“This is the kind of a place I like,” said Connie.
“Only it’s nice to have somebody here,” Blythe admitted.
“That’s all right, we’re here,” Pee-wee said.
They did not hear the sound again. If one were superstitious he might have conjured that sound into a crying of the ghost of some dead soldier haunting the old forsaken camp. But these scouts did not believe in ghosts.
They did, however, believe in hunter’s stew and they forgot all else as they sat around their camp-fire in the quiet darkness, telling yarns, and amusing their new friend by jollying....
CHAPTER X
THE FALL OF SCOUT HARRIS
As a camping place, perhaps the old reservation would not have proved a spot to the heart of the woods lover, but it was sequestered and had about it that romance which attaches to deserted habitations that are not tainted by the sordid environments of city life. The old buildings had never been beautiful and it was only the atmosphere of a place deserted which gave them a sort of romantic character.
But Nature had not been forced to evacuate the camp area; trees and tiny patches of woodland had remained, and the things which scouts love and seek had reasserted their supremacy there after the last of the soldiers, and later the army of clerical workers, had gone away.
The result was a kind of jumble of man’s hurried handiwork and Nature’s persistence, and the place, for a while, was a novel, nay even a delightful, spot in which to camp.