“What have you guessed, Hugh?” demanded Arthur, knowing from the manner of the scout master that he had apparently solved the mystery.

Hugh was laughing now.  The strained look had passed from his young face.  It seemed to him like a jump from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“If you fellows will look over to one side to where that man was turning the handle of some sort of box just as if he might be an organ grinder, you’ll guess what it all means,” Hugh told them, pointing as he spoke.

Cries of wonder and comprehension immediately arose from Alec and Arthur, though even then Billy and Stallings did not seem to fully grasp the facts.

“Motion-picture actors at work!” exclaimed Alec.

“Oh! did you ever hear of such a thing?” gurgled Billy, at the same time beginning to lose the haunted look on his face.

“Sure thing!” added Arthur, grinning now.  “That chap is the camera man—–­what is it they call it, a cinematoscope or something that way.  He’s been grinding like mad while all that battle on the walls was taking place.  And I can see him laughing from here, as if that last scrap pleased him a whole lot.”

“Well, if that don’t beat everything!” said Monkey Stallings, in mingled awe and delight.  “To think of a company finding out about that queer old imitation castle, and coming all the way up here so as to stage one of their Shakespeare plays around it!”

“And look at all the actors they’ve gone and fetched along with them, will you?” Billy went on to say.  “Why, there must be scores of men and women there, all dressed in fancy costumes.  Gee! it must cost rafts of money to stage just one of those dramas.”

“Oh!” said Hugh; “expense doesn’t seem to enter into their calculations when they think they’ve got something that will go.  A thousand people have been used in, one play, I’ve read, and as much as two hundred thousand dollars spent on it!”

“Say, here’s our same old luck come along again, fellows!” declared Arthur, as though it gave him a tremendous amount of satisfaction to realize it.  “I’ve always had a sort of hankering after a chance to learn just how these queer people managed when staging one of their plays, and as sure as you live we’re in a fair way to find out now.”

“Was there ever anything so strange as our being up here just at the time they came to play their game?” demanded Monkey Stallings.  “Why, it begins to look as if they must have engaged the old castle especially to cast their play here, and make it seem the real stuff, don’t you think so, Hugh?”

“That’s not so very remarkable, after all,” ventured Hugh, as all of them continued to stare at the many moving figures, apparently resting for the next stage in the exciting drama that was being reeled off.  “I understand that all those big companies have spies out everywhere about the country.”

“Spies!” echoed Billy; “and what for, Hugh, when we’re not at war with anybody?”