In half an hour he was done, and he said to turn off the flash, which I did, and then I turned it right back on again. That skeleton seemed to jump right out at you as soon as the shack was dark. It didn’t look as if it was painted on a board. The board just up and disappeared, and the skeleton looked as if it was standing in the air and _glowing_. It gave me the jumps.
“If that thing’s going along,” says I, “you can count me out. Two’s company—three’s a crowd.”
“Fiddlesticks,” says he. “I’ll carry it. Guess we’re ready now. Come on.”
“Hold the dog-gone thing with its back this way, then,” says I, “I don’t want it staring at _me_.”
So we went out of the shack and headed for the pirates’ lair, or barbed wire entanglement, or whatever it was Catty had decided it was now. Looked to me like he’s made up his mind to have it be a graveyard.
“Go careful now,” says Catty, “and keep listening. We don’t want to run into a trap.”
“You bet we don’t,” says I. “Won’t they have any lights?”
It turned out there wasn’t much light. Pretty soon we got close to the wire. Everything was quiet, but we could see a light in a tent, and after a while we could hear somebody walking up and down.
“Is he inside the wire, I wonder,” says I.
“If he was outside we could sic the skeleton on him, and let it bite his leg.”
“We’ll sic it on him, all right,” says he, “but first we’ve got to lead up to it.”
“I can do that,” says I. “My nose hurts so I can groan real natural.”
“All right,” he says, “you can be the official groaner of this expedition, but don’t let go with one till I say so.”
“Hurry up, then,” I says, “because I feel a groan coming on.”
We started in then and crawled closer until we weren’t more than a dozen feet from where the man was walking back and forth. We could barely see a black shape where he was. We kept quiet, and before long another sentinel came along and the two stopped to talk.
“I feel like I was back in the navy,” says the first one, “mounting guard like this.”
“How should I know? The Old Man didn’t take me into his confidence.”
“Guess Jonas P. Dunn never told nobody nothin’,” says the other. “Tight-mouthed old coot.”
“He knows what he’s up to, you can bet on that.”
“There’s diggin’ in it. Don’t s’pose he’s rim onto Captain Kidd’s treasure or somethin.”