he latter
calling a number into the telephone receiver. She was probably trying
to report the outrage to Mrs. Poole.

"But the woman will never dare call the police," Darry assured Jessie.
"You tell your father all about it, and he'll know what to do."

"And we must see Daddy Norwood as soon as possible," the girl said. "I
must take Bertha to him. The case is already in court."

"I'll fix that for you, Miss Jessie," Mark Stratford said. "I can get
you to town just as quickly as the traffic cops will let me--and they
are all my friends."

Darry considered that he should go, too. So they dropped Amy and
little Henrietta, with Burd Alling, at Roselawn, and after a word to
Momsy, started like the flight of an arrow in Mark's powerful car for
New York.

Jessie and Bertha Blair had never ridden so fast before. Mark
Stratford knew his car well, and coaxed it along over the well-oiled
roads of Westchester at a speed to make anybody gasp.

But haste was necessary. They knew where the court was, and they
arrived there just after the noon recess. Mrs. Norwood had reached her
husband's chief clerk by telephone, and he had communicated the news
to the lawyer. Mr. Norwood had dragged along the prosecution until the
missing witness arrived. Then he introduced Bertha Blair into the
witness chair most unexpectedly to McCracken and his clients.

If Mr. Norwood's side of the argument needed any bolstering, this was
supplied when Bertha was allowed to tell her story. The judge even
advised the girl, or her guardians if she had any, that she had a
perfectly good civil case against Martha Poole for imprisoning her in
the tower on the Gandy farm.

These matters, however, did not interest Jessie Norwood and her
friends much. They had been able to assist Mr. Norwood in an important
legal case, and naturally everybody, both old and young, was
interested in Bertha Blair, the girl who had been imprisoned. Momsy
said she would put on her thinking cap about Bertha's future.

Meanwhile Bertha and little Henrietta went back to the Foleys for a
while. Henrietta was bound to be the most important person of her age
in all of Dogtown. No other little girl there was the possessor of
such finery as she had.

What Mark Stratford had said to Jessie about Superintendent Blair kept
recurring to the Roselawn girl, and she felt that she should tell the
man who had charge of the Stratford Electric Corporation radio program
about the girl who had been