“Get out of the way, there!” shouted the rider.  “Are you blind, that you run right under a fellow’s horse that way?”

David sprang quickly to one side, and the horseman drew up his nag with a jerk and looked down at him.  It was Lester Brigham, one of the neighborhood boys of whom we have never before had occasion to speak.  He was comparatively a new resident in that country.  He had been there only about a year, but during that time he had made himself heartily detested by almost all the boys about Rochdale.  Of course he had his cronies—­every fellow has; but all the best youngsters, like Don and Bert Gordon and Fred and Joe Packard, would have little to do with him.  He had lived in the North until the close of the war, and then his father removed to Mississippi, purchased the plantation adjoining General Gordon’s, and began the cultivation of cotton.

Mr. Brigham was said to be the richest man in that county, and Lester had more fine things than all the rest of the boys about there put together.  He took particular pride in his splendid hunting and fishing outfit, and it was coveted by almost every boy who had seen it.  He had four guns—­all breech-loaders; a beautiful little fowling-piece for such small game as quails and snipes; a larger one for ducks and geese; a light squirrel rifle, something like the one Clarence Gordon owned; and a heavier weapon, which he called his deer gun, and which carried a ball as large as the end of one’s thumb.  He had two jointed fish-poles—­one a light, split bamboo, such as is used in fly-fishing, and the other a stout lancewood, for such heavy fish as black bass and pike.

If there was any faith to be put in the stories he told, Lester was a hunter and fisherman who had few equals.  Before he came to the South, it was his custom, he said, to spend a portion of every winter in the woods in the northern part of Michigan, and many a deer and bear had fallen to his rifle there.  He could catch trout and black bass where other fellows would not think of looking for them, and as for quails, it was no trouble at all for him to make a double shot and bag both the birds every time.  There were boys in the neighborhood who doubted this.  Game of all kinds was abundant, and Lester was given every opportunity to exhibit the skill of which he boasted so loudly, but he was never in the humor to do it.  He seldom went hunting, and when he did he always went alone, and no one ever knew how much game he brought home.

“Your name is Evans, isn’t it?” demanded Lester.

David replied that it was.

“Are you the fellow who intends to trap fifty dozen quail in this county, and send them up North?”

“I am,” answered David.

“Well, I just rode down here on purpose to tell you that such work as that will not be allowed.”

“Who will not allow it?”

“I will not, for one, and my father for another.”

“What have you to say about it?” asked David, who did not like the insolent tone assumed by the young horseman.  “Do the birds belong to you?”