“You can’t improve it anywhere,” replied Lester, who was rather proud of the production.  “Do you want me to abuse Don and the rest?  That would be poor policy, for the man would say right away that we were jealous of them and trying to injure them.  I have told him that he will get no birds from David, and if he does, it will be our fault.”

Bob could not see the force of this reasoning.  There was so much at stake that it was necessary they should do everything in their power to secure the contract, and he was sure it would help matters if a few hard words were added respecting Don and David.  So they were put in, and the letter was copied and dropped into the post-office.

After that Lester took up his abode with Bob Owens.  According to an agreement made between them, Bob went through the ceremony of sending a note to Lester by a negro boy, inviting him to come over and spend a week with him, bringing his horse and gun, and they would have a fine time shooting turkeys and driving the ridges for deer.  This arrangement enabled the two conspirators to be together day and night.  They intended to pass the most of their time in riding about through the woods, and if a deer or turkey happened to come in their way and they should be fortunate enough to shoot it, so much the better; but if the game kept out of their sight they would not spend any precious moments in looking for it.  Their object was to devote themselves exclusively to destroying all David’s chances for earning the hundred and fifty dollars.  They would watch him closely, and when they found out where his traps were set, they would visit them daily, and steal every quail they found in them.

During the first few days the boys spent together they found out two things:  one was that there was a pile of traps in the yard behind Godfrey Evans’s cabin, and that they were never touched except when the family happened to be in want of kindling wood.  The other was, that David left home bright and early every morning and went straight to General Gordon’s.  What he did after he got there they could not find out.  They would always wait an hour or two to see if he came out again, and then they would grow tired of doing nothing, and spend the rest of the day searching the woods and brier-patches in the neighborhood of the cabin, in the hope of finding some of David’s traps.  But they never found a single one, for the reason that they were all set on the General’s plantation, and the boys never thought of looking there for them.

“It’s my opinion,” said Lester, one day, when the two were seated at a camp-fire in the woods, broiling a brace of squirrels which Bob had shot, “that David has given it up as a bad job and left the way clear for us.”

“Hurrah!” shouted Bob.

“Well—­yes; but I’d hurrah louder if he had only set a dozen or two traps and given us a chance to rob them.  If he’d done that, we might have had a hundred birds on hand now.  The best thing we can do is to set our own traps and catch the quails as fast as we can.  We’ll keep an eye on David all the same, however.”