"You just bet you were, Elmer!" Lil Artha exclaimed.
"A figure in white, remember, fellows; and the one we saw to-night was dressed that way, as sure as shooting!" said Toby, convincingly.
"The poor Oxley fellow was in Cuba during the Spanish war, and must have fetched the white uniform of a Spanish officer home with him," suggested Ty Collins; "when he went out of his mind he imagined himself a Spanish recruit, and they let him wear that soldier suit to humor him."
"Yes, and right now he believes he has escaped from an American prison, and is trying to hide from the guard. He has to eat to live, and so he steals things from the farmers around. Of course it's only a matter of good luck that he hasn't been shot before now; and it couldn't last much longer."
"Why, when winter gets here in dead earnest the poor fellow would freeze to death, like as not," George remarked, showing that he was being convinced against his will.
"But what gets me is his staying around the old haunted house," remarked Toby.
"Oh! I don't see what there is queer about that," Lil Artha declared. "Course he couldn't know anything about all this talk, so it's hardly likely he's been trying to play ghost on us. We fooled ourselves, that's what," with a quick look toward Chatz, as though to intimate that possibly the Southern boy had had considerable to do with their being hoodwinked; which was a lamentable fact, for a small fraction of yeast will scatter through the whole pan of dough.
"And when you come to think of it," added Lil Artha, who had something of a long head when a knotty question was involved, "where could a crazy man find a better hiding place than in a house said to be haunted, I'd like to know?"
"The poor fellow!" Ted was heard to say, that being his first utterance. "Tell you what, we ought to put in all the rest of our time up here trying to capture him. I'd never feel thatithfied to lie in my comfy bed at home nighth, thinking of him up here, freezing perhapth. Thay we will, Elmer, and you too, boyth!"
Ted was tender-hearted, and could never bear to see any one suffer if he had it in his power to alleviate the pain. He promised to make a fine doctor some day, for his knowledge along the line of medicine and surgery was really wonderful; but while the other scouts had been so deeply interested in figuring things out, and settling the question of the strange man's identity, Ted had doubtless only considered his physical sufferings past and present.