“Blessed if I know. We don’t want it, and at the same time we don’t want it hanging around here to click with the wind. Let’s put it up in the hollow above and leave it there. We can look at it from time to time and see if anyone has taken it.”
The boys shrank from touching the thing so Ted and Buck cut the rope down, picked up the skull, and carried the skeleton to a small hollow well above the camp, where they left it and returned to the others.
“That skeleton was rather a clever fellow,” laughed Ted. “We found that his joints had all been wired together with a thin wire, which means that after his skin dropped off he got down off of his rope, wired himself together, and then got back on his rope, if we’re supposed to think it is a genuine affair. I think that whoever hung it there must have hoped that we’d be so scared that we would flee from the camp in terror, without stopping to investigate thoroughly.”
“Say, this couldn’t be a trick to draw us out of camp, could it?” Buck asked, suddenly.
There was a moment of silence as they thought it over. Ted seized his lantern.
“I hope not, but it might be,” he cried, bolting through the bushes.
But there was nothing to worry about on that score. The camp was perfectly peaceful and if anyone had visited it in their absence there was no trace of the fact. The fires were dying and everything was in order.
“All right, let’s get to bed, and we’ll talk about it all in the morning,” Ted called, cheerfully.
Most of the boys obeyed at once, but four or five boys clustered around Ralph Plum, who was talking to them earnestly. Their heads were close together and he seemed to be doing all the talking. Ted walked over to them and they looked at him somewhat nervously.
“Well, what is on your minds?” Ted asked.