“Let us cut that tree down,” ordered Captain Putnam.

Two axes had been brought along, and Dale used one while Peleg Snuggers wielded the other.  Soon the cedar commenced to totter.

“Look out!” cried Captain Putnam, and then crash! the tree came down, directly on top of the tar-barrels.  Up went a thick cloud of smoke and sparks.  But the cadets were ready with dirt and stones, and the danger of a new blaze was quickly averted.

While the tree was being cut down, the cadets and teachers had been busy with pickaxes and shovels, and also with their rakes and wet swabs, and had put out much of the fire elsewhere.  One more tree had to be leveled, and this work was done by Joe and Bart.  Then, after five minutes more of hard work, the last of the fire was extinguished, and the crowd in the woods was left in darkness.

“Hello, it’s dark enough now,” cried Pepper.  “We’ll need a lantern to get out with.”

“Here’s a torch,” answered one cadet, and took up a cedar bough, and commenced to wave it into a flame.

“No more of that, Bates!” cried Captain Putnam.  “We have had enough of fire.  We’ll go back in the dark.  Snuggers, you stay here and see to it that the fire doesn’t break out again.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the general utility man.

“Here is a pistol.  If it does break out, fire two shots for an alarm.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll send Alexander Pop here with more water and with some lunch, for you’ll have to stay all night,” went on the owner of the school.  Alexander Pop was a colored man who had come to the school to wait on the table.

“Yes, sir,” answered Snuggers.  He did not much relish remaining in the woods all night, but he felt that he had to obey orders.

One by one the cadets and the teachers returned to Putnam Hall.  The conflagration in the woods had rather broken up the anticipated celebration in honor of the football victory.

“Now, I want to know who placed those tar-barrels in the woods,” said Captain Putnam, when he had assembled the cadets in the school building.

“It was Jerry Cole, the roofer from Cedarville,” answered John Fenwick, a small youth usually called Mumps.  He was known as a toady and a sneak, and was very chummy with Dan Baxter.

“How do you know, Fenwick?”

“I saw him with the barrels on his wagon.”

“Why should he put the barrels there?”

“I will tell you,” answered Pepper, stepping forward.  “I bought them to celebrate with to-night.  I thought they’d make a dandy bonfire.”

“Indeed!  Then you set them ablaze, Ditmore?”

“No, sir.  My idea was to roll them to the lake-shore and pile them one on top of the other.”

“Then who did set them on fire in the woods?”

For the moment nobody spoke, but Pepper, Jack and Andy, as well as Joe, looked at Reff Ritter and Gus Coulter.