“He needn’t think he can get out of it that way!” blazed Jack Nelson.
“I’m sick,” moaned Tuttle—“oh, I’m awful sick! What do you s’pose they’ll do to us if we’ve really drove Grant batty? Oh, say! won’t I catch it at home!”
“We ought to follow him,” said Nelson. “We ought to catch him. No telling what he will do. Maybe he’ll jump into the lake or the river and be drowned.”
“I’m going home,” wheezed Hunk Rollins huskily. “Somebody is liable to come along and spot the whole of us here.” He edged toward the door.
“Yeou’re another quitter, jest like Barker,” roared Crane suddenly. “Yeou pranced around and made a lot of fightin’ talk to Rod Grant arter yeou’d figured it out that he wouldn’t take yeou up, and now yeou’re so allfired sca’t yeou want to skedaddle.”
“Somebody has got to help me take the skeleton back to the academy,” said Piper appealingly. “Don’t skin out and leave me, boys; let’s hang together.”
“If we don’t hang together,” muttered Cooper, with a rueful grimace, “we may hang separately.”
Little did they dream that at that very moment they were watched by two pairs of eyes gazing at them through the broken window.
Grant, having made his spectacular getaway, reached the road and ran as far as the lower corner of the academy yard, where he stopped, breathing a trifle heavily, and leaned upon the fence. In a moment he was startled by a voice coming from the shadows of a nearby tree.
“What’s the matter?” was the question that reached his ears. “What’s going on at the gym to-night?”