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——”
“’Sh!” hissed Ben suddenly, grasping Grant’s arm. “Here comes somebody.”
They hastily retreated into the darkness beneath the tree, from which
shelter they saw a fellow pass at a run.
“One of my late entertainers on the way to his downy couch,” whispered
Rod, smothering a chuckle of satisfaction. “I trust his slumbers
to-night may not be disturbed by unpleasant dreams.”
“I believe it was Barker,” murmured Stone;
“Oh, Barker!” said Grant, with a snap of his jaws. “He was sort of a
high cockalorum with the gang. I judge he put up the job on me. And now
he’s quit his partners in crime and scooted. I sized him up for that
kind of a piker. Let’s slide down to the gym and see how the gang is
taking it.”
And so it happened that, standing outside the shattered window, they
were more or less highly entertained by the talk of the frightened boys
within the gymnasium. Also, as those lads had removed their masks, all
save Barker, who had deserted, were seen and recognized beyond any
question or doubt. After it had been arranged that Piper and Crane
should return the broken skeleton to the academy laboratory and the
others were preparing to scatter quietly to their various homes, Rod
and Ben decided it was time for them to depart.
In Stone’s room at Mrs. Jones’ home Grant washed the powdered chalk
from his face, combed his hair and made his appearance as passable as
possible.
“Aunt Priscilla will sure be a plenty worried by this time,” he said,
“and I don’t want to frighten her into fits by showing up looking like
a battered specimen from a railroad wreck. If you’ll loan me a coat,
I’ll be much obliged. I can get mine to-morrow.”
Wearing Ben’s best coat, the young Texan finally said good night and
departed, feeling well satisfied with himself and the manner in which
he had turned the joke on his hazers.
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