Well, sir, it did look as if we were goners. All Collins and Jiggins had to do was come and get us. But they hadn’t discovered the little peninsula yet and were wallowing around maybe a hundred feet off.
Mark was moving around slow and cautious. Finally I heard him sort of chuckle. “Here’s the boat,” he whispered. “I thought this was like the place your uncle said it would be.”
We were as quiet as could be getting to where it was, but Collins and Jiggins heard us and yelled. We jumped into the boat and started to push off, but before we were away from the shore Collins loomed up out of the murkiness and grabbed at the stern.
“I got you,” he said, business-like as anything. Somehow I didn’t like the sound of his voice.
He missed us first grab and took a step into the water. Just as he reached for us again the most unearthly sound I ever heard came wavering over the water. It was a horrid kind of a sound. A mysterious, shuddery sound that made you draw all together and wish you were in the house by a warm fire.
“Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” it came. Weird? Why, weird was no name for it! It was the craziest, awfulest laugh in the world. Collins stopped and straightened up like he’d been shot.
“Shove,” says Mark, who wasn’t so scared but he could take advantage of what was going on. I was almost paralyzed, and so were Plunk and Tallow, but we shoved, and the boat glided off out of Collins’s reach.
Then came that laugh once more. “Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha!” It was half laugh and half shriek. All of it was crazy—plum lunatic crazy.
“What is it?” I whispered. I couldn’t have spoken out loud to save my neck.
Mark chuckled. “Git to r-r-rowin’,” says he.