themselves. We ought to have brought buckets!"

"There is no water on this floor!"

Amy banged open the door of the big room in which they knew, by the arrangement of the outside wires, Bob and Fred must have set up the radio set. Amy plunged in, with Jessie right behind her. The room was unpleasantly filled with smoke.

"Why don't you put it out?" shrieked Amy, and then began to cough.

"Hullo!" Bob Stanley exclaimed out of the smother. "We want to put it in, not out. Hullo, Jess. You here, too?"

"The fire! The smoke!" gasped Jessie.

"Shucks," said Fred, who was down on his knees poking at something.

"We can't have the windows open, for the rain is beating this way.

We've got to solder this thing. Did you have trouble with yours, Jess?"

"Sweetness and daylight!" groaned a voice behind them.

Dr. Stanley stood in the doorway. He was a heavy man, and mounting the stairs at such a pace tried his temper as well as his wind.

"Is _this_ what started you girls off at such a tearing pace? Why, the boys borrowed that soldering outfit from the plumber. It's all right."

"I am so sorry we annoyed you," said Jessie, contritely.

But Amy had begun to laugh and could say nothing. Only waved her hands weakly and looked at the clergyman, whose cap was much more over his ear than before.

"Right in the middle of Sunday's sermon, young ladies," said the minister, with apparent sternness. "If that sermon is a failure, Amy and Jessie, I shall call on one of you girls--perhaps both of you--to step up into the pulpit and take my place. Remember that, now!" and he marched away in apparent dudgeon; but they heard him singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" before he got to the bottom of the upper flight of stairs.

"But it certainly was a great to-do," murmured Jessie, as she tried to see what the boys were doing.

She was able to advise them after a minute. But Amy insisted upon opening one of the windows and so getting more of the smoke out of the long room.

"You boys don't even know how to make a fire in a fire-pot without creating a disturbance," she said.

Nell came up from the kitchen where she had been consulting the cook about the meals, and Sally came tagging after her; of course, with a cookie in one hand and a rag doll in the other.

"This Sally is nothing but a yawning cavity walking on hollow stilts,"

declared Nell, who "fussed" good-naturedly, just as her father did.

"She is constantly begging from the cook between meals, and her eyes are the biggest things about her when she comes to the table."

"Ain't," said Sally, shaking her curls in denial.

"Ain't what?" asked Jessie.

"Ain't--ain't _if you please_," declared the little girl, revealing the fact that her sister had tried to train her in politeness.

When the girls stopped laughing--and Sally had finished the cookie--Nell added:

"Aunt Freda came last night to dinner and we had strawberry fool. Cook makes a delicious one. And Sally could eat her weight of that delicacy. When I came to serve the dessert Sally was watching me with her eagle eye and her mouth watering. I spooned out an ordinary dishful, and Sally whispered:

"'Oh, sister! is _that_ all I get?'

"So I told her it was for Aunt Freda, and she gasped:

"'What! All _that_?'"

The boys got the thing they wanted soldered completed about this time, and Bob ran down the back way with the fire-pot. The rain began to lift. As Nell cheerfully said, a patch of blue sky soon appeared in the west big enough to make a Scotchman a kilt, so they could be sure that it would clear.

Jessie and Amy walked home after seeing the Stanley boys' radio set completed. Their minds then naturally reverted to the adventures of the morning and what they had heard so mysteriously out of the ether the evening before. Jessie had warned her chum to say nothing to anybody about the mysterious prisoner and the stock farm over by Harrimay or of their suspicions until she had talked again with Mr.

Norwood.

Momsy came home that afternoon from Aunt Ann's, but Mr. Norwood did not appear. The Court was sitting, and he had several cases which needed his entire attention. He often remained away from home several days in succession at such times.

"And one of the most important cases is that one he told us about,"

Momsy explained. "He is greatly worried about that. If he cannot find that girl who lived with Mrs. Poole----"

"Oh, Momsy!" exclaimed Jessie, "let us find Daddy and tell him about what Amy and I heard over the radio. I believe we learned something about Bertha Blair, only we could not find her this morning."

She proceeded to explain the adventure which included the automobile trip to Harrimay and the Gandy farm. Momsy became excited. It did not really seem to her to be so; but she agreed that Daddy Norwood ought to hear about it.

When they tried to get him on the long distance telephone, however, the Court had closed for the day and so had the Norwood law office. He was not at his club, and Momsy did not know at which hotel he was to spend the night. There really seemed to be nothing more Jessie could do about the lost witness. And yet she feared that this delay in getting her father's attention would be irreparable.

CHAPTER XXII

SILK!

Belle Ringold and Sally Moon came up to the Norwood place the next forenoon and found Jessie and Amy in a porch hammock, their heads together, writing a letter to Jessie's father. Jessie had tried to get Robert Norwood at his office right after breakfast, but a clerk had informed her that Mr. Norwood was not expected there until later. He would go direct to court from his hotel.

"And they have no more idea where he went to sleep than Momsy had,"

Jessie had explained to her chum when Amy appeared, eager and curious.

"He is so busy with his court work that he does not want to be disturbed, I know. But it seems to me that what we heard over the radio ought to be told to him."

It was Amy who had suggested the writing of the letter and having it taken into town by Chapman, the chauffeur. The coming of Belle and Sally disturbed the chums in the middle of the letter.

"Glad we found you here, Amy," said Belle. "You never are at home, are you?"

"Only to sleep," confessed Amy Drew. "What seems to be the trouble, ladies? Am I not to be allowed to go calling?"