“Huh!” objected Thomp.  “We penned that gang up for you.  Now, are you going to chase us off just as the real fun starts?”

“If you stay, it’ll be at your own risk, then,” answered Chief Coy, with a rather pleased grin, for he had followed the fortunes of Gridley H.S. on the football gridiron, and well enough he knew the school grit.

Pushing their way through, the police made their way to the closed rear door.

“Within, there!” summoned Coy, knocking lustily on the door.  “You are surrounded, and may as well give up.  Open the door, and come out, and you’ll be safe.”

There was a pause.  Then a gruff voice demanded: 

“If we open you don’t fire on us?”

“Not if you come out with your hands held up high.”

“All right, then.  Give us time to open the door.”

The light from the police dark lanterns played on the door as it swung open.  Then two very crestfallen robbers, holding their hands well aloft, came out on the steps.

The windows of the hall, some distance away, had been thrown up.  A lot of white-gowned girls, some with covered heads, and some not, looked wonderingly out at the spot lighted up by the dark lanterns.

Chief Coy and two of his officers quickly entered the bank.  It was ten minutes before they reappeared.

“Somebody has done us the good turn of discovering this thing just in time tonight,” announced Coy, with a grave face.  “The vault door is blown entirely off, and the vault is stacked high with sacks of money.  Who first discovered this thing anyway?”

“Don’t you know?” called Ben Badger.

From a score of throats at once the information broke forth: 

“Dick & Co.!”

“It’ll be a good night’s work for Dick & Co., then, when the bank directors meet” declared Chief Coy.  “In three or four minutes more these robbers would have been going sixty miles an hour with an automobile loaded down to the guards with real money!”

The police party being large enough to take care of everything, it was not many minutes more before the High School boys were back in the hall.  It took half an hour, however, for the young men to gratify the natural curiosity of the girls.  At last the orchestra leader, tiring of the long delay, passed the word to his musicians.  Then the music pealed out for that good, stirring old eulogy: 

“For he’s a jolly good fellow!”

In an instant bright-faced boys and girls caught up the refrain, making the hall shake with the din of their voices.

In the midst of it Thomp and Badger made a rush for Dick Prescott, caught him, and rushed him to the platform.  But they had to hold him there.

“Speech! speech!” roared the boy and girl assemblage.  There was a volley of hand-clapping.

But Dick, as soon as he could make himself heard, responded: 

“You’ve got my number—–­nothing but the freshman class.  When a freshman is in doubt he doesn’t dare do it!”