“Take your family and slip out through the back door,” Dick whispered to Tom Drake.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever see you again,” murmured Drake huskily,
“so I want to say-----”

“Don’t say anything,” Dick smiled back.  “You’re all right, from now on.  And we’ve all learned something to-night.  We’ll let it rest there.  Good-bye, and the best of good luck for you and yours.”

So the Drakes escaped from what would have been an embarrassing scene.  Nor were Dick and his friends long in getting away from the too-enthusiastic citizens.

“It’s late enough for us to go back to camp and turn in, isn’t it?” suggested Tom Reade.

“I was thinking of that myself,” Dick admitted.

“You must be tired, anyway,” Dave hinted.  “You whipped Miller all right, but he was a tiring brute, and I’ll wager that you’re both sore and exhausted.”

“I’ll plead guilty to a little bit of both,” Dick Prescott assented, laughing at the recollection of Miller at the time when that brute’s second eye was closed.

Yet it was more than half an hour after their return to camp when slumber finally began to assert its claim upon the Gridley boys.  For Greg and Harry, as soon as they had heard a few words as to the evening’s adventure, insisted upon hearing all of it before they would let Dick turn in.

“I’ll bet they’re sore in Miller’s place tonight,” chuckled Greg, just before be extinguished the second lantern.

Certainly anger did reign in Miller’s place for the rest of that evening.

Miller had been brought to consciousness, after considerable effort.  He was even able to be up and about his place, but his swollen features looked like a caricature of a face.

“The schoolboy that was able to do that to you, Miller, must have been eight feet high and as wide as a gate,” remarked one of the red-nosed patrons of the place.

“Shut up!” was Miller’s gracious response.

There were other drinking places in Fenton, and to these the news of the big fellow’s drubbing quickly spread.

Indeed, the fight seemed to be the one topic of the talk of Fenton that evening.

As it happened, it wasn’t very long before word was brought to Miller that Dick and his friends were camping down on Andy Hartshorn’s place.

“It’s queer that Hartshorn will let such young toughs stop on his land!” growled Miller.

“They ought to be chased out of town—–­that’s what!” growled a patron of the place.

More of this talk was heard, until finally someone demanded thickly: 

“Well, why can’t we chase ’em out of town?”

At first, the idea met with instant favor among the dozen or more worthless men gathered in Miller’s saloon.  The plan grew in favor until one man, slighter than the rest, observed: 

“Say!  Stop and think of one thing.  We know what one of the boys did to Miller, and there are six of those boys down at the camp!”