ads in it, Miss. You kin shoot
all you like."

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."