“Hurrah!” cried the listening boys, though every one knew full well even before Mr. Holwell said this that the awarding of the golden prize would be done fairly, because he was a square man.
“Every tub will have to stand on its own bottom, you understand,” continued the minister, looking down into the faces of the score and more of boys occupying seats in front of him. “And may the best fellow win is the wish of not only myself, but the committee, and every one interested in this work.”
To the astonishment, and amusement as well, of some of the boys, Nat Silmore, the night he joined, openly announced his intention of competing for the prize.
“Grin all you want to,” he told some of the boys who had gathered near him later in that evening when he and his cronies had become members of the Junior League; “but all the same I’ve got a hunch you’ll laugh on the other side of your mouths when you find out how easy I’m goin’ to run away with that yellow stuff.”
“But you never were much of a success at school in composition, you know, Nat,” remarked Phil Harkness. “So what makes you think you can beat the rest of us, with one hand tied down?”
Nat winked knowingly as he answered this question.
“Oh! mebbe I’ve been practicin’ on the sly all this time,” he told them with a nod of his head. “P’raps I discovered I had a reg’lar gift ’long the line of makin’ up jokes and crackin’ lively puns. Huh! you just wait and see what happens. I’m just gettin’ to find myself, I reckon. Some of these days you’ll see folks take off their hats when they speak of Nat Silmore, the celebrated author!”
It was hard to know just what Nat meant when he talked like this. Even Mr. Holwell might have been deceived by his apparent earnestness, indulging in the hope that the bully of Cliffwood had actually begun to see a light, and realized it paid to be decent after all.
As for the boys, they were all at sea, and the subject often came up when two or three of them got together to talk things over.
“It’ll pay to keep your eye on Nat,” was the sage comment of Dan Fenwick that same evening, when they were getting ready to go home. “He’s got something going in that shrewd brain of his, I take it. He’ll surprise us by springing a prank, or else by actually copping that prize.”