“I’m glad he didn’t have his shoes on,” he said. “Now we know he’s got some kind of a scar on his foot. Come ahead, follow me.”
Eight or ten of these prints, among many others which Roy did not pause to distinguish, brought them to the concrete road which runs through the old reservation, the Knickerbocker Road, as it is called. Here the leader of the Silver Foxes was baffled. There was no following footprints here.
They paused for a moment, considering. The white road stretched like a ribbon straight north and south. The temporary makeshift cross streets could be seen in black outline with their silent, ghostly, gloomy buildings, standing in more or less regular order. Here and there was an area of lesser darkness where some boarded side had fallen away revealing the fresher wood of the interiors.
The two scouts moved northward a little way along this permanent, central road, the backbone of the old camp. Still they could hear that strange, unearthly voice.
Suddenly out of the darkness near them sped a form. It crossed the road, entered one of the old buildings and hurriedly emerged, entering another. It seemed like some lost spirit of the night. It passed within ten feet of the scouts, never noticing them. It seemed intent with a kind of diabolical intentness. Meanwhile the voice continued, now mournful, now petulant, now clear, now modulated, according to the rising wind.
The two scouts paused spellbound as if in a place haunted. The figure had disappeared but they could hear the patter of its running, and once or twice a fleeting dark shadow. The breeze was freshening and conjuring every sound about the ramshackle buildings into spectral wailings. A fragment of glass falling from a window startled the listeners. Agitated, their nerves tense, they strained their eyes for glimpses of the hurrying apparition and listened to the ghostly concert.
“It’s he,” said Warde; “we’ve got to catch him. Do you think that sound is a tree toad? Listen!” He pulled his hat on tighter because of the rising wind.
“First I thought it was,” Roy said. “But it isn’t. They make funny noises but not like that. It’s off there and up high. It’s not any animal–or loose boards or anything like that. Come on.”
Suddenly out of the blackness arose a piercing scream. Its echo resounded from the dried boards of some building and re-echoed from another as if its terror-stricken owner had three voices. It mingled with that wailing voice, distant, aloof. Then they heard human words, sounding strange and unhuman.
“I’m coming! Wait, I’m coming!”