“Had we better stay?” Binney was pretty scared and showed it.
“Of course,” Plunk told him. “We ain’t babies. We got to stay.”
We couldn’t very well back down after that. I expect every one of us was willing enough to pack up and go, but nobody would start it, so we sat close to the blaze and talked about other things, and made believe to one another that wild men were the last thing in the world we’d ever think of running away from.
It began to get dark, and we cooked supper. It wasn’t a very cheerful meal because every once in a while one of us would stop to listen and ask, “What was that?” There were lots of noises, like there always are in the woods, but they never seemed so shivery before. The moon didn’t come up till late, and it was dark as a pocket except where our fire lighted things up for a few feet.
“We ought to have a gun,” said Plunk, after we had been quiet a long time.
“Bosh!” said Mark. “Let’s go to b-b-bed.”
“We got to have a guard,” says Binney. “The Ku Klux Klan wouldn’t camp without a sentinel.”
We agreed to that. The night was divided into watches, and we drew pieces of stick to show who would watch first. I drew the shortest piece, and the other fellows went into the cave and wrapped themselves up in their blankets. I sat out by the fire, and I can tell you it was pretty lonesome and scary.
CHAPTER VI
After a while I could hear Mark snoring inside the cave, and it made me sort of mad. Anybody would think he’d been brought up next-door neighbor to a wild man or whatever kind of a thing it was that went around leaving marks in the sand a foot long, with the toes turned toward the side. I crept over to the opening and looked in. All three of them were asleep, and if I felt lonely and skittish before I pretty nearly went into a panic now. The fire was going good, but I threw on more wood just to have something to do and to light up farther into the woods.