"Hi! hi! stop that!" yelled Buster Beggs. "We are not ghosts! We are----"
Bang! spoke up the shotgun a second time, and the load went clipping through the bushes on the left.
"Hand me your shotgun, Billy," said one of the voices. "I don't know if I hit 'em or not, but this'll fetch 'em!"
"Run!" cried Dave. "Run for your lives! That old farmer is so scared he doesn't know what he is doing!"
And then all the boys ran across the roadway and dove into the woods beyond. They heard another report, but the contents of the gun did not reach them.
IN WHICH JOB HASKERS GETS LEFT IN THE COLD
The boys kept on running for fully a hundred yards, plunging deeper and deeper into the woods which lined the roadway. Tom Atwood had dropped the plank and two of the club members had lost their headpieces, but nobody dreamed of going back for the articles.
"I think I know who that man is," said Phil, when the crowd came to a halt.
"I thought that, too, but I wasn't sure. He called the other fellow Billy."
"He has a boy working for him now and his name is Billy," said Shadow. "I met him on the road several times, driving cows. He isn't just right in his mind. I suppose Marcy got him to work cheap."
"I wonder if Marcy really thought we were ghosts?" mused the senator's son. "Maybe he only said that to scare us. He might have thought we were up to some kind of a job around his farm."
"Well, whether he thought we were ghosts or not, he certainly shot at us," was Phil's comment. "Ugh! I am glad I didn't get a dose of the shot!"
"That is one more black mark against Mike Marcy," said Luke Watson. "We'll have to remember to pay him back."
"Never mind about paying him back just now," answered Roger. "The question is, What's to do next? That run warmed me up and I'll take cold if I stand here long doing nothing."
"We must get back to the boathouse. Remember, the Soden boys are still locked up in that closet. It hasn't much ventilation and we don't want them to smother."
"I'm not going around by the road," said Henshaw.
"Not on your life!" exclaimed Ben. "I'd rather go down to the river and walk over the ice."
It was finally decided to follow Ben's suggestion, and the crowd continued on their way through the brushwood until the Leming River was reached. They saw or heard nothing more of Mike Marcy and his hired boy, for which they were thankful. Reaching the ice, they set off at a dog-trot for the old boathouse.