Part 12 (1/2)
”Do you really mean, Hugh,” he went on to task, in a voice that trembled more or less despite Horatio's effort to control the same, ”that you half expect to find K.K.lying alongside the road, either dead, or else insensible from the pain of his broken leg?”
”Well, I wasn't just thinking things would be as bad as all that,”
Hugh hastened to say. ”What I had in mind was the chance of coming on his footprints, and then trying to follow the same. We could easily tell them, for K.K. had on his running shoes, you remember.
By tracking him, step by step, don't you see, we could tell just where he met with his trouble, even find out, perhaps, the nature of his accident, and continue to follow him up.”
”That would suit me first rate,” said Julius, promptly; ”and my fine electric hand-torch might come into play with a vengeance. There's nothing better going for following a trail in the dark, because the light is focussed, you see, on a small compa.s.s. Why, you can pick up night-walkers like everything when the fis.h.i.+ng season's on, by using a flashlight. I could even find a needle in a haystack, I believe, with one of these jim-dandy contraptions.”
”All right, Julius, we'll appoint you head tracker, then,” chuckled Horatio. ”But, after all, perhaps we'll run across our comrade yet, before we get out of this tangle. We're about to come to the most critical point of the entire trip, remember, for the old quarry is just ahead of us.”
Horatio chanced to be on the side of the car toward the quarry. He was not spending nearly so much time now looking ahead, leaving that task to his chums; even while talking he kept his eyes fixed upon the dark expanse that represented the surrounding woods, antic.i.p.ating catching a glimpse of something, he hardly knew what, at any moment now. Doubtless all those silly yarns retailed by the ignorant gossiping farm-hands in the market-place in Scranton, while they tried to outdo one another in matching fairy stories, must have been circulating through Horatio's brain just then. The heavy atmosphere of the deserted stone quarry, and its lonely surroundings, added to the mysterious disappearance of K.K., combined to make him peculiarly susceptible to such influences as see ghosts in every white object that moves in the darkness.
This being the case with the Juggins boy it was not to be wondered at that there could be traced a vein of actual gratification in his voice when he suddenly electrified his companions by exclaiming:
”Hugh! fellows, I tell you I saw it right then, just as that Swanson farmhand vowed to me he did once on a time this last summer---it was a light, waved up and down, back and forth, and just like they teach you when you join the Signal Corps, and learn how to wigwag with a flag or a lantern. It came from right over yonder, where we all know the old quarry lies! And I'm not fooling, either; cross my heart if I am!”
CHAPTER XV
PROWLING AROUND THE QUARRY
Everybody was staring hard by the time Horatio finished. Hugh, of course, had immediately stopped the car on the road, so that they were now stationary.
It chanced that the spot was one of few where a glimpse of the quarry could be picked up, as the boys had discovered at the time they pa.s.sed along this way, when we overtook them on their nutting trip.
Seconds crept past.
Each boy could measure time by the beating of his wildly accelerated heart, and as these were throbbing at the rate of something like a hundred pulsations per minute it can be easily understood that ”things were going some,” to quote Horatio, when afterwards telling the story.
Then all of them saw what the first discoverer had attempted to describe. They stared as though fascinated. Truly Horatio had said well when he spoke of the odd movements of the mysterious light; for it moved swiftly up and down, then sideways, and in eccentric circles, after which it vanished as suddenly as it had come into being.
Some of the boys sighed, as though being wakened from a dream. Horatio, of course, was full of deepest gratification, since he had detected a skeptical air in the actions of Thad and Owen, which seemed to place him in the light of one who saw things where none existed.”
”There, didn't I tell you?” he exclaimed, triumphantly. ”And, say, wasn't that---eh, party, whoever he might be, making some sort of telegraphic signals with his old lantern or torch?”
”Hugh, what do you think?” demanded Thad. ”You're up in all that kind of wigwag signal work, and perhaps now you could tell what it means.”
”I lost some of it, I'm sorry to say, fellows,” observed Hugh, gravely; ”but all the same I caught enough to tell me that waving of a light was meant as a signal message, though who sent it, and to whom, is all a mystery.”
”But could you make out enough of the message, Hugh, to give you any idea what it stood for?” persisted Thad.
”Yes, I believe I did,” the other admitted, solemnly, so that each of his chums bent closer to catch the next words that fell from his lips. ”I'm certain it spelled out the word 'Help,' for one; and I thought another was 'quick'!”
”Oh! what do you think of that?” gasped Horatio.
”The mystery deepens,” added Owen, dramatically, just as he had probably been accustomed to reading in some story of excitement.
”Of course,” continued Hugh, immediately, ”we've got to take a look around that same old quarry, and see what's going on. Somebody's holding the fort there, even if it is said to be deserted. Who and what he can be, of course, remains to be seen; but I'm not taking a bit of stock in those old wives' yarns about a ghost, remember, Horatio.”
”Then we'll have to leave the car on the road, won't we, Hugh, when we tackle this big job?” questioned Owen.