"We may as well sell out and go home," said Pender, in deep disgust.
"But we can't go home," returned Rockley. "We've got to stay right here and take all the taunts that come along."
"Nobody shall taunt me," cried Jackson. "If they try it I'll punch somebody's nose."
"And to think we lost our money, too," said Ben Hurdy, after a pause.
"That's what makes me sick."
"Reckon you didn't lose much," said Lew Flapp, with a sickly grin.
"I lost all I had, and that's enough."
"Who won it?"
"Hans Mueller. That crazy Dutch boy was yelling for Tom Rover and I took him up."
The Flapp crowd did not feel like mingling with the visitors, and at the first opportunity Lew Flapp and his intimate cronies slipped away from the camp and hurried to the hermit's den they had discovered.
"We'll have a little jollification of our own," said Rockley, and his plan was speedily carried into effect, in a fashion which would not have been approved by Captain Putnam or any of the teachers under him.