"Who was it?" asked Dave. "Wilbur Poole?"
"Whoever he was, he had the most outlandish rig on a fellow ever saw!" exclaimed Luke. "I think he must have borrowed it from some scarecrow."
"If that was Wilbur Poole we had better keep our eyes open for him," said Dave, seriously. He had not forgotten the trouble which the wild man who called himself the King of Sumatra had given him and his chums in the past.
"We were all sitting there enjoying ourselves when we heard the fellow give an awful yell or two," explained Phil. "Then he came dancing out from behind some bushes, waving a sort of sceptre in the air. He nearly scared the girls into fits, and that is what made them scream. Then he caught up a stick of wood from the pile yonder, and disappeared between the trees. I guess he must have imagined he was a wild Indian on the warpath."
"I am afraid if that poor fellow isn't captured he will cause us a good deal of worry," was Mr. Wadsworth's comment. "As long as he is at large there is no telling what he will do."
"If it really is Wilbur Poole, we ought to let the Pooles know about it," said Dave.
The matter was talked over for some time, and then, after another search through the edge of the woods and among the rocks and brushwood of that vicinity, the boys and Mr. Wadsworth returned to the bungalows. They found all of the girls and Mrs. Wadsworth on one of the verandas, discussing the situation. Even Jessie had joined the group, declaring that the alarm had scared most of her headache away.
"Oh, I was so frightened when I first saw the man—if it really was a man!" cried Laura.
"He looked more like an orang-outang," declared the girl from the West. "If I had met him out on the range, and if I had had a gun with me, I surely would have shot at him!"
"I brought a gun along," returned Dave, exhibiting the weapon; "I thought it was a bear scare."