CHAPTER VI.
THE RESULT OF A PRACTICAL JOKE

The woods rang with their whoops and yells; their circling figures cast flitting, grotesque, fantastic shadows. The helpless captive choked and strangled; the fire had begun to scorch his shins.

Suddenly, with a series of answering yells, half a dozen masked fellows charged forth from the darkness and fell upon the savages, who, in seeming panic, took to their heels and fled, after a brief show of resistance. Two or three of the newcomers had apparently made an effort to dress themselves like cowboys, while the remainder simply wore rough, ill-fitting clothes, or garments turned wrongside out. One, who seemed to be the leader, scattered the blazing leaves and sticks with his feet and began stamping out the fire.

“Pards,” he said, “we’ve put the pesky redskins to rout and saved this poor fellow from a frightful death. I reckon he will be very grateful.”

The still choking captive, blinking the smoke from his eyes, gazed sharply at the speaker.

“I’m sure much obliged for the temporary relief, Mr. Barker,” he said; “but I’m not chump enough to opine you’re through with your shindig, and I allow there’s something more coming to me.”

“What’s this?” cried the other. “His voice sounds familiar. His face – I’ve seen it before. So help me, he’s the galoot that led the cowpunchers who lynched my partner, poor old Tanglefoot Bill. I swore vengeance upon him, and my hour has come. He shall pay dearly for what he did to Tanglefoot. Eh, pards?”

“That’s right; that’s right,” they cried, glaring threateningly at the captive through the eyeholes of their masks.

“Let’s swing him from a limb,” proposed a stout chap, who was occasionally losing a peanut from a hole in the bottom of the well stuffed side pocket of his coat. “Many a time and oft has he boasted of what he has done to cattle rustlers like us.”

“My deduction is – ” began a little chap; but instantly some one gave him a poke in the ribs, which cut him short.

“We’ll bear him to our retreat amid the mountains,” proposed the leader, “and there we can decide what fate shall be meted out to him. Release him from the tree, but blindfold his eyes, in order that he may not observe the trail we follow.”

These instructions were carried out, although they took care to leave Grant’s hands pinioned behind his back. A thickly folded handkerchief was placed over his eyes and securely tied at the back of his head. Barely was this done when the three redskins and the renegade came sneaking back from the shadows of the woods and joined the self-styled cattle rustlers. Threatening Grant if he made an outcry, they hurried him forth from the woods and away toward the twinkling lights of the distant village. Down the Barville road they went, approaching the dark and silent academy and the gymnasium. Among themselves at intervals they muttered fierce threats of vengeance for the death of the mythical “Tanglefoot Bill.”

Once or twice a sound like a suppressed, smothered giggle came from behind the mask of the fat fellow, causing one of his companions to give him a vigorous punch and hiss into his ear an order to “dry up.”

Within the gymnasium a shaded light glowed dimly. Beneath this light they gathered, with the unresisting and still blindfolded captive in their midst.

“What shall we do with him, comrades?” questioned the leader.

“String him up to a rafter,” urged one of his followers.

“Show him no mercy,” advised another.

“Make short work of him,” growled still another.

“Had we known who he was,” said the leader, “we’d never risked our lives to rescue him from the redskins. Comrades, listen. In yonder small, dark room lie the bleaching bones of poor Tanglefoot Bill. While we are debating over the proper fate for Bill’s slayer, I would suggest that we place the wretched captive in that room with the remains of his victim.”

This proposal meeting no opposition, Grant was pushed toward a door, at which one of the masked fellows took his place with his hand on the knob. At a signal from the leader, the door was opened, the blindfold snatched from Rod’s eyes, and he was given a push that sent him staggering into the room. At the same time some one cried in his ear:

“Behold the bones of your victim!”

The door slammed and the key was hastily turned in the lock.

Barely succeeding in keeping upon his feet, Rodney Grant stumbled against something that rattled; and then in the deep darkness of that place he saw lying at his very feet what seemed to be a skeleton, every bone of which glowed with a dull, phosphorescent luminosity. Involuntarily he backed away from the thing until he had retreated against the door.

“Great jackrabbits!” he gasped. “It can’t be – ” He choked, the words seeming to stick in his throat, for, to his added amazement and consternation, the skeleton moved, its head rising slowly from the floor and the upper part of its body following. Little by little it continued to rise, until at last it was in an upright position. Then one long, faintly gleaming arm was lifted from its side until it became outstretched toward the shivering, cowering lad. From some source a hollow groan sounded, followed immediately by a faint, huskily spoken word, twice repeated:

“Retribution! Retribution!”

Outside that room, which in the days when the building had served as a bowling alley had been a washroom and a closet for the keeping of clothing and various other articles, one of the masked jokers was manipulating the cords that had caused the skeleton to rise and lift its arm. Another fellow, with his mask removed, had applied his lips to a knothole in the partition, through which he sent the groan and spoke that terrible sounding word.

“Gee whiz!” giggled the fat chap. “I’ll bet he’s pretty near frightened into fits. I know I’d be.”

“Shut up, Chub!” hissed the leader, who was listening at the door. “Of course he’s scared stiff, for he’s a coward, anyhow.”

“He ought to be yelling blub-bloody murder by this time,” murmured Osceola, the Seminole.

“Can yeou hear anything, Berlin?” asked Tecumpseh, the Shawnee.

“How can I hear anything with all you fellows pushing and chattering?” fretfully retorted the one at the door.

“My deduction is,” said the chap who had pulled the cords, “that he’s too scared to even utter a chirp.”

“I bate a hundred dollars,” laughed King Philip, “that this will cook him so he won’t tell no more yarns about hunting Indians and lynching cattle thieves.”

“Shut up!” once more ordered the leader. “I can hear something now. Listen to that. What’s he doing?”

The sounds, low and weird and doleful, issuing from that small, dark room, filled them with unspeakable astonishment.

“So help me, Bob,” spluttered King Philip, “he’s singing!”

It was a sad and doleful wailing, like a funeral dirge, and the jokers, who had been ready to shriek with laughter a few moments before, were now struck dumb by wonderment, and more than one of them felt a shiver creep along his spine. Suddenly the singing ceased, but it was followed by a burst of wild laughter even more startling.

“He’s gug-giving us the ha-ha,” said Osceola. “Now what do you think of that!”

There seemed, however, to be no merriment in the strange, wild peals of laughter which reached their ears. Agitated and apprehensive, one fellow seized the shoulder of the chap who stood at the door.

“Open up, Bark,” he urged – “open up! Turn the lights on, somebody. Let’s see what’s the matter in there.”

As the lights were turned on the door swung open, and those practical jokers, crowding forward, beheld a spectacle that made more than one recoil. In some manner Rodney Grant had succeeded in freeing his hands from the rope. His coat had been torn off and flung aside. His shirt was ripped open at the throat, and one sleeve had been torn into shreds. He was crouching on one knee directly in front of the dangling skeleton, and the flood of light from the open door fell on a face so wild and terrible that the disguised boys shuddered at beholding it. He was white as a sheet; his eyes glared, and a frothing foam covered his lips.

“Avaunt!” he shrieked. “Quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; thou hast no speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare with!”

“Great mercy!” gurgled one of the group at the door. “He’s gone mad – stark, staring mad!”

CHAPTER VII.
THE ONE WHO LAUGHED LAST

While they stood paralyzed Rodney Grant suddenly leaped to his feet, still jabbering and laughing wildly, seized the skeleton, tore it from the ropes by which it was suspended, and charged them with the grisly thing in his grasp. Right and left they scattered, terrified beyond words, some of them actually uttering screams of fear. Their one great desire seemed to be to get out of the way and give Grant plenty of room.

Having driven them in this manner, the victim of the joke hurled the skeleton aside, rushed across the open floor of the gymnasium, caught up a chair and dashed it through a window, carrying away sash and glass. A single step he retreated, and then, with a forward bound and a yell, he followed the chair through the broken window, disappearing into the darkness outside. The appalled boys heard the sound of running feet swiftly die out in the distance.

“Well, we’ve done it!” said Cooper huskily, as he tore off his mask and revealed a face almost as ghastly as that of the lad who had leaped through the window.

“You’re right, Chipper,” agreed Chub Tuttle, also unmasking. “We drove him plumb daffy. It’s awful!”

“He busted the skeleton,” said Sleuth Piper, gazing ruefully at the broken thing, which lay on the floor where Grant had flung it. “The prof will raise the dickens about this.”

“Oh, hang the sus-skeleton!” stuttered Phil Springer. “Think of driving that fellow out of his wits! Gee! boys, it’s bad business.”

“Yeou bate it is,” agreed Sile Crane. “We’d orter knowed he wasn’t well balanced, for his old aunt has been half crazy all her life.”

Tuttle, his peanuts forgotten, had dropped his mask to the floor and sunk limply on a bench near the lockers, where he sat shivering like a round jelly pudding.

“It’s awful,” he muttered over and over – “it’s awful, fellows!”

“I guess we’re in a bad scrape,” said Hunk Rollins, who was posing no longer as Girty, the renegade.

“It’s awful!” mumbled Tuttle. “If we had ever stopped to think that he came from a family of loose screwed people we might not have pushed this thing so far.”

“He’s busted the skeleton,” complained Piper again. “Won’t the prof be hopping about that!”

“Busting the old sus-skeleton is nothing compared with driving a chap plumb cuc-crazy,” groaned Springer. “Perhaps he’ll never get his wits back. Maybe they’ll have to send him to a mum-madhouse, and we’ll be responsible – think of that, boys, we’ll be responsible! I’ll nun-never get over it.”

“Who proposed this thing, anyhow?” asked Roy Hooker, looking around. “Was it you, Sleuth?”

“Not much I didn’t,” answered Piper instantly. “It was Barker’s scheme. He said Grant was a scarecrow who was even afraid of the prof’s old skeleton, and suggested that it would be great fun if we could only haze him the way college fellows do.”

“But you got the skeleton. If it hadn’t been for you – ”

“Now don’t you try to shoulder all the blame onto me,” cried Piper, in terrified resentment, forgetting for the time being his artificial style of speech. “You were all in for it, every one of you. I simply had some keys by which I could get into the lab, where the skeleton was kept. You’re all as deep in the mud as I am in the mire. Barker is really the one who engineered this thing.”

“Where is he, anyhaow?” asked Crane, looking around.

“Yes, where is he?” cried the others, realizing for the first time that the fellow they had recognized as their leader was missing.

They called to him in vain. The outer door of the gym stood slightly ajar, and, after a time, looking at one another in dismay, they understood that Barker had slipped away.

“Now what do yeou fellers think of that!” rasped Sile Crane. “He’s skedaddled and left us; he’s run away.”

“Well, if that isn’t the tut-trick of a coward, I don’t know what you’d call it!” exploded Springer.

“He needn’t think he can get out of it that way!” blazed Jack Nelson.

“I’m sick,” moaned Tuttle – “oh, I’m awful sick! What do you s’pose they’ll do to us if we’ve really drove Grant batty? Oh, say! won’t I catch it at home!”

“We ought to follow him,” said Nelson. “We ought to catch him. No telling what he will do. Maybe he’ll jump into the lake or the river and be drowned.”

“I’m going home,” wheezed Hunk Rollins huskily. “Somebody is liable to come along and spot the whole of us here.” He edged toward the door.

“Yeou’re another quitter, jest like Barker,” roared Crane suddenly. “Yeou pranced around and made a lot of fightin’ talk to Rod Grant arter yeou’d figured it out that he wouldn’t take yeou up, and now yeou’re so allfired sca’t yeou want to skedaddle.”

“Somebody has got to help me take the skeleton back to the academy,” said Piper appealingly. “Don’t skin out and leave me, boys; let’s hang together.”

“If we don’t hang together,” muttered Cooper, with a rueful grimace, “we may hang separately.”

Little did they dream that at that very moment they were watched by two pairs of eyes gazing at them through the broken window.

Grant, having made his spectacular getaway, reached the road and ran as far as the lower corner of the academy yard, where he stopped, breathing a trifle heavily, and leaned upon the fence. In a moment he was startled by a voice coming from the shadows of a nearby tree.

“What’s the matter?” was the question that reached his ears. “What’s going on at the gym to-night?”

He recognized the voice as that of Ben Stone, whose figure he could perceive in the denser darkness under the tree. For a moment he hesitated; then, with a short laugh, he answered:

“Oh, just a bit of a monkey circus, that’s all. A few of my friends tried to force me into playing the clown, but I sure reckon the laugh is on them some. What are you doing here?”

“I knew something was up,” answered Stone, as he came forward, “and, while I didn’t want to butt in, I couldn’t choke down my curiosity entirely. Tell me about it.”

Grant did so briefly and concisely, beginning with his ambuscade by the fake Indians. Although a narrative unadorned and cut short, it was vivid and interesting enough to absorb the listener.

“All the time,” proceeded Rod, “I was doing my level best to get my hands free, for I allowed I’d sail into that bunch right lively if I could obtain the use of my paws. I was sure enough jarred some when they handed me into the dark room with the old skeleton and the thing rose up on its hind legs and groaned. That made me give an extra twist, and I broke the rope. I knew where I was, for Roger Eliot had shown me all over the gym. I likewise knew the powdered chalk for marking the field was kept on a shelf in that closet. It didn’t take me long to think of a plan to turn the laugh on that bunch of merry old roasters. I found the chalk and rubbed it over my face. Then, feeling around, I got hold of a cake of soap on the washstand and bit off a piece, which I proceeded to chew up so that I could froth at the mouth in fine shape. All the while I was chanting a funeral dirge a plenty doleful, punctuating it with occasional loud and mirthless ha-ha’s. The game worked well. They were listening, and I reckon it set them guessing. When I heard the key turning in the lock I proceeded to drop down on my shin bones in front of the skeleton, and I turned off a bit of the mad scene from Macbeth. Say, Stone, it knocked ’em stiff. Then when I saw I had them going I grabbed the old skeleton and made a dash at the bunch. They fell over one another in their urgent desire to give me ample room. I didn’t propose to let them get their hooks on me again, so I dropped old phosphorus bones, grabbed a chair, smashed a window, jumped through and touched the elevated spots outside. I opine the merry jesters left behind are a plenty disturbed about now, and – ”