It was pitch black--no moon. We were hiking to one of the stations to camp for the night. A lot of leaves on the trail. One of the boys kicks a revolver laying on the trail. He gives it to me and I look at it briefly with a flash light. It looks like a legitimate fire arm. We all start freaking out that there is a murderer out on the trail in our area and he dropped this gun, but he surely has another, or someone of his "band" of robbers does. In darkness, your mind really wanders and devises all kinds of conspiracies. We know that there are people from all over the country on this famous trail and this was probably from some group of bad men wanting to prey on travelers. Surely, the guy who lost his revolver was probably looking for it and would soon find us.

When we finally get the group of traumatized scouts and leaders to our station to set up camp, we get looking at the revolver more carefully to see if it's loaded and find out it is actually just a pellet gun that had the orange tip removed so it looked real.

As I noted, darkness can really do a number on you when you are traveling a path you don't know and you can't see anything.