“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.”