"With his eyes starting from their sockets he sat incapable of movement, waiting—waiting—when suddenly——"
Out of the pine on which every scout was focusing his gaze came an unmistakable choking, gasping sound.
An instant later a faintly glowing light appeared.
"Great goodness! Look there!" exclaimed Patrol Leader Crawford in a husky voice.
With a piercing shriek a horrible apparition floated out of the branches of the pine. Its white hair was covered with ghastly clots of red. Its arms waved wildly, moving the folds of a flowing white garment splotched with blood.
Transfixed with horror, the boys sat frozen in their tracks as THE THING rushed toward them.
Then there came a huge splash in the bobbing tub behind them and an unmistakably human voice exclaimed, "Oh, thunder!" The voice belonged to Pepper Perkins, and the Scoutmaster's flashlight revealed its owner in a sitting posture in the tub of water, whence he had fallen from a low branch of a tree directly over his head.
Meanwhile the "ghost" that had floated out of the pine was having troubles of its own. It stopped floating with a sudden jerk and hung suspended in mid-air, with a pair of khaki legs dangling beneath the flowing garment and kicking around for something solid to stand on, while a very unghostly voice pleaded, "Gosh, sakes! Can't you help a feller down?"
A few turns of the flashlight revealed the whole plot. The "ghost" had floated on a wire stretched from the huge pine to the smaller one across the clearing. The faintly glowing light was a flashlight enclosed in a paper sack, the horrible head-dress a piece of old fur robe smeared with red paint, and the "shriek" a siren whistle.
You have heard how Death-Rattle Hill came by its name. And now you know how it came about that George Taylor of the Glenwood Scouts acquired the name of "Terry"—a name which he bears to this day.