There was another pause, and the blows began again. Alberdina gave evidence of wishing to speak, but Miss Campbell interrupted her.
“Never mind, Alberdina,” she said impatiently. “You may go up into the gallery if you like. You are quite safe. They only want Miss Phoebe.”
But Alberdina would not be silenced. Perhaps somewhere in the remote history of her ancestors there had been a warrior who had ranged the German forests dressed in the skins of wild beasts, his helmet decorated with a pair of fierce upstanding horns. Who knows but a drop of his fighting blood had come down through the generations to stir this sluggish descendant into action just at this particular moment when something had to be done?
“Come,” she called, with unexpected energy. “I asg you, come. We will a high wall mag already. You will see. Hein?”
Again the axe crashed through the door and without a word they followed her into the gallery, Billie carrying the rifle and Elinor the breakfast horn. Alberdina hurried into the locker room and presently returned with a trunk hoisted on her shoulders. This she placed at the top of the stairs.
“Good,” exclaimed Billie. “Why didn’t we think of that before? It will keep them off for a little longer, at any rate.”
Alberdina did not listen to these honeyed words of praise, however. She never paused until she had piled three trunks, one on top of the other in a very effective barricade. At the far end of the gallery, Elinor and Mary appeared to be very much occupied at a little window placed in the roof for ventilation, but now closed. Finding the bolt rusty, Elinor took off her slipper and broke a pane of glass. Mary, her lieutenant, then handed her the breakfast horn. It was like Elinor to wipe off the mouth piece carefully with her handkerchief before she placed it to her lips. But the blast she blew must have startled the mountaineers outside, for the blows on the door ceased for a moment. Again and again she signaled, always the same long agitated note.
“I think anybody would recognize that as a call for help,” she said, pausing for breath; and while the axe crashed through the door, she continued to blow the bugle with all her strength.
Billie, however, felt fairly certain that a trunk barricade and a bugle blast for help would not keep off the savages long.
“We need some kind of ammunition, Nancy,” she said. “If only this rifle was loaded.”