The other boys looked at Plum and he cleared his throat defiantly. As he stood before Ted he was fully as big as the leader, with a bigger shoulder spread. Obviously he was out of place with the smaller boys and should have been one of the leaders, a fact that had crossed his mind more than once as he secretly chaffed under Ted’s and Buck’s orders. He was well aware that his relative had given a big sum of money to the organization, and to rank simply as a member of the club and not even as a captain of a tent had irritated him from the start. Deep in his heart there was a fear of the camp they were in, and although he would not go so far as to say that he feared the presence of anything supernatural near the place, he did feel a bad atmosphere and it made him perpetually uneasy.
“We fellows don’t like this place for a camping place,” he began. “We want to go somewhere else.”
“Want to run away, eh!” asked Ted, as the other boys, crowding into the open, watched.
“We aren’t running away,” returned Plum, doggedly. “But this place isn’t healthy for anybody. Already we have received several warnings that we aren’t wanted around here, and I don’t see why we can’t get wise to ourselves and get out before something happens. Up to the present time nothing has happened, but how do you know that something won’t happen that we’ll be pretty sorry for? We don’t have to go home, but there are places nearer home where we can camp, and I can show you a couple of good ones, almost as good as this one.”
“And then, at the end of the month, we go back to the trustees and tell them that we were afraid to use their own camping site and had to go somewhere else? Let everybody in the town know that we were scared to death? Is that what you mean?” asked Ted.
“No, because if we all agree to keep still we won’t have to let the story out. We could even go back and make out that we did stay in this camp all summer, and who would be the wiser?”
Ted stood with his hands on his hips, a frown of contempt on his face. He would have thought differently about it if it had been one of the younger boys who had made the request, but Plum was a big boy and his counsel was dangerous for the little fellows. Ted longed to take the big boy and shake him until his teeth rattled, but he did not feel justified in going that far. To his mind the question just now was one of discipline in the matter of going to bed, and he felt that he must make good on that first.
“We’ll discuss all that in the morning, right after breakfast,” he said. “Right now I have ordered you to bed, and you are going! I’m the boss of this camp and you fellows are going to obey me, at least for the present. As to the idea that I would ever sneak off somewhere else, and then go back and tell Mr. Calvert that we had spent the month here, that is so silly that I won’t even discuss it. You’ve heard what I said about bed. March to your tents!”
There was one long moment of indecision. Those back of Ted near the tents watched with breathless interest to see what the outcome would be and Buck was prepared to back his chum up. The smaller boys with Plum hesitated and looked at him. That Plum was angry there was no doubt, but he did not know clearly what to do. He measured Ted up in a glance and he felt for a moment that he was physically able to handle him, but he was not so sure when he looked into Ted’s clear, direct eyes. They didn’t look uncertain, and he lowered his own gaze.
“You’ll talk it over in the morning?” he asked, somewhat lamely.