“How about Buck Looker and Carl Lutz?” asked Herb, with a grin.
“They were good too,” asserted Jimmy. “Good for nothing. But, after all, they didn’t do us any real harm, though they tried hard enough. And I guess the scare they got in the fire took some of the meanness out of them.”
“I don’t know about that,” remarked Joe dubiously. “Buck was frightened ’most to death, and he was ready to promise almost anything. But probably that didn’t change his real nature. If he should get a chance to do us a bad turn, he’d probably do it, just as he always has. You’ve heard that old saying that the leopard can’t change its spots, haven’t you? Buck sure had a lot of spots.”
“Talk about angels, and they appear!” exclaimed Herb. “Here they come now.”
The four boys looked in the direction that Herb Fennington indicated, and saw two boys of about their own age coming down the street. The larger of the two was a heavily built, hulking fellow, with eyes set too close together and a look of the bully standing out all over him. The other was not so large in bulk, but quite as tall. His complexion was pasty and there was a furtive look about him that was anything but prepossessing.
“Fallen angels,” muttered Joe, in reply to Herb’s last remark. “I’ll bet at this moment they’re cooking up some low-down trick or other. They wouldn’t be happy if they weren’t. That’s their conception of having a good time.”
The two newcomers were coming along facing each other and tossing a baseball between them. The slenderer one, Carl Lutz, had his back toward the four friends, while the heavier one, Buck Looker, was facing them.
Just as they got about twenty feet from Bob Layton and his friends, Buck threw the ball well to one side of Lutz. Even at that, the latter could easily have stopped it, if he had wanted to. He made only a half-hearted offer at it, however, and the ball went swiftly past him and struck Jimmy Plummer full in the pit of the stomach.
The ball was hard thrown, and it doubled Jimmy up promptly. With a cry of pain, he fell to the sidewalk.
Bob sprang toward him to pick him up, while Joe glared wrathfully at Buck.