in it, but it's got plenty of
e-pluribus unions in it. The potatoes and dumplings go to the patrol
leaders, carrots to first and second hand scouts; tenderfeet get nothing
because the stew isn't tender enough...."

It was pleasant sitting there in the bright area surrounded by darkness,
chatting and planning the work for the morrow, and eating hunter's stew,
scout style, patent applied for. And notwithstanding the slurs which Roy
had cast at the sky it was pleasant to see that vast bespangled
blackness over head. In the solemn night the neighboring shacks were
divested of their tawdry cheapness, the loose and flapping strips of
tar-paper and the broken windows were not visible, and the buildings
seemed clothed in a kind of sombre dignity--silent memorials of the boys
who had made those old boards and rafters ring with their shouts and
laughter. Not a sound was there now from all those barnlike remains of a
life that was gone. Only the noise of the saw and the hammer would
resound where once the stirring revelry echoed.

"You hear some funny sounds here at night, when the wind blows," Blythe
remarked.

"Shh, listen; I hear something now," one of the scouts said.

"I heard that last night," said Blythe uneasily; "or else I dreamed it."

Westy, who had been poking up the fire, paused, his stick poised,
listening. "It's over there," he said, pointing to the tall dark outline
of the windmill.

"There isn't breeze enough to turn the fan," Doc Carson said.

"It sounds like someone groaning," said another.

From the neighborhood of that old tower, though perhaps farther off,
they could not tell, came a sound almost human, a kind of moaning
intermingled with a plaintive wail, pitched in a higher key.

"Spooky," Westy said.

"This is the kind of a place I like," said Connie.

"Only it's nice to have somebody here," Blythe admitted.

"That's all right, _we're_ here," Pee-wee said.

They did not hear the sound again. If one were superstitious he might
have conjured that sound into a crying of the ghost of some dead soldier
haunting the old forsaken camp. But these scouts did not believe in
ghosts.

They did, however, believe in hunter's stew and they forgot all else as
they sat around their camp-fire in the quiet darkness, telling yarns,
and amusing their new friend by jollying....

CHAPTER X

THE FALL OF SCOUT HARRIS

As a camping place, perhaps the old reservation would not have proved a
spot to the