Morgan Scott - Boys of Oakdale Academy

“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!”

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?”