“Be careful, or they’ll play you some dirty trick, Dave,” said Phil, warningly.
“I’ve got my eyes open,” replied Dave.
In a rather unusual manner Dave had become acquainted with a man named Hooker Montgomery, a fake doctor, who traveled around the country selling medicines that he made himself. This man asked Dave to call on him, and when the youth did so he was suddenly seized from behind, made a prisoner, and carried off in a sleigh and then in an automobile. At first he did not know what to make of it, but at last learned that he was being held, for some purpose, by Merwell, Jasniff, Montgomery, and the fourth man, a mere tool. He watched his chance, and, at length, escaped, much to his enemies’ chagrin.
“Have them all arrested,” was the advice of Dave’s chums, but this was not easy, since all of the evil-doers had disappeared. Then, one day, while on a sleigh-ride to a distant town, the boys fell in with Hooker Montgomery. The fake doctor was practically “down and out,” as he himself expressed it, and said he would do anything for Dave, provided he was not prosecuted.
“It was all a plot gotten up by those two, Jasniff and Merwell,” said Hooker Montgomery. “They promised me some money if I would help them, but I never got a cent.” Then he said that Jasniff and Merwell were in town.
“We’ll locate them,” said Dave, but this was not accomplished until later, when the pair of rascals were encountered at a railroad office. Our hero and his chums tried to stop Jasniff and Merwell, but the rascals rushed through a crowd and got aboard a train; and that was the last seen of them for the time being. The boys might have gone after the pair, but they had an important hockey game to play, and when they administered a stinging defeat to Oak Hall’s ancient rival, Rockville Academy, Dave, for the time being, forgot that he had an enemy in the world.
“Two weeks more of the grind, boys!” cried Dave, on the following Monday. “And then home for the holidays.”
“Right you are,” answered Phil. “But, oh, those two weeks!”
On Wednesday one of Dave’s chums celebrated his birthday, and among the presents received was a very fine double-barreled shotgun. This lad immediately wanted to go hunting; and the result was that the boys applied to Doctor Clay for permission to go to Squirrel Island, up the river, on a hunting expedition, the following Saturday. There was just sufficient snow on the ground to make rabbit and squirrel tracking good, and the boys were told that they might remain away all day. Six of them had guns and two had revolvers, and they carried in addition a good-sized hamper of provisions for lunch.
“Now, boys, be careful and don’t shoot yourselves or anybody else,” said Doctor Clay, with a smile, when Dave, Roger, and Phil left the school building. “Don’t fire at anything until you are certain of what it is. Every hunting season somebody is killed through the sheer carelessness of somebody else.”