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."