“Well, we’ve done it!” said Cooper huskily, as he tore off his mask and revealed a face almost as ghastly as that of the lad who had leaped through the window.
“You’re right, Chipper,” agreed Chub Tuttle, also unmasking. “We drove him plumb daffy. It’s awful!”
“He busted the skeleton,” said Sleuth Piper, gazing ruefully at the broken thing, which lay on the floor where Grant had flung it. “The prof will raise the dickens about this.”
“Oh, hang the sus-skeleton!” stuttered Phil Springer. “Think of driving that fellow out of his wits! Gee! boys, it’s bad business.”
“Yeou bate it is,” agreed Sile Crane. “We’d orter knowed he wasn’t well balanced, for his old aunt has been half crazy all her life.”
Tuttle, his peanuts forgotten, had dropped his mask to the floor and sunk limply on a bench near the lockers, where he sat shivering like a round jelly pudding.
“It’s awful,” he muttered over and over—“it’s awful, fellows!”
“I guess we’re in a bad scrape,” said Hunk Rollins, who was posing no longer as Girty, the renegade.
“It’s awful!” mumbled Tuttle. “If we had ever stopped to think that he came from a family of loose screwed people we might not have pushed this thing so far.”
“He’s busted the skeleton,” complained Piper again. “Won’t the prof be hopping about that!”