“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.”
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.”
But though Cora and Belle agreed to drop the matter of the unexplained noise, they could not dismiss it from their minds. Several times that day Cora would notice Belle in a brown study, and on taxing her with it would be met with the statement:
“Oh, not so very. At home we wouldn’t give it a second thought.”
“Yes,” agreed Belle, “but there are so many ways of explaining noises in town, and so few ways up here. I wonder if that is the beginning of the surprises, Cora?”
“If it is they aren’t so unpleasant. Noise never hurt any one.”
So they said nothing to the others about the little disturbance in the night, and the only remark the others made, having any reference to it, was that of Walter’s about thunder.
“It must have been thunder,” Cora said, “for if the noise had been in our bungalow the boys couldn’t have heard it in theirs.”
“I don’t see how they could,” Belle agreed.
“But, all the same, I’m going to have some way of calling to Jack and the others without screaming our lungs out,” declared Cora. “It’s only right to be able to summon them if we want them. One of us might become ill, and they’d have to go for the doctor. I’d rather call Jack than Mr. Floyd.”