his being the case with the Juggins boy it was not to be wondered at
that there could be traced a vein of actual gratification in his
voice when he suddenly electrified his companions by exclaiming:

"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?"

"Hugh, what do you think?" demanded Thad. "You're up in all that
kind of wigwag signal work, and perhaps now you could tell what it
means."

"I lost some of it, I'm sorry to say, fellows," observed Hugh,
gravely; "but all the same I caught enough to tell me that waving of
a light was meant as a signal message, though who s