“Oh! I hope it turns out all right in the end,” said Leslie. “I was telling my mother what we’d done, for she will keep it a secret, believe me.”
“What did she think of the plan?” demanded Dick, anxiously, for he had considerable respect for the opinions of his chum’s mother.
“Why,” replied the other boy, quickly, “she took to it right from the start, and said it was just the finest plan she had ever heard of.”
“Well,” continued Dick, confidently, “it’s Mr. Nocker’s last chance to come in out of the wet.”
“Listen!” exclaimed Leslie, just then, clutching his chum’s coat sleeve.
“What did you hear?” asked the other.
“I thought it was a chuckle,” replied Leslie, “but I guess it must have been an engine whistling away over at the Barrtown crossing. You see this is the only lonely place we’ve got to pass on the way home, and if those fellows training with Nat should take a notion to lay for us, it’d be around this section.”
“What gives you the idea they’d bother doing that?” demanded Dick, who himself had been thinking along the same lines.
“Oh! well, it’d be just like Nat to want to have revenge on somebody for being thrown out of the meeting tonight. And I happen to know he hates you more than he does any other boy in Cliffwood. Better edge a little further away from that bunch of bushes, Dick. There, what did I tell you?”
Leslie’s last words were drowned in a series of harsh cries that sprang from a party of boyish figures breaking from the suspicious bushes, and leaping toward the two who were on the road leading to their separate homes.