"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 passed 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?"