The boys paused, not realizing, at first, to whom the excited voice belonged.
"Come help me! I've got him!"
"Chunky!" they groaned. "He's at it again!"
Professor Zepplin leaped from his cot, striding off in the direction from which Stacy Brown's triumphant voice had come, and followed by the rest of the party on the run. All four of them crashed into the bushes at the same instant, shouting words of warning to Stacy.
They did not know what it all meant, but the boys were sure that he had gotten himself into some new danger.
Chunky had slipped away some moments before, after Ned Rector had discovered the trail of the bob-cat. His companions, however, had not missed him, so Stacy was free to follow his own inclinations.
"Where are you?" cried the Professor.
"Here! here!"
Whack! whack! came the sound from a rapidly wielded club again, accompanied by a vicious spitting and snarling that caused the boys to hesitate, for a brief second, in their mad dash for the underbrush.
As they emerged into a little open space, made so largely by the battle that was being waged there, their eyes fairly bulged with surprise.