'To me! to me, too!' David cried under his breath, carried away by the haunting imagination, and straining his eyes into the dusk. Had the night opened to his sight there and then in a vision of glory, he would have been no whit surprised. Hark!--what was that sound? A weird scream rose on the wind. The startled congregation in the smithy scrambled to their feet. Another scream, nearer apparently than the first, and then a loud wailing, broken every few seconds by a strange slight laugh, of which the distance seemed quite indefinite. Was it close by, or beyond the Red Brook? The prayer-leader turned white, the boys stood huddled round him in every attitude of terror. Again the scream, and the little ghostly laugh! Looking at each other wildly, the whole congregation broke from the smithy down the hill. But the leader stopped himself. 'It's mebbe soom one in trouble,' he said manfully, every limb trembling. 'We mun go and see, my lads.' And he rushed off in the direction whence the first sound had seemed to come--towards the Red Brook--half a dozen of the bolder spirits following. The rest stood cowering on the slope under the smithy. David meanwhile had climbed the ruined wall, and stood with head strained forward, his eyes sweeping the moor. But every outline was sinking fast into the gulf of the night; only a few indistinct masses--a cluster of gorse-bushes, a clump of mountain ash--still showed here and there. The leader made for one of these darker patches on the mountain-side, led on always by the recurrent screams. He reached it; it was a patch of juniper overhanging the Red Brook--when suddenly from behind it there shot up a white thing, taller than the tallest man, with nodding head and outspread arms, and such laughter--so faint, so shrill, so evil, breaking midway into a hoarse angry yell. '_Jenny Crum! Jenny Crum!_' cried the whole band with one voice, and, wheeling round, they ran down the Scout, joined by the contingent from the smithy, some of them falling headlong among the heather in their agony of flight, others ruthlessly knocking over those in front of them who seemed to be in their way. In a few seconds, as it seemed, the whole Scout was left to itself and the night. Footsteps, voices, all were gone--save for one long peal of most human, but still elfish, mirth, which came from the Red Brook. CHAPTER XI A dark figure sprang down from the wall of the smithy, leapt along the heather, and plunged into the bushes along the brook. A cry in another key was heard. David emerged, dragging something behind him. 'Yo limb, yo! How dare yo, yo little beast? Yo impident little toad!' And in a perfect frenzy of rage he shook what she held. But Louie--for naturally it was Louie--wrenched herself away, and stood confronting him, panting, but exultant. 'I freetened 'em! just didn't I? Cantin humbugs! "_Jenny Crum! Jenny Crum!_"' And, mimicking the voice of the leader, she broke again into an hysterical shout of laughter.