He swaggered toward the door, the others following in his wake.

Keith rose from his seat.

“Go back to your places.”  He spoke so quietly that his voice could scarcely be heard.

“Go nowhere!  You go to h——­l!” sneered the big leader, contemptuously.  “’Tain’t no use for you to try to stop me—­I kin git away with two like you.”

Perhaps, he could have done so, but Keith was too quick for him.  He seized the split-bottomed chair from which he had risen, and whirling it high above his head, brought it crashing down on his assailant, laying him flat on the floor.  Then, without a second’s hesitation, he sprang toward the others.

“Into your seats instantly!” he shouted, as he raised once more the damaged, but still formidable, weapon.  By an instinct the mutineers fell into the nearest seats, and Keith turned back to his first opponent, who was just rising from the floor with a dazed look on his face.  A few drops of blood were trickling down his forehead.

[Illustration:  “If you don’t go back to your seat, I’ll dash your brains out,” said Keith.]

“If you don’t go to your seat instantly, I’ll dash your brains out,” said Keith, looking him full in the eye.  He still grasped the chair, and as he tightened his grip on it, the crestfallen bully sank down on the bench and broke into a whimper about a grown man hitting a boy with a chair.

Suddenly Keith, in the moment of victory, found himself attacked in the rear.  One of the smaller boys, who had gone out with the rest, hearing the fight, had rushed back, and, just as Keith drove Jake Dennison to his seat, sprang on him like a little wild-cat.  Turning, Keith seized and held him.

“What are you doing, Dave Dennison, confound you?” he demanded angrily.

“I’m one of ’em,” blubbered the boy, trying to reach him with both fist and foot.  “I don’t let nobody hit my brother.”

Keith found that he had more trouble in quelling Dave, the smallest member of the Dennison tribe, than in conquering the bigger brothers.

“Sit down and behave yourself,” he said, shoving him into a seat and holding him there.  “I’m not going to hit him again if he behaves himself.”

Keith, having quieted Dave, looked to see that Jake was not much hurt.  He took out his handkerchief.

“Take that and wipe your face with it,” he said quietly, and taking from his desk his inkstand and some writing-paper, he seated himself on a bench near the door and began to write letters.  It grew late, but the young teacher did not move.  He wrote letter after letter.  It began to grow dark; he simply lit the little lamp on his desk, and taking up a book, settled down to read; and when at last he rose and announced that the culprits might go home, the wheezy strains of the three instruments that composed the band at Gates’s had long since died out, and Gordon Keith was undisputed master of Ridge College.