_Adventure Stories for Girls_
The
Silent Alarm
_By_
ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago
_Printed in the United States of America_
Copyright, 1926
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
_All Rights Reserved_
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Prisoner in a Lone Cabin 9
II Strange Sentries 18
III A Darting Shadow 41
IV A Strange Escape 58
V Safe at Home 69
VI Confederate Gold 76
VII Mysterious Footsteps 93
VIII The Silent Watcher 112
IX Beyond Forbidden Portals 131
X A Mysterious People 149
XI The Guard of the Stone Gateway 166
XII The Mystery Trail 182
XIII A Tense Situation 196
XIV Hallie Kidnapped 212
XV By the Aid of a Coon 220
XVI A Perilous Glide 234
XVII The Last of Her Clan 244
XVIII The Strange Procession 253
THE SILENT ALARM
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
rabbits 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.