th? Or duck shooting on the
Southwest coast? Or prairie-chicken and grouse shooting in the far West
and Rocky Mountains?" demanded Merriwell, who had arrived on the grounds
of the gun club with Bart Hodge and was taking his gun out of its case.

Paulding flushed.

"If you had ever shot grouse across the big pond, you 'now, you wouldn't
ask such a question, Merriwell!"

"I have shot grouse on the other side of the big pond, and it is fine
sport, true enough. But there is just as fine shooting to be had in
America. You make me tired. You want to act like an Englishman,
Paulding, but it is an insult to the English, for your imitation is
really disgraceful. A true Englishman is very much a man!"

"And Paulding is a mere thing!" snapped Hodge.

"He isn't worth noticing, don't you 'now!" sneered Paulding, moving away
with the members of the Chickering set. "He is always slinging insulting
things at me. It's mere jealousy, don't you 'now, that makes him act so.
Baw Jawve, if I was as jealous as Merriwell, I'd go drown myself!"

"He is always slinging insults at us in the same way!" Ollie Lord
breathlessly declared, looking as fierce as he could and lifting himself
on his tiptoes to increase his fighting height.

"I wouldn't let the thing worry me," purred Rupert Chickering.
"Merriwell is so spoiled by flattery that he is hardly responsible for
what he says. I never like to hold harsh feeling against any one."

"I'd like to pull the wetch'eth nothe!" lisped Lew Veazie, looking quite
as fierce as Ollie Lord. "It would therve him wight if I thould walk up
to him thome day and thimply pull hith nothe!"

"But he might pull yours!" Julian Ives warned. "That wouldn't be
pleasant, you know."

Julian Ives, in the perfumed sanctity of Chickering's rooms, often
looked lovingly at himself and his wonderful bang in the long mirror and
dreamed the heroic things he would like to do and the revenges he would
like to carry out, but his actual courage had been at a very low ebb
ever since his humiliating experience as a member of the Eskemo dog-team
driven by the cowboy, Bill Higgins. He was likely to remember that a
long while.

"They're not worth talking about--none of Merriwell's crowd!" snarled
Gene Skelding, as if anxious to change the drift of the unpleasant
conversation, for he had been given cause to fear and hate Merriwell and
his friends quite as much as any other individual who claimed the
companionship and friendship of