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." "Did you look through the barrel?" asked Nancy, slightly more experienced with firearms than Billie. She seized the rifle and held it up before a lamp that Alberdina had set in a corner of the gallery, cocked it and looked through with one eye professionally squinted. "Why, it is loaded," she announced. "It only has two empty what do you call them--chambers?" "Must I shoot at somebody?" asked Billie. "You could try and I could try," answered Nancy, "but I don't think either one of us would hit an elephant." Just then Miss Campbell put out the light. At the same moment the axe made a breach in the door and a man crawled through. Billie lifted the rifle and, taking a long breath, aimed at his foot. The man was looking about him in a bewildered way. It was the innkeeper, second leader of the gang. Billie pulled and pulled, but nothing happened, and in another moment a dozen mountaineers had crawled through the opening. The one lamp cast a small circle of light near the fire-place. The rest of the room was in darkness. In the gallery the anxious watchers were invisible to the band of men, but the watchers themselves could see the outlaws plainly now gathered in a group in the center of the room, rather uneasy after breaking down the door of Sunrise Camp.