But it was in the second volume of that series, “The High School Pitcher,” that our readers found Dick & Co. entered fully in the training squads of one of the most famous of American high schools.  As described in the third volume, “The High School Left End,” Dick & Co. were transferred from the baseball nine to the gridiron eleven, and by this time had become the undisputed athletic leaders of Gridley High School.  These honors they had not won without tremendous opposition, especially by the formation of the notorious “Sorehead Squad” to oppose their hard earned supremacy in football.  Yet Dick & Co. ever went strenuously forward, in manly, clean-cut fashion, working unceasingly for the furthering of honest American sport.  Between the plottings of their enemies and a host of adventures on all sides, the school life of Dick & Co. proved exciting indeed.

In the “High School Boys’ Vacation Series” our readers have followed the summer doings of Dick & Co. as distinguished from the doings of their crowded school years.  The first volume devoted to the vacations of Dick & Co., “The High School Boys’ Canoe Club,” describes the adventures of our lads in an Indian war canoe which even their slender financial resources enabled them to buy at an auction sale of the effects of a stranded Wild West Show.  In the second volume of this series, “The High School Boys In Summer Camp,” our readers came upon an even more exciting narrative of keenly enjoyed summer doings, replete with lively adventures.  In that volume the activities of Tag Mosher, a strangely odd character, kept Dick & Co. continually on the alert.  In the third volume of the vacation series, entitled “The High School Boys’ Fishing Trip,” were chronicled the things that befell Dick & Co. while away on a fishing expedition that became famous in the annals of Gridley school days.  This third volume was full to the brim with the sort of adventures that boys most love.  Some old enemies of Dick & Co. appeared; how they were put to rout is well known to all our readers.  How Dick & Co. played a huge joke, and several smaller ones upon their enemies, is described in that volume.

In this present volume will be recounted all that befell Dick & Co. in August after completing their junior year in Gridley High School, just as the preceding or third volume dealt with the happenings of July of that same summer.

After that first halt Dick & Co. plodded on for another hour.  But Prescott, noting that Hazelton was still on the driver’s seat of the camp wagon, blandly inquired: 

“Harry, if you sit up there, lazily holding the reins, how do you expect to get your share of the training work of this hike?”

“Perhaps I’d rather have the comfort than the training work,” laughed Hazelton.

“That will never do!” smiled Dick.  “Suppose you climb down and let Danny Grin take your place at the reins until the next halt.  I suspect that Danny boy already has a few pebbles in his shoes, and that he’ll be glad enough to look over the world from the driver’s seat.”