“Just what I thought, Ralph,” said Tom Sherwood. “If that’s the case, I reckon we’d all of us better close our potato traps and talk low.”
“The mill is still some distance away,” Hugh told them. “I know because that foam comes from the creek tumbling down among those rocks yonder. Don, you’ve been here before, how about it?”
“Won’t get there for nearly ten minutes according to my figuring,” came the ready response that proved the reasoning of the scout master to be nearly accurate.
“And I should think we’d only have to follow up this little stream to strike the mill,” suggested Walter Osborne.
“That was what we laid out the other day,” Don told him, “and it turned out all right. So, as I’ve luckily managed to bring you over the rise and within touch of the mill, I’ll only too gladly turn over things to Hugh here. He knows the lay of the land, I wager, and——”
“’Sh! drop down, everybody, behind these bushes!” whispered Hugh. “I saw something moving over yonder, and chances are the hoboes have broken loose!”
CHAPTER X.
LYING IN AMBUSH.
These low words coming from the scout master caused a general “ducking” on the part of the scouts. Every fellow carried out the tactics of screening himself from observation according to his individual notion. This one dodged behind an adjacent tree, another curled up back of a friendly bush, while a third might have been seen hugging the ground, with his nose touching the virgin soil. Possibly this latter class believed, like the foolish ostrich, that, as long as they could not see anything, their bodies must also be concealed.
And after all it turned out to be a false alarm. Hugh himself was the first to ascertain that it had been a rabbit bounding away that had disturbed his peace of mind, and caused him to give that sudden warning.
“It’s all over, fellows, and no damage done,” the scout master told them in his cautious way, though at the same time he could not help smiling at the ridiculous attitudes assumed by some of the scouts in their wild endeavor to hide. “Only a scared little bunny, as it turns out. We’ll go on where we left off.”