The Motor Girls at Camp Surprise: or, The Cave in the Mountains

“There’s the hotel,” said Paul, as they came out on a ledge of rock, and looked down in a valley. “That’s where I’m going to have some tango tea.”

“To-night?” asked Jack. “I’m with you if you go.”

“Count me in,” added Walter. “I haven’t had a good dance, not since – ”

“The one with me,” cut in Cora, for she and Walter were good partners.

“Right – oh, little one!” he cried. “Shall we all go down to-night?”

The hotel was about a mile from the Mountain View property, and was quite a well-known hostelry, though the season was not yet in full swing.

“Some other night,” suggested Cora. “We haven’t really gotten settled yet, and we don’t know what time Mrs. Floyd will come back. Besides, do they let any others than guests and their friends dance?”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Walter. “We’ll find out. But if you don’t want to go to-night we’ll wait.”

This was agreed to, and the rest of the day was spent on the part of the girls in getting their rooms in order, putting away their dresses and arranging for supper, for they were going to do much of their own work in camp, Mrs. Floyd being more of a chaperon and general manager than housekeeper or cook.

The boys said they would shift for themselves.

“Aren’t you going to get your suppers?” asked Cora of her brother, as she saw him and his two chums going down the road about five o’clock in the afternoon.

“Later,” he answered. “We’re going for the mail now. It gets in about this time, and Walter is expecting a letter.”

“No more than you are!” was the quick retort.

“Bring us all one!” called Bess. “Does the mail really come up here?”

It did, twice a day it developed, coming to the little village of Mountain View, which was about a mile from Camp Surprise.

“Maybe there’ll be some word about your car, Cora,” said her brother.

“That’s too good to hope for, Jack.”

There was a letter for Cora from her mother, but there was no news of the car. And as there were epistles also for Bess, Belle and Hazel, the boys took great credit to themselves for having fulfilled the commands of the girls.

“And we think we ought to be rewarded, too,” said Walter.

“What form ought the reward to take?” Cora asked.

“The form of supper,” was the quick answer. “We don’t feel like pitching in and opening a tin of corned beef just now. Feed us to-night, and we’ll rustle the grub for ourselves after this.”

“Well, in view of the fact that you’ve been so nice to us, we will. Shan’t we, girls?” asked Cora.

“Yes!” came in an unhesitating chorus; and once more the boys ate bounteously with no effort on their part.

Mrs. Floyd and her husband returned about eight o’clock, to find the young people playing games in the big living room, and having a jolly time.

They planned an excursion for the next day, to include a stop at the hotel to ask about dance privileges, and then, this having been arranged for, good nights were said.

Cora, whose room adjoined that of Belle, was awakened some time in the night by a touch on her arm.

“Yes! What is it?” she asked, sitting up quickly, and reaching for the little electric flashlight she always had under her pillow. “Oh, it’s you,” and she revealed Belle’s face. “What’s the matter – are you ill?”

“No, but listen! Did you hear that – that noise?”

CHAPTER XIV – WAS IT THUNDER?

The silence of Cora’s room, into which Belle had tiptoed, was broken only by the accentuated breathing of the two girls.

“I don’t hear anything,” began Cora. “Are you sure – ”

“Listen!” interrupted her chum. “Did you hear it then?”

For a moment Cora was not aware of anything, and then there seemed gradually to come to her a dull, scraping sound. Perhaps it would be more correct to call it a vibration. If you have ever tried to raise a window which fits loosely in the frame sidewise, as compared to the other direction, and have felt it go up in a series of vibrations, you will understand what is meant. The whole room seemed to tremble like the shaking of the window.

The whole bungalow, too, seemed to be vibrating and delicately trembling from some cause – a deep, low and hardly audible sound that was, in effect, more sensation than noise.

“It’s the waterfall,” said Cora. “Don’t be a goose, Belle!”

“I’m not. It’s a noise. Can’t you hear it above the sound of the water?”

Cora listened more intently.

“Yes, I can,” she reluctantly confessed. “It’s like the rumbling of a wagon going past the house.”

“Yes,” agreed Belle in a whisper. “But it isn’t a wagon. There isn’t any out at this hour, and the noise is in this bungalow, not outside.”

Cora agreed to that, also. She snapped on the switch of her little portable light, so that it would glow without the necessity of holding her finger on the push-button, and then she slipped on her robe, and put her feet in slippers. Belle was similarly attired.

“What are you going to do?” asked Belle.

“Find that noise,” whispered Cora. “But don’t let’s wake up the others. It may be – nothing, and they’d only laugh.”

“It can’t be nothing,” insisted Belle. “There it sounds louder than ever.”

Together they went silently to the door of Cora’s room. But either their movements or the queer noise had awakened Bess in the adjoining apartment.

“Is that you, Cora?” she called.

“Yes. It’s nothing. I’m going to get a drink, Bess. I am,” she added in a whisper to Belle, to justify herself.

“Bring me one,” begged Bess, sleepily.

It was evident that the noise which had alarmed – or if not alarmed, had awakened – Belle, had not disturbed her sister. For as Belle and Cora went toward the door they could both hear and feel the vibration more plainly now.

“What can it be?” asked Belle. “Some one trying to get in?”

“Nonsense!” chided Cora.

“But it sounds like raising a sticking window. Are you going to call Mr. Floyd?”

“I wish he weren’t so far off,” said Cora, pausing undeterminedly in the middle of the room. “He might just as well be in another building as where he is. I don’t like going through that connecting passage. And he and his wife both sleep soundly. She told me so.”

“We ought to have some means of summoning them – or the boys,” continued Belle.

“We can always scream,” Cora remarked.

“Yes, and startle every one. I almost screamed when I heard the noise, and then I thought I’d come in to you.”

“I’m glad you did. Can you hear it now?”

They were out in the hall, and could see the light that was kept aglow in the bath room. Cora switched off her electric.

“I don’t hear it,” affirmed Belle. “The noise has stopped.”

It had, that was certain. The silence of the night outside was broken only by the distant roar of the waterfall, a sound with which by this time the girls had become so familiar that they did not notice it unless they listened especially for it, as the receiver of a wireless message must be tuned to catch the wave impulses of a certain length.

“I can’t hear it,” said Cora, breathing softly, as Belle was doing.

There was no more noise.

“Could it have been distant thunder?” asked Cora, when a minute passed in silence – and a long minute it seemed to the waiting ones.

Belle stepped to the window and looked out and up at the sky.

“The stars are shining,” she said. “If there is a storm it is a distant one, and one that far off wouldn’t sound so near. I don’t believe it was thunder.”

Whatever it was, the sound was not repeated. Together Cora and Belle got a drink in the bath room, and brought one to Bess. Cora called softly to her, but the plump twin had gone to sleep again, without waiting for the water. Cora set it in a chair by the bed and came out of the room as softly as she had gone in.

“No use letting her know about it,” she remarked to Belle. “And we won’t tell anything in the morning, until we hear what the others have to say.”

“All right,” agreed Belle. “I’ll lie with you a while.”

“Yes,” assented Cora. She understood Belle’s feelings.

The two girls talked in whispers, straining their ears for a repetition of the strange noise, but none came, and finally Belle, who was fighting off sleep, announced that she was going to her own room.

Cora and Belle looked significantly at one another across the breakfast table, and Bess remarked:

“Did you hear me knock it over?”

“Knock what over?” asked Cora, wonderingly.

“The glass of water in the chair by my bed. I didn’t know it was there, and just before daylight I awoke, and as I put my arm out of bed I knocked the glass to the floor. I thought sure you must have heard it.”

“No,” Cora replied. “Did you break it?”

Bess shook her head.

“It fell on the rug, but the water splashed in my ties. I’ll have to wear my high shoes until the others dry. Why didn’t you tell me the water was there?”

“You were asleep when I brought it in,” Cora said, “and I felt it was a pity to disturb you.”

“What were you prowling around for?” asked Hazel.

“Oh, just for fun,” Cora said, with another warning look at Belle.

“They didn’t hear anything,” the latter said to Cora when they were alone a little later.

“No, and Mrs. Floyd or her husband didn’t either, for they didn’t say anything.”

“Unless they heard it and don’t want to tell us.”

“Why shouldn’t they tell us?” Cora asked.

“Oh, they might think we’d go away if the queer things begin happening.”

“It wasn’t so very queer – just a noise,” declared Cora.

“Was it just a noise?” asked Belle, suspiciously.

“I don’t know – was it – or – wasn’t it?” Cora questioned.

“I guess we’ll have to let it go that way,” Belle decided. “Here come the boys. Shall we tell them?”

“No – that is, not directly. I’ll see if I can’t find out in an indirect way.”

“All right, I’ll leave it to you.”

After some general talk when the boys had come in, Cora brought the subject around to the waterfall.

“Have you boys gotten used to the noise of it yet?” she asked. “You’re nearer to it than we are. Does it keep you awake now?”

“Can’t anything keep me awake,” yawned Jack. “I don’t get half enough sleep as it is.”

“You certainly slept soundly last night,” said Walter.

“How do you know? Did you stay awake to find out?”

“No, but I heard it thundering, and I called to you that you’d better put your window down, for your room faces the west and most storms come from there this time of the year. You didn’t answer so I concluded you must have been sleeping.”

“I was,” declared Jack. “Thunder, eh? I didn’t hear it.”

“It was only a rumble,” Walter said. “I didn’t stay awake longer myself than to hear that.”

“They heard it, too,” said Belle, when she and Cora had walked off by themselves.

“Yes,” agreed her chum. “But was it thunder?”

“We’re right back where we started,” laughed Belle, “arguing in a circle. Let’s forget it.”

CHAPTER XV – A NARROW ESCAPE

But though Cora and Belle agreed to drop the matter of the unexplained noise, they could not dismiss it from their minds. Several times that day Cora would notice Belle in a brown study, and on taxing her with it would be met with the statement:

“I can’t think what caused it.”

“That noise you mean?”

“Yes. Wasn’t it queer?”

“Oh, not so very. At home we wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

“Yes,” agreed Belle, “but there are so many ways of explaining noises in town, and so few ways up here. I wonder if that is the beginning of the surprises, Cora?”

“If it is they aren’t so unpleasant. Noise never hurt any one.”

So they said nothing to the others about the little disturbance in the night, and the only remark the others made, having any reference to it, was that of Walter’s about thunder.

“It must have been thunder,” Cora said, “for if the noise had been in our bungalow the boys couldn’t have heard it in theirs.”

“I don’t see how they could,” Belle agreed.

“But, all the same, I’m going to have some way of calling to Jack and the others without screaming our lungs out,” declared Cora. “It’s only right to be able to summon them if we want them. One of us might become ill, and they’d have to go for the doctor. I’d rather call Jack than Mr. Floyd.”

Cora spoke to her brother that afternoon.

“We should have some sort of speaking tube,” he assented. “I might rig up one of the string telephones we used to make with tin baking powder boxes that served both as transmitter and receiver.”

“Can you do it?” asked Cora.

“I guess so.”

“I know something better than that,” Paul put in. “There’s a toy telephone that comes now, made of string, but the baking powder boxes are replaced by wooden cylinders with parchment tightly stretched over one end. You can hear quite well with them.”

“Where can we get it?” asked Cora.

“I have one,” Paul said. “I bought it just before we left to come up here, intending to give it to a kid cousin of mine, but I forgot to mail it. You can use that if you like.”

“Just the thing!” exclaimed Jack. “The dear girls can’t get along without us after all; can they?”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself that we’re as fond of you as all that,” laughed Belle. “But we do like to have you within call – especially up here.”

“Why, have you seen any suspicious characters lurking around?” asked Walter.

“Nary a lurk,” responded Cora. “We’re just getting ready for emergencies.”

The toy telephone was strung that day from the girls’ bungalow to that of the boys’, and it worked quite well. As simple as it was, and it scarcely could have been more simple, talk could be plainly heard over it. The string took up the vibrations imparted to the parchment by the voice, and transmitted them across space to the other end of the line. Of course the string had to be tight, and it must not touch anything in its course, or the vibrations would have been interfered with. But space was what they had most of in Camp Surprise.

“To my mind the camp isn’t living up to its name,” declared Paul, after the telephone had been put up and tested, the boys sending any number of foolish messages over the string. “No, sir! There hasn’t been a surprise worth talking about,” went on Paul. “Why doesn’t something happen?”

“Give it time,” suggested Jack.

“Perhaps that noise was the start,” said Cora to Belle when they were alone.

“Perhaps.”

The trip down to the hotel had given the young folks the information that there were dances twice a week, the Saturday night “hop” being quite an event. They were cordially invited to attend, and the first Saturday night in camp they took advantage of the chance.

The crowd was not large, but, as Walter said, it was “nice and comfortable,” and the girls and boys thoroughly enjoyed the dance. The hotel proprietor introduced them to some other young folks and, as was voted by Jack and his chums afterward, “a large and glorious time was had by all.”

“What a splendid moon!” cried Belle, as she walked along with Jack on the way home. “It’s a shame to go to bed.”

“Let’s don’t!” proposed Paul. “Let’s go down where we left the motor boat and have a ride.”

“Let’s don’t!” cried Cora. “Walk over that rough mountain road at this hour of the night? I guess not!”

“But look at the moon!” begged Paul. “The glorious moon!”

“You’ve been looking at it too long already,” was Cora’s retort. “I guess you’re looney.”

And so, laughing and joking, they walked on.

“This is how it goes!” said Belle suddenly, seemingly apropos of nothing at all, and, at the same time she began to step backward and forward in a peculiar manner in the road.

“What in the world – ” began Hazel.

“That new Cortez step the girl in pink was doing with that nice man dancer,” Belle explained. “I’ve been puzzling over it. I hoped he would ask me to dance, but he didn’t.”

“Say, I like that!” cried Walter. “Didn’t I ask you?”

“Yes, but you can’t do that step. I remember now how it went. I was watching that couple. It’s a rocking step forward, then one back, step back with the left, draw the right and go forward again with the left, see!”

She executed it there in the road, her shadow, cast by the moon, bobbing curiously back and forth.

“It is pretty,” agreed Cora. “How does it go?”

Belle and she took a dancing position and Cora had soon acquired the new Cortez step.

“Now you’ve got me doing it!” cried Jack. “Come on, Hazel, I’ll show you.”

“He doesn’t even know himself,” derided Cora.

“You watch!” challenged Jack.

“Why, he can do it,” said Belle, as she looked at Jack and Hazel. For Hazel was a natural dancer and, it developed, she, too, had been watching the girl in the pink dress.

“Well, here we are,” said Bess, as they reached their bungalow. “I’m tired.”

“Is that all you’re going to say, after we took you to the dance?” demanded Walter.

“Don’t we get asked in to have some cake and chocolate?” questioned Jack.

“Shall we?” queried Cora.

“Please do!” urged Paul.

And they did.

The plans for the next day included a long walk up the mountain to a place where it was said a wonderful view could be had. They were to take their lunch and stay all day, for they could not get back to the bungalow by noon.

“All aboard!” cried Jack, as he and his two chums called for the girls, crossing the rustic bridge at the foot of the fall. “All aboard!”

They started off merrily together, talking and laughing. Walter had been down to get the early morning mail, and there was a letter from Cora’s mother, which said, among other things, that the police had some clews to the men who took the automobile.

“Good!” cried Jack, when Cora read out this. “What’s the rest of it?”

“Well, it seems that some more bogus tickets have been disposed of in places around Chelton, and the men who sold them are described as the same two who sold the coupons in the tea room. The police seem to think there is a good chance of getting them.”

“They didn’t see them have your car; did they, Cora?” asked Hazel.

“No such luck, I suppose. But mother doesn’t mention that.”

The view was voted all that had been said of it, and after admiring it for some time, preparations were made to eat lunch.

“Let’s sit down here,” proposed Cora, pointing to a grassy spot in the shade of a big sycamore tree. “Boys, spread the cloth and unpack the baskets. Oh, what a curious root!” she cried, stooping over toward something near a stone.

“Look out!” suddenly cried Paul, pulling Cora back so sharply that she nearly toppled over. The next moment Paul caught up a stone and threw it with all his force at the spotted root. There was an angry hiss.

“Narrow escape for you, Cora,” said Paul, a trifle pale. “That was a copperhead snake!” and he pointed to the writhing, dying reptile. His stone had struck it fairly.

CHAPTER XVI – LOST

Cora Kimball was not an unusually nervous girl, nor was she given to hysterical demonstrations, but, somehow or other, she felt sick and faint as she looked at the wiggling snake in its death agony. Her eyes saw black, and she swayed so that Paul stepped forward and slipped an arm around her waist.

“I thought you were going to faint,” he said in explanation.

“I – I was,” faltered Cora. “But I’ve gotten over the notion. Thank – thank you, Paul. Could I have a drink of water?”

Jack brought her some from a spring not far away.

“Brace up, Sis,” he said with rough, brotherly kindness. “You’re all right. That snake wouldn’t have killed you anyhow. I’ve been bitten by ’em, and it isn’t much worse than a mosquito.”

“You have?” cried Paul, in such a queer tone that all save Cora realized that Jack was bluffing for the sake of minimizing the effect on Cora.

Jack made this plain to Paul by winking quickly, and motioning to him to confirm what he had said.

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Paul went on. “I’d forgotten that the copperheads aren’t poisonous this time of year. You wouldn’t have been much damaged, Cora, if you had been nipped by this fellow,” and with a swift motion of his foot he kicked the still writhing reptile to one side.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really.”

She looked relieved. The faint spell passed and Cora smiled. The color was coming back to her cheeks.

“I’m sorry I acted so,” she said, “but I have a terrible fear of snakes, even harmless ones. I thought this one was a curiously mottled root, and I was going to pick it up. Suppose I had? Oh!”

She shuddered and looked at Paul.

“A miss is as good as a bird in the hand,” he misquoted. “Come on now, let’s eat.”

“Say, old man,” said Jack to Paul, when they were alone a little later, “that snake was a bad chap, wasn’t he?”

Paul nodded in confirmation.

“I thought so,” Jack went on. “Just as well, though, not to let her know, she’s so deadly afraid. There’d have been trouble if she had been bitten?” he questioned.

“Yes,” said Paul, simply. “Of course they’re not sure death, but they’re dangerous enough.”

“I thought so. Shake!”

After the temporary scare of the snake had passed, the picnic party made merry, laughing and talking as they enjoyed the lunch the girls had put up. It was a perfect day, rather warm, but cool enough in the shade, and the mountain air was invigorating. There followed a delightfully lazy time, lying on the grass under the trees when every one had eaten enough.

Then they packed up the rest of the food and walked on, intending to make a circle and return to Camp Surprise late in the afternoon. Now and then they would come to some open space, where the sloping mountain dropped away suddenly, revealing below a vista which made them pause in admiration.

Once they reached a point where they could look down on Mountain View, and, though they could not distinguish their own bungalows, they could see about where they were situated.

Cora stood gazing down, in rather a thoughtful mood. Walter was by her side, and noted her abstraction. He held up the proverbial penny.

Cora shook her head.

“No. I won’t tell,” she said with a smile.

Walter guessed that she was thinking of the snake, but he refrained from saying so. And then Cora, fearing he might put a wrong construction on her words added:

“I was just wondering when they were going to continue.”

“What was going to continue?” he inquired.

“The surprises in our camp. You know – ”

“Continue!” he interrupted. “I didn’t know we had had any. I had begun to think it was all a hoax.”

“Oh, no,” cried Cora, impulsively. “There was a – ”

She caught herself just in time, for she recalled that she and Belle had agreed not to mention the queer noise.

“Was it a ghost?” asked Walter.

“It wasn’t anything,” Cora hastened to say. “Look, see that curl of smoke. Isn’t it just like a great big ostrich plume? What a hat it would require to carry it! A giant’s hat.”

“Lady giant you mean,” said Walter. “But look here, Cora, you are keeping something from me.”

“Not at all.”

Her manner was light, but Walter was a good guesser.

“Yes, you are!” he insisted. “Something did happen, Cora. Go on, tell a fellow.”

“Nothing really happened, Walter.”

“Then you heard something.”

“How did you know?” she asked with a start.

“I thought I’d catch you. Come now. Own up. You didn’t have that toy telephone strung to our bungalow just on general principles. Did you hear something, Cora?”

She looked around to make sure none of the others were listening. Then she told Walter of the queer noise, enjoining him to secrecy, however.

“So that’s what it was,” he said. “I thought it was thunder myself, but if you heard it in your bungalow it couldn’t have been.”

“And it was in our bungalow,” Cora said. “Seemingly away down in the cellar, or sub-cellar, if they have such a thing.”

“Not as deep as that, I guess, Cora. But it was a queer rumbly noise, though how I could hear it, when it was under your bungalow I can’t imagine.”

“Unless it came from the waterfall.”

“How could it come from the waterfall?” Walter asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cora. “But there might be some sort of hollow rock – blowing stones I believe they are called – and when air is forced into the hollow, by the action of the water, it might give a roaring sound, and vibrate the earth.”

Walter considered a moment.