There was a total silence in the room while the colonel and the sheriff glared at each other. The whole frame of the sheriff shook with suppressed rage and his breath came fast. Calmly the colonel looked him straight in the eye. But the sheriff was beaten and he knew it.
Instead he vented his fury upon the Hydes. “Get out of here and get home,” he snarled. “Don’t ever let me catch you in any trouble again as long as I’m sheriff on this Ridge! You, Peter Vancouver, come here while I put the handcuffs on you.”
The Hydes had slunk off and were lost in the darkness. The sheriff had handcuffed Peter Vancouver and now they were on their way to the local jail in Rideway. After putting the light out the colonel and the members of the Ghost Patrol left the cabin and started over the trail to camp.
“I’m very glad we got there in time to prevent any serious injury to that old man,” remarked the colonel, as they walked on. “Did you boys have any trouble with that sheriff?”
“A little bit, sir,” Douglas replied. “He made a lot of noise when we explained things to him. But he did come finally, though he talked so much and made so much noise on the way up that Vench and I felt like rolling him in the mud!”
“I guess it was about time that somebody talked to him,” the colonel said. “The people around here are curious. They haven’t made any effort to run down this ghost and they take abuse from this great blustering sheriff. But I guess this ghost angle of things is about over.”
“All that remains now is to catch Maul,” Jordan reminded him.
“Yes, and we’ll see to it that steps are taken to do that,” the headmaster promised.
The sky was pitch black, and not a star in sight. A leaden sky threatened rain and the absence of the moon and the friendly stars made the world below very dark indeed. Fortunately for them the cadets knew the road fairly well, and they approached the camp through the bushes without having altered their course enough to puzzle them.
“We will be hailed in about a moment,” said the colonel. They were close to the outpost where the sentry was on duty, and they advanced boldly, waiting for the call.
But none came. They reached the line of patrol that the sentry was supposed to make, but they did not run across the man who should have been patrolling. In bewilderment they stopped.