“I am going to give you a reward of Merritt, Ernest,” he laughed, as he finally came upon the sneak sitting on a stone at the edge of the woods, looking very miserable.
“Get out of here, I haven’t done nothing,” snarled Merritt, too weak to get up. “It wasn’t me, it was Pete Herring.”
“What is that mask doing on the ground, Merritt?” asked Jack. “And you have your old clothes on also. How does that happen, if you were not in this plot the same as Herring?”
“I was going blackberrying and wore my old clothes so’s they wouldn’t get hurt. You gotter wear something over your face, too, to keep it from getting scratched.”
“Well, here’s something else,” laughed Jack as he plunged his hand into a mudhole close by and brought it up fairly reeking with black ooze.
Then he gave a generous plaster of the stuff to the bully’s face, and chuckled as he went away:
“They say that mud is a sure cure for a lot of things, Merritt, and maybe it will cure you of trying to haze a fellow unawares. Think it over. Thinking won’t hurt you, anyhow. You don’t do enough to injure you.”
Herring had taken himself off by the time Jack went back to the spring, evidently fearing that he would get another dose, which in his weak state he had no desire for and the boy did not find him.
“Well, he has had enough to last him for a time, at any rate,” he said with a grin, “and I am not resentful enough to further add to his troubles. I wonder how those others are doing?”
He found Holt sitting on the ground looking very wretched and said, wiping his muddy hand on the fellow’s face: