It was awful to hear, and the girls didn't wait for another, or even for the sob part. At the first moan they started to their feet, looking around with scared faces, and when the menagerie turned loose away they went on a run.
"Charge, my braves!" cried Skinny, as soon as he could stop laughing long enough to speak. "Let's surround 'em."
With a yell, we charged across the top of the hill, down the slope beyond and into a field which rose gently up to Plunkett's woods.
Just before the girls reached the woods one of them looked back, saw us, and told the others. I thought they would run harder than ever when they saw us coming, but it was just as Hank said about not knowing what they would do. They turned and stood there, the whole twelve of them, looking so mad that we stopped running and waited to see what would happen.
"We know who you are, Skinny Miller," said the one who had seen us first, "and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. We'll fix you for this."
She said something to the others, which we couldn't hear, and pointed toward us. Then they stooped and each one grabbed a stick from the edge of the woods.
"Great snakes!" said Bill. "I wish I hadn't come."
"Fellers," said Skinny, looking at his watch. "It's 'most four o'clock. We'll have to run like sixty if we get to the cave in time for the meetin'."
There are a lot of boys who never saw a mountain, and the Band, even, never saw the Rockies and big mountains like those. But Greylock is big enough for us. On a summer day, with fleecy clouds chasing over his head like great, white butterflies; sunshine resting on the pine trees, and the mountain smiling down on us with arms outstretched, as if he would gather in all of Massachusetts and a part of Vermont, and the cawing of crows in the Bellows Pipe, and no school to call us back—say, that's living; that is!
Soon we came to the woods and followed along a path until we could hear the rushing and roaring of Peck's Falls in front of us, sounding as if old Greylock himself was talking.