As he was getting out of the car into the dark road, a mournful, shrill cry that echoed all about sounded through the forest.
“What’s that?” gasped Nan, shrinking close to her mother. “Oh, what is it?”
CHAPTER VIII—A NUTTING PARTY
Mrs. Bobbsey was rather alarmed at what had happened to the automobile to cause it to stop. She was also worried, thinking perhaps they all might have to stay out in the woods all night, if they could not go on to camp. So when Nan asked the cause of the strange noise her mother did not at first answer.
The sound came again, just as Bert was getting down out of the car to go to his father, who had lifted the hood over the motor to see what was wrong, and the strange sound so startled this Bobbsey twin lad that he let go his hold of the side of the car and slid with a bump to the ground.
“Ugh!” grunted Bert, as he fell.
He grunted in such a funny way, and he looked so odd sitting there in the dusk, as if he did not know what had happened, that Flossie and Freddie laughed. And this laughter seemed to make them less afraid of the queer call of the woods.
“Hurt yourself, Bert?” asked his father, looking up from his task of throwing the gleams of a flashlight in among the parts of the automobile motor.
“No, sir,” Bert answered. “I just sat down sudden, that’s all. But what was that noise, Daddy? Is it——”
As if finding fault because the Bobbsey twins had come to Cedar Camp, once more the warning call came.