“And all our things are just sopping! We left our blankets out to dry, you know,” mourned Hal.
“Say!” on the instant exclaimed Ned, fumbling in his pockets. “Do you know, I left my knife up there by one of those holes!”
“Oh, you can’t find it, now,” objected Hal, who somehow did not fancy being deserted, even for a moment, in this weird spot.
“Yes, I can,” flung back Ned, scrambling up the wet slope, and anon slipping and stumbling. “It’s by the second hole, where I sharpened my stick.”
Ned gained the crest at the same point where he and Hal had come out when they had climbed before. It was very still, up here; only the drip, drip, from the trees, and the soughing of the wind, breaking the quiet. It also was much darker and lonesomer than he had expected it would be, but he bravely trudged forward along the edge of the bluff toward the old mounds.
He started to whistle, but his “Marching Through Georgia” came to an abrupt stop right in the middle of the first chorus. What uncanny, harrowing sound was that? He halted, with one foot upraised, and peered ahead.
He was nearing the first of the opened mounds, when rising apparently out of the second he descried a dim, white Thing, spectral, wavering, menacing him with a series of ghastly noises.
The goose-flesh sprang out all over Ned’s body, as if he had been in swimming too long, a weakness seized on his knees, and he imagined that his hair was rising under his battered felt hat.
It occurred to him that, rightfully enough, the Indians did not approve of having their remains, which had slumbered through two centuries and a half, exposed by means of spades and crooked sticks in the hands of the pale-face. And having cautiously retreated backward, step by step, suddenly he turned and bolted as hard as he could run! He didn’t want his jack-knife.