CHAPTER IX

TED LAYS DOWN THE LAW

“How do you know that?” Buck asked, as they all crowded closer to look at the dangling skeleton.

“Because the person who hung it here forgot to notice that there is a name on the lower left rib,” replied Ted, pointing. “There is some white chalk over it, but if you look closely you’ll see the name of Doctor Hemple. I don’t know anything about skeletons, but this one has evidently been in this state a long time.”

“I’ll be hanged!” cried Buck. “What do you suppose anyone did that for?”

“I imagine that it is all part of what has been going on right along,” Ted answered. “Somebody thought this would scare us. But I guess they thought we haven’t any eyes or brains! Look at the rope which is holding it up! It is an old one, and somewhat weather-beaten, but not as much as it would be if this was the skeleton of a man who had either hung himself or been hanged in the woods. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if whoever hung it here wanted us to believe that it was the skeleton of some British soldier!”

“Looks like somebody is trying to impress us with the history of the place,” smiled Buck.

“Looks more to me as though someone was trying to impress us with the fact that we aren’t welcome around here,” grumbled Ted. “But this act won’t get them anywhere. If that rope was supposed to have hung there all these years while the skin dropped off and all trace of the clothing disappeared, all I have to say is that it is a mighty fine piece of rope, that is all!”

“It certainly was well thought out otherwise,” remarked Buck, as the boys fell to talking it over among themselves. “The head lying on the ground half upside down looks for all the world as though the skull fell off and has never been touched.”

“That skull has been touched, though,” said Ted, examining it. “It has been cut with some surgical tool. Well, that was just a lot of time wasted on the part of someone.”

“But it is a real skeleton, isn’t it, Ted?” Drummer asked.

“Oh, yes, it is real enough, all right, but it belongs in some doctor’s study and has been there for a long time. I never heard of a Doctor Hemple, but we’ll try and find out if there is anyone around here with that name.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Buck asked. Ted considered, but shrugged his shoulders.

“Blessed if I know. We don’t want it, and at the same time we don’t want it hanging around here to click with the wind. Let’s put it up in the hollow above and leave it there. We can look at it from time to time and see if anyone has taken it.”

The boys shrank from touching the thing so Ted and Buck cut the rope down, picked up the skull, and carried the skeleton to a small hollow well above the camp, where they left it and returned to the others.

“That skeleton was rather a clever fellow,” laughed Ted. “We found that his joints had all been wired together with a thin wire, which means that after his skin dropped off he got down off of his rope, wired himself together, and then got back on his rope, if we’re supposed to think it is a genuine affair. I think that whoever hung it there must have hoped that we’d be so scared that we would flee from the camp in terror, without stopping to investigate thoroughly.”

“Say, this couldn’t be a trick to draw us out of camp, could it?” Buck asked, suddenly.

There was a moment of silence as they thought it over. Ted seized his lantern.

“I hope not, but it might be,” he cried, bolting through the bushes.

But there was nothing to worry about on that score. The camp was perfectly peaceful and if anyone had visited it in their absence there was no trace of the fact. The fires were dying and everything was in order.

“All right, let’s get to bed, and we’ll talk about it all in the morning,” Ted called, cheerfully.

Most of the boys obeyed at once, but four or five boys clustered around Ralph Plum, who was talking to them earnestly. Their heads were close together and he seemed to be doing all the talking. Ted walked over to them and they looked at him somewhat nervously.

“Well, what is on your minds?” Ted asked.

The other boys looked at Plum and he cleared his throat defiantly. As he stood before Ted he was fully as big as the leader, with a bigger shoulder spread. Obviously he was out of place with the smaller boys and should have been one of the leaders, a fact that had crossed his mind more than once as he secretly chaffed under Ted’s and Buck’s orders. He was well aware that his relative had given a big sum of money to the organization, and to rank simply as a member of the club and not even as a captain of a tent had irritated him from the start. Deep in his heart there was a fear of the camp they were in, and although he would not go so far as to say that he feared the presence of anything supernatural near the place, he did feel a bad atmosphere and it made him perpetually uneasy.

“We fellows don’t like this place for a camping place,” he began. “We want to go somewhere else.”

“Want to run away, eh!” asked Ted, as the other boys, crowding into the open, watched.

“We aren’t running away,” returned Plum, doggedly. “But this place isn’t healthy for anybody. Already we have received several warnings that we aren’t wanted around here, and I don’t see why we can’t get wise to ourselves and get out before something happens. Up to the present time nothing has happened, but how do you know that something won’t happen that we’ll be pretty sorry for? We don’t have to go home, but there are places nearer home where we can camp, and I can show you a couple of good ones, almost as good as this one.”

“And then, at the end of the month, we go back to the trustees and tell them that we were afraid to use their own camping site and had to go somewhere else? Let everybody in the town know that we were scared to death? Is that what you mean?” asked Ted.

“No, because if we all agree to keep still we won’t have to let the story out. We could even go back and make out that we did stay in this camp all summer, and who would be the wiser?”

Ted stood with his hands on his hips, a frown of contempt on his face. He would have thought differently about it if it had been one of the younger boys who had made the request, but Plum was a big boy and his counsel was dangerous for the little fellows. Ted longed to take the big boy and shake him until his teeth rattled, but he did not feel justified in going that far. To his mind the question just now was one of discipline in the matter of going to bed, and he felt that he must make good on that first.

“We’ll discuss all that in the morning, right after breakfast,” he said. “Right now I have ordered you to bed, and you are going! I’m the boss of this camp and you fellows are going to obey me, at least for the present. As to the idea that I would ever sneak off somewhere else, and then go back and tell Mr. Calvert that we had spent the month here, that is so silly that I won’t even discuss it. You’ve heard what I said about bed. March to your tents!”

There was one long moment of indecision. Those back of Ted near the tents watched with breathless interest to see what the outcome would be and Buck was prepared to back his chum up. The smaller boys with Plum hesitated and looked at him. That Plum was angry there was no doubt, but he did not know clearly what to do. He measured Ted up in a glance and he felt for a moment that he was physically able to handle him, but he was not so sure when he looked into Ted’s clear, direct eyes. They didn’t look uncertain, and he lowered his own gaze.

“You’ll talk it over in the morning?” he asked, somewhat lamely.

“Yes, I will. But not another word tonight.”

Plum walked slowly to his tent and the other boys followed to their own. Ted looked to see if little Tommy Clayton was with them, but the small boy was over in front of his own tent, looking on. As Ted walked back to his tent they all scattered and were soon undressing, the lights going out one by one.

The night was quiet and uneventful.

In the morning something radically different claimed their attention. One of the boys, looking out of the tent, cried in an excited voice that there was a bear in the camp. Every head was thrust out of the flaps, and sure enough, there near the dead embers of their fire, was a small brown bear, sniffing around a spot where some beans had been dropped. The cries of the boys made him lift his head, and he stared at them with his small, piggy eyes.

“Oh, will he attack us?” a boy asked, in Buck’s tent.

“No, unless he is pretty desperate for food, and I don’t see why he should be at this time of the year,” answered Buck. “I think I can get rid of him.”

Buck reached into his duffle bag. Drummer stared in fascination at the undecided bear.

“Gosh, suppose he ate one of us!” he said.

Charlie Wells grinned at him from another tent. “I think he came down here just on purpose to get you, Drummer!” he said. “He probably heard that you eat more than anybody else, and he is here to make a meal of you. If we had to throw somebody out to him to keep him quiet, we’d throw Drummer, wouldn’t we, fellows?”

“Sure!” came in a chorus.

“I don’t doubt it!” returned the fat boy.

Buck appeared in the doorway of the tent with something in his hand. He drew back his arm and launched the tennis ball at the bear. The white ball went straight and true, hitting the bear on the nose with a whack.

The little bear gave a grunt of surprise, shook his head in evident perplexity, and turned and ran at a lumbering trot away from the camp, pursued by the laughter of the boys. He disappeared at top speed in the undergrowth and avoided the camp from that day onward.

Breakfast was eaten cheerfully, the bear incident having put them all in good spirits, and afterward Ted addressed them as they sat around the fire. He talked without heat, but earnestly.

“I want to lay down the law to you fellows, not in any nasty way, but so that there will be no mistake,” he said. “From the events which have gone on around here we know that someone doesn’t want us in this camp, because if anyone will go to the trouble to blow a conch shell and hang up a skeleton, they aren’t fooling. But we’re not going to run away like a bunch of babies. I’m responsible for this camp, and if I went back and said that I couldn’t hold you here, I would be falling down on a trust which was committed to me. We’ll show this prowler, whoever he is, that we have more right to be here than he has and that we won’t pack up and move!”

He glanced briefly at Plum. “If any of you boys have any complaint to make, make it to Buck or to me. We are the leaders and we’ll try and do what is right. We’re not going to run away from this camp just because someone wants us to, and we’re not going home one single day before Labor Day! So get that straight, and also the fact that all orders must be obeyed without argument. If there are several bosses around any organization things jar, and while I don’t want to appear to be overbearing, Buck and I must have your full support. We’ll be fair with you, I promise you that. That will be all for now.”

The group broke up, scattering to the affairs at hand. Tom Clayton spoke to the morose Plum.

“Ted is quite a leader, isn’t he?”

“He’s too much leader!” was the growled response.