what do yeou fellers think of that!” rasped Sile Crane. “He’s skedaddled and left us; he’s run away.”
“Well, if that isn’t the tut-trick of a coward, I don’t know what you’d call it!” exploded Springer.
“He needn’t think he can get out of it that way!” blazed Jack Nelson.
“I’m sick,” moaned Tuttle – “oh, I’m awful sick! What do you s’pose they’ll do to us if we’ve really drove Grant batty? Oh, say! won’t I catch it at home!”
“We ought to follow him,” said Nelson. “We ought to catch him. No telling what he will do. Maybe he’ll jump into the lake or the river and be drowned.”
“I’m going home,” wheezed Hunk Rollins huskily. “Somebody is liable to come along and spot the whole of us here.” He edged toward the door.
“Yeou’re another quitter, jest like Barker,” roared Crane suddenly. “Yeou pranced around and made a lot of fightin’ talk to Rod Grant arter yeou’d figured it out that he wouldn’t take yeou up, and now yeou’re so allfired sca’t yeou want to skedaddle.”
“Somebody has got to help me take the skeleton back to the academy,” said Piper appealingly. “Don’t skin out and leave me, boys; let’s hang together.”
“If we don’t hang together,” muttered Cooper, with a rueful grimace, “we may hang separately.”
Little did they dream that at that very moment they were watched by two pairs of eyes gazing at them through the broken window.
Grant, having made his spectacular getaway, reached the road and ran as far as the lower corner of the academy yard, where he stopped, breathing a trifle heavily, and leaned upon the fence. In a moment he was startled by a voice coming from the shadows of a nearby tree.
“What’s the matter?” was the question that reached his ears. “What’s going on at the gym to-night?”
He recognized the voice as that of Ben Stone, whose figure he could perceive in the denser darkness under the tree. For a moment he hesitated; then, with a short laugh, he answered:
“Oh, just a bit of a monkey circus, that’s all. A few of my friends tried to force me into playing the clown, but I sure reckon the laugh is on them some. What are you doing here?”
“I knew something was up,” answered Stone, as he came forward, “and, while I didn’t want to butt in, I couldn’t choke down my curiosity entirely. Tell me about it.”
Grant did so briefly and concisely, beginning with his ambuscade by the fake Indians. Although a narrative unadorned and cut short, it was vivid and interesting enough to absorb the listener.
“All the time,” proceeded Rod, “I was doing my level best to get my hands free, for I allowed I’d sail into that bunch right lively if I could obtain the use of my paws. I was sure enough jarred some when they handed me into the dark room with the old skeleton and the thing rose up on its hind legs and groaned. That made me give an extra twist, and I broke the rope. I knew where I was, for Roger Eliot had shown me all over the gym. I likewise knew the powdered chalk for marking the field was kept on a shelf in that closet. It didn’t take me long to think of a plan to turn the laugh on that bunch of merry old roasters. I found the chalk and rubbed it over my face. Then, feeling around, I got hold of a cake of soap on the washstand and bit off a piece, which I proceeded to chew up so that I could froth at the mouth in fine shape. All the while I was chanting a funeral dirge a plenty doleful, punctuating it with occasional loud and mirthless ha-ha’s. The game worked well. They were listening, and I reckon it set them guessing. When I heard the key turning in the lock I proceeded to drop down on my shin bones in front of the skeleton, and I turned off a bit of the mad scene from Macbeth. Say, Stone, it knocked ’em stiff. Then when I saw I had them going I grabbed the old skeleton and made a dash at the bunch. They fell over one another in their urgent desire to give me ample room. I didn’t propose to let them get their hooks on me again, so I dropped old phosphorus bones, grabbed a chair, smashed a window, jumped through and touched the elevated spots outside. I opine the merry jesters left behind are a plenty disturbed about now, and – ”
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