“It is a wonderful picture,” said Florence when they had gazed at it in silence for a time. “But after all, it is only a print, and can’t be worth much. I still don’t see—”
“Tell you what,” Meg broke in, “let’s unroll them all and weight them down on the floor with books so we can have a good look.”
“Good idea,” said Florence, beginning to unroll one.
It was truly a remarkable collection of pictures which at length carpeted the floor. War pictures, all of them, and all displaying that strong spiritual interpretation which was so common in pictures of those times. A French airplane falling in flames and beneath it an angel waiting to bear away the soul of the brave aviator; the American flag drifting in the clouds and seen from afar by a French soldier in the trenches; such were the themes.
“Don’t you think they’re grand?” said Meg.
“Yes,” Florence responded, “but after all, they are only prints of the work of some great master. ‘Veny LeCarte’” she read at the bottom of one. “I believe, yes, they’re all by the same man.”
For some time they sat there in silence. They were at last about to rise when there came a light rap at their door.
“Let me in,” came from outside. “I saw the light in the room as I was passing and thought I’d come up to say ‘Good morning and Merry Christmas.’” It was Lucile.
“Merry Christmas yourself,” exclaimed Florence, throwing wide the door. “Come in.”
“This is Meg, Lucile; and Meg, that’s Lucile,” she smiled.
“But Florence, where in the world did you get those marvelous etchings?” exclaimed Lucile after she shook hands with Meg. “And why do you carpet your floor with them? I nearly stepped on one.”
“Etch—etchings!” stammered Florence. “They’re mine—at least I bought them.”
“Bought them! You? You bought them!” Lucile stared incredulous. Then, bending over, she read the name at the bottom of one. After that her eyes roved from picture to picture.
“Veny LeCarte,” she murmured as if in a dream. “And she says she bought them!” She dropped weakly into a chair.
“Florence,” she said at last, “do you know who Veny LeCarte was?”
“N-o.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. He was one of the most famous artists of France. He made etchings of the war. No one could surpass him. And unlike his fellow artists, who allowed a hundred copies to be made from each plate, he allowed but twenty. Then the plates were destroyed. He made these pictures. You have nearly all of them. And then he went away to the war, and was killed.
“Since that time his etchings have been much prized and have brought fabulous prices. Oh, Florence, tell me how you got them! Surely, surely you didn’t buy them!”
“I did,” said Florence unsteadily, hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry, “but I bought them in a strange way. I’ll tell you about it.” Then she told Lucile the whole story.
“And those pictures,” she said at the end, “are the reason that man dogged my footsteps. It had not been his bag. He had not owned the pictures, but some way he had learned that the pictures were in this bag. He had meant to buy the bag, but arrived too late.”
The hour was late. What did that matter? Tomorrow was Christmas. Florence set about brewing some cocoa, and over the cups the girls engaged in such a talk fest as they had not enjoyed for months. Everything that had happened to Lucile during those eventful weeks, from the first night to the last, had to be told. The wonderful cape, with its white fox collar, must be displayed. The gold coins must be jingled and jangled. Meg’s story must be told all over again.
After that, problems yet unsolved must be discussed. Was the hawk-eyed man who had attempted to gain possession of Florence’s bag the same one who had attempted to kidnap Cordie?
“That question,” said Lucile to Florence, “can only be settled by you going down to the police station and looking at him.”
“In that case, it will never be answered,” said Florence, with a shudder.
Would a romance spring up between the rich girl Cordie and the gallant young policeman, Patrick O’Hara? Who could tell? So the conversation rambled on until early morning. At last Lucile hurried away and Meg and Florence prepared for three winks.
As Florence, with Meg by her side, was drifting off to sleep, she heard Meg say:
“Tomorrow I must go back to the ship.”
“Indeed you’ll not,” she roused up to protest. “You’ll stay right here tomorrow and every day. And you’re going to school, too. I need you to guard all my—my treasure.”
How the pictures came to be in the bag which Florence had purchased at the sale, will probably always remain a secret. Perhaps the one who left the bag did not realize the value of the etchings. Who knows what may have been the reason? But they were truly valuable, and Florence learned this for certain on the following Monday. Later she sold them to a dealer for a good round sum. This money went far, not only to smooth the road to her own education, but to enable her to give Meg many a lift along the way.
THE SILENT ALARM, by Roy Snell
CHAPTER I
THE PRISONER IN A LONE CABIN
In a cabin far up the side of Pine Mountain, within ten paces of the murmuring waters of Ages Creek, there stood an old, two roomed log cabin. In one room of that cabin sat a girl. She was a large, strong girl, with the glow of ruddy health on her cheeks.
Her dress, though simple, displayed a taste too often missing in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, and one might have guessed that she was from outside the mountains.
If one were to observe her, sitting there in a rustic splint bottomed chair; if he were to study her by the flickering firelight, he might have said: “She is a guest.”
In this he would have been wrong. Florence Huyler was virtually a prisoner in that cabin. As she sat there dreamily gazing at the flickering fire, a man did sentry duty outside the door. He seemed asleep as he sat slouched over in a chair tilted against the cabin, but he was not. Nor would the occupant of that chair sleep this night.
Yet, had you said to Florence, “Why do they hold you prisoner here?” she would have replied:
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
That would have been true, too.
“What can they want?” she asked herself for the thousandth time as she sat there watching the coals of her wood fire blink out one by one. “Are they moonshiners? Do they think I am a secret agent of the revenue men? Do they want this,” she patted a pocket inside her blouse, “or have they been hired by the big coal company to hold me until the secret of the railroad is out?”
When she patted her blouse there had come a crinkling sound. Ten new fifty dollar bank notes were pinned to the inside of the garment.
“If that’s what they want,” she said to herself, “why don’t they demand it and let me go?”
She shuddered as she rose. The room was cold. She dreaded facing a night in that cabin.
Having entered the second room, she closed the door softly behind her, then sat down upon the edge of the bed.
After removing her shoes, she glanced up at the smoke blackened ceiling.
“Hole up there,” she mused. “I wonder if.... No, I guess not. Never can tell, though.”
At once her lithe body was in motion. With the agility of a cat, she sprang upon a chair, mounted its back, caught the edge of the opening above and drew herself up into the attic, then dropped noiselessly down upon a beam.
“Whew! Dusty,” she panted.
Five minutes later she found herself staring out into the moonlight. At the upper end of the cabin loft she had found a small door that opened to a view of the mountain side. Having found this she opened it noiselessly. It would be an easy matter to hang by her hands, drop to the ground and then attempt her escape through the brush. This she was about to do when something arrested her—a very small thing. On a narrow level space where the grass had been eaten short by cows or wild creatures, three young rabb
its were sporting in the moonlight.
“Shame to spoil their fun,” she whispered to herself. “Time enough.” She seated herself close to the opening.
A moment later she was thankful for the impulse that caused her to wait. In an instant, without a sound, the rabbits disappeared into the brush.
With a little gasp the girl closed the small door. Ten seconds later, by peering through a crack, she saw a man cross the small clearing. It was her guard.
“Thanks, little rabbits,” she whispered. “You did me a good turn that time.”
A moment later the man returned across the patch of short grass and once more the girl set herself to listening and watching.
“When the little gray fellows come back to play, I’ll risk it,” she told herself.
As she sat there waiting, feeling the cool caress of the mountain night air upon her cheek, listening, watching, she allowed her eyes to wander away to the half dozen little peaks that formed the crest of Pine Mountain.
“How dark and mysterious they seem in the night,” she thought to herself. “How—”
Her meditations were suddenly cut short. Her eyes had caught a yellow gleam that had suddenly appeared on the very crest of the highest peak of the mountain.
“Wha—what can it mean?” she whispered. “It can’t be—but it is!”
Even as she looked, the yellow gleam blinked out for a second, glowed again, only to vanish, then to glow steadily once more.
The girl’s heart grew warm, her cheeks flushed. Whereas only the moment before she had felt herself utterly alone in an unknown and hostile world, now she knew that on the crest of yonder mountain there stood a friend, her very best friend, Marion Norton. Between her and that peak lay many a long and tangled trail. What of that? That golden glow spoke warmly of friendship.
“The Silent Alarm,” she murmured as she hastily drew from her pocket two dark cylinders. One of the cylinders she placed before her on the window ledge. The other she grasped at either end, drawing it out to four times its original length. The thing was a pocket telescope such as is often carried in the mountains. From the ends of this she unscrewed the lenses. After that, lying flat upon the dusty floor that was all but level with the sill of the small shuttered door, she glanced along the tube of the dismantled telescope. Slowly, surely, as if the thing were a rifle, she aimed it at the distant yellow gleam. Then, without allowing the tube to move, she picked up the other shorter one which had all this time rested on the window sill. Having placed the end of this against the end of the hollow tube, she pressed a button, and at once a needle point of glowing light shot forth into the night. The second cylinder was a small but powerful flashlight.
“The Silent Alarm,” she whispered once more.
She had kept the small flashlight aimed at the distant yellow flash of fire less than a moment when, with a suddenness that was startling, the glow on the distant mountain crest vanished. It was as if someone had thrown a shovel of earth or a bucket of water upon a small camp fire.
The little tableau was not at an end. Florence, by moving her hand before her tube, sent out successive flashes, some short, some long. Now a short one, now two long ones, now three short; so it went on for some time.
“The Silent Alarm,” she thought. “I only hope she gets it right. She might try to come to me. That would be too terrible.”
This had scarcely passed her mind when, of a sudden, from that same distant hillside there gleamed a star. Or was it a star? If a star, then a tree branch must wave before it, for now it appeared, only to disappear and reappear again.
It was no star. At once, with a pencil and a scrap of paper, the girl was marking down dots and dashes, taking the message being sent by signal code from the distant mountain crest.
As she scratched down the last dash, the star vanished, not to reappear. Once more darkness brooded over the foothills of Pine Mountain and the somber peaks beyond were lost in the glooms of night.
For a time, by the steady gleam of her flashlight, the girl studied her dots and dashes. Then, as she closed her tired eyes for a moment, she murmured:
“Oh! I had hoped for a real message, a message that would mean success.”
As she opened her eyes she glanced down to the spot of golden moonlight on the grass. The rabbits had returned to complete their frolic.
“Time to try it,” she whispered as she drew herself up on her knees.
CHAPTER II
STRANGE SENTRIES
“Thanks, jolly little friends,” she whispered to the rabbits. “Sorry to disturb you, but it really has to be done.”
Clutching at her heart in a vain effort to still its wild beating, she slid slowly out of the window. A gripping of the beams, a swinging down, a second of clinging, a sudden drop, a prayer of thanksgiving that her alighting place was grass cushioned and noiseless, and the next instant she was lost from sight in the brush whither the three rabbits had fled.
For a full moment she crouched there motionless, scarcely breathing, listening intently.
There came no sound. Her guard was dozing in his chair.
Her mind was in a whirl. Now that she was free, where should she go? Where could she go? Home, if she could find the way, or to Everett Faucet’s cabin. Everett lived at the back of the mountain.
Yes, she might go to either place if only she knew the way. Truth was, she didn’t know the way. She had been carried about on horseback by her mysterious captors, covering strange trails, and at night. She was lost. Only one thing she knew—she was still on the back of Pine Mountain. The way home led up this side of the mountain and down the other.
A great wave of fear and despair swept over her. The whole affair, she told herself, was a useless adventure.
“I’ll go back home to our cabin; give it up,” she declared.
She began the upward climb. Beating her way through the brush, she struggled forward. It was heart-breaking work, making her way through brush and timber. Here a dense thicket tore at her, and there a solid wall of rock blocked her progress.
“Ought to find a trail. Have to,” she panted.
With this in mind, she began to circle the slope. She felt the need of haste. Night was wearing away. The early morning would soon reveal her, a lone girl in a strange and apparently hostile country.
Panic seized her. She fairly flew through the brush until, with a sudden compact that set her reeling, she came upon a rail fence.
Beyond the fence was a narrow trail. To her immense relief she found that this trail wound away up the mountain.
That mountain trail was the longest she had ever taken. It wound on and on, up and up until there seemed no end.
The cool damp of night hung over everything. The moon, swinging low in the heavens, cast long, deep shadows far down the trail. Now a startled rabbit, springing into the brush, sent the girl’s heart to her mouth. Now the long-drawn bay of a hound at some distant cabin sent a chill running up her spine. Frightened, alone, quite without means of protection, she hurried on.
Then suddenly, as she rounded a corner, she caught the sound of voices.
“Men,” she said to herself with a shudder.
The next instant she was silently pushing herself back into the depths of a clump of mountain ivy that grew beside the trail.
The men were coming down the trail. Now their voices sounded more clearly; now she caught the shuffle of their rough shoes, and now heard the heavy breathing of one as if carrying a load.
As they came abreast of her, she saw them dimly through the leaves. Then for a second her heart seemed to stop beating.
“A dog,” she breathed. “A long-eared hound!”
As the hound, with nose to the ground, came upon the spot where she had left the trail, he stopped short, gave a loud snort, then started straight into the bush.
“Come on, you!” one of the men grumbled, seizing him by the collar. “It’s only a rabbit.”
The dog struggled for a time, but a kick brought him back to his pl
ace behind his master and they traveled on down the hill.
“Saved!” the girl breathed as she dropped weakly upon the ground.
“And yet,” she thought as strength and courage came back to her, “why should I fear everyone here behind Pine Mountain?”
Why indeed? The experiences of the past hours had made fear a part of her nature.
Once more upon the trail, she hurried on more rapidly than before. Dawn was on its way. The jagged peaks of the mountain ahead showed faintly gray against the dark sky.
“Have to hurry,” she told herself. “Have to—”
Her thoughts broke short off and once more she sprang from the trail. Other men were coming. The night seemed filled with them.
This time, finding herself in a narrow grass grown trail that led away at an angle from the hard beaten main trail, she hurriedly tiptoed along it.
“Not another narrow escape like the last one,” she thought.
She had followed this apparently deserted trail for a hundred yards when suddenly she came upon a cabin.
Her first thought was to turn and flee. A second look told her that the place was abandoned. Two panes of glass in the single window were broken and before the door, displaying their last fiery red blossoms, two hollyhocks did sentry duty.
The door stood ajar. For a moment she hesitated before the red sentries.
“Oh, pshaw!” she whispered at last. “You dear old-fashioned guardians of a once happy home, I can pass you without cracking a stem or bruising a blossom.”
Putting out her hands, she parted the tall flowers with gentlest care, then stepped between them. For this simple ceremony, inspired by her love of beauty, she was destined in not so many hours to feel supremely grateful.
Inside she found a lonesome scene. The moon, shining through the single window, struck across a rude table. A dark cavern at the end spoke of a fireplace which once had offered ruddy comfort.
A ladder leading to the loft stood against the wall. Without thinking much about it, she climbed that ladder. Somewhat to her surprise, she found the attic half filled with clean, dry, rustling corn husks.
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