“You’d have been out of luck if Bob hadn’t helped you out the way he did,” said Joe. “You certainly landed on him like a load of bricks, Bob.”
“I was so mad that I think I would have dropped a ton of bricks on him if I’d had them handy,” replied Bob, with a grim laugh. “That was one dirty trick—hitting Herb—when he was knocked out by that fall.”
“I guess I owe you a vote of thanks for that, too,” said Herb.
“I owe you one, for tripping up Buck in the neat way you did,” returned Bob. “He and 86 Hayes would have been on top of me both together if you hadn’t.”
“No thanks due; it was a pleasure,” grinned Herb, although a swollen lip made this exercise painful. “I wish he’d broken his neck while he was about it.”
“It wasn’t your fault that he didn’t,” said Bob.
“I knew that bunch was mean,” remarked Joe. “But I never thought they were mean enough to take up stone throwing from ambush. That’s the most cowardly thing they’ve ever done.”
“Yes, and the most dangerous,” said Bob. “Any one of those stones might have killed one of us if it had landed just right.”
“Or, worse still, it might have broken our vacuum tubes,” added Jimmy, with a grin. “It’s a wonder that the whole lot of them didn’t get smashed. I’ll be afraid to open the package when we do get it home,” he went on more seriously.
His fears turned out to have been groundless, for when they arrived at the Layton home, without having seen or heard anything more of the bullies on the way, they found all their delicate apparatus unharmed. And other than Herb’s swollen lip and a few slight bruises, they had received little damage themselves from the encounter. The bullies had not fared so well, for little was seen of them for several days, and when they did make an appearance in public they were 87 decorated with strips of court plaster here and there. They offered many ingenious excuses in explanation, but they received little credence from the other boys of the town, who had been apprized of the cowardly attack on the radio boys and the result of the encounter.