To-night, every one was bent upon making the end of the camping trip a season of befitting jollity. They sang their scout songs as they gathered round the camp-fire. They retailed the last good joke from their magazine. They challenged the darkness with their hearty motto,—both in the strong sweet mother tongue wherein it had been given to the world, and in the pretty Estu preta! form, which two of their number thought might serve as a universal link.
But the night refused to rejoice with them. It was chilly, colder than on the same date one year ago when four lost boys camped out in the Bear’s Den. The inflowing tide broke on the beach with sobbing clamor. There was no moon, few stars. The white sand-hills were wild-looking sable mounds waving blood-red plumes of beach-grass or beach-pea wherever the light of camp-fire or camp-lantern struck them.
The clusters of gray birches and ash-trees scattered here and there among the dunes cowered like ebony shadows fearful of the rising wind.
“Bah! De night she’s as black as one black crow,” declared Toiney with a shrug as he threw another birch log on the camp-fire and set one of the two bright oil-lanterns on a sand-hill where it spied upon the gusty, secretive darkness like a watchful eye.
With the exception of a few small carbide lamps attached to tent-posts, those lanterns were the only luminaries in camp.
“An’ de win’ she commence for mak’ noise lak’ mad cat! Saint Ba’tiste! I’ll t’ink dis iss night for de come-backs—me.” And Toiney glanced half-fearfully behind him at the sable mounds so milky in daylight.
“He means it’s a night for spooks—ghosts! He doesn’t believe much in ‘come-backs,’ though: look at his face!” Leon pointed at the assistant scoutmaster’s black eyes dancing in the firelight, at the tassel of his red cap capering in the breeze. “By the way, Nix and I saw one ‘come-back,’ about an hour ago—a human one!” went on Corporal Chase suddenly, after a minute’s pause: “that rough customer, Dave Baldwin, as we suppose him to be, turned up again this evening near the summer bungalows away over on the beach. He was acting rather queerly, too!”
“He certainly was!” chimed in Nixon, looking thoughtfully at a little topknot of flame that sprouted upon the blazing log nearest to him as he lay, with his brother Owls, prone upon his face and hands, gazing into the fire.
“What was he doing?” asked Jesse Taber, a member of the Seal Patrol.
“Why, he was up on the high piazza of the largest bungalow—that house built just on the edge of the dunes which looks as if it was standing on stilts, and getting ready to walk off! He seemed to be trying one of the windows when we came along as if attempting to get in.”