“It surely did! Next time anyone comes around bothering the camp we’ll just send you out with a basket of apples and we can sleep in peace all night! Well, come on back to the graveyard, I want to get my flashlight.”
They all climbed over the low wall and went back to the spot where Buck had been captured by the man behind the monument and there on the ground they found his flashlight. Beside it, resting against the base of the stone, they found a battered lantern.
“I wondered what had become of his lantern,” said Buck, picking up the battered object. “Just an ordinary old farm lantern, which doesn’t tell us much, but we’ll take it back to camp with us.”
“I won’t be sorry to get back to camp,” said Charlie.
“Pretty soft for the fellows in camp!” remarked Drummer. “Just sitting around the fires waiting for us!”
“Let’s get back to the camp,” suggested Buck. “They’ll be waiting up for us and worrying.”
In a body they set out for the camp, feeling better now that everything had turned out well, although they were sorry that the man had gotten away. “If we had gotten him we would have solved the problem of our camp,” said Buck. “But we’ll keep after him until we do get him.”
“Think he’ll come around the camp any more?” Drummer asked.
“Not for a while, anyway. I can’t say whether he’ll come around again or not because I don’t know what his object can be. But if he doesn’t, we’ll go out and hunt him up, because it is high time that he was brought down.”
They had run further away from the camp than they had thought and it took them a long time to reach the top of the mountain where they could look down on the camp. The two fires were burning brightly but no one was in sight. This puzzled them and they halted, studying the situation.