Just then we heard the noise again. It seemed to be nearer and appeared to have moved around towards the stream.
"Well, that beats me all out for a noise!" exclaimed Willis. "I can't even guess what makes it."
"Nor I," said Tom. "Never heard anything like it."
To hear a mysterious sound like that, off in the wilderness, at night, will disturb almost anyone. Addison kept laughing and trying to talk of other things. Thomas stepped out as if to fix up the fire, but slipped into the other cabin and got the gun. He came out to one side, however, so that the girls did not see him from where they sat, and stood the gun against their cabin. All the while Addison was talking on, telling the girls how the Indians cooked hedgehogs by coating them all over with clay, then roasting them under their camp-fires. The girls were not very good listeners, however, for we kept hearing that same hollow, moaning noise, and it did not seem to be very far off. We were all pretty sure that it was not an animal, and concluded that it must be a man, or a number of men; but why they were making such a strange noise as that, we could not understand.
Suddenly the sound burst forth close at hand, apparently near the stream. It startled us all badly, and Thomas reached for the gun.
"I think, boys," said Kate quite calmly, yet with a curious little flutter in her voice, "that we had better all get inside the cabin here and shut the door."
"Perhaps we had," said Addison. "For if it is anybody who means mischief, it is foolish for us to sit in the light here where we can be seen so plainly."
Thereupon we all beat a retreat inside the cabin, shut the door and buttoned it; the firelight shone in, however, both through cracks in the door and chinks betwixt the logs. Tom drew the partridge charge from his gun and put in another heavier one, with five or six buckshot, mixed with the bird shot.
A moment or two after, we heard the noise again; and this time it seemed to be just in the rear of the other cabin. Addison stood with an eye at a crack, looking out.
"It's human beings, fast enough," he said in a low voice.