CHAPTER XXII
GHOST MEETS GHOST
There was only the faintest stir as the boys followed Buck’s lead in tossing their blankets aside and joined Ted at the bushes. Following the direction which he had indicated, they found that what he had said was the truth. Close beside a tall tree, on the bank of the creek, stood a figure shrouded entirely in white.
The figure was motionless at the time, intently regarding the silent camp before him. From the direction in which his coming lay the boys guessed that he had come up on the far side of Bear Creek and had crossed over the stones at the spot where Ted had previously crossed them. The sight of the almost dead fires and the strange silence of the camp was giving the would-be ghost food for thought, though he must have expected that the boys would be asleep at the time of his coming. For two or three minutes, a space of time which to the boys seemed an age, he stood looking across the cleared space before the tents and then he began to work his way nearer to the empty camp shelters, keeping always close to the trees which skirted them.
What his intentions were they could not guess. He carried nothing in his hands and from all appearances he was about to confine his efforts at simply scaring them.
“Look there!” suddenly gasped Drummer.
They saw that he was looking off in the opposite direction and back of the tents, but for the moment could not make out what he had seen.
“What is it?” Ted whispered.
“Another ghost!” was the answer. “Look, back there in the bushes near the pine grove where the fire was. By golly, there are two ghosts!”
Now they saw what had struck the fat boy’s eyes. It was another figure dressed much in the manner of the one near the front of the tents, and it was crouching in the thicket back of the tents. As they watched it too moved forward.
“That is all right,” Buck said. “We’ve known all along that there have been two of them working together. While we chased one of them, the other set the woods on fire. They are both up to the same trick, and now we’ll have to make up our minds how we’ll capture them.”