"Mr. Crabtree, we may as well come to an understanding," said one of the students, a heavyset young man named Sanders. "We hired you to do certain work for us, and we paid you well for that work. Since we left America you have found fault with nearly everything, and in a good many instances which I need not recall just now you have not done as you agreed. You are not the learned scientist you represented yourself to be—instead, if we are to believe our newly made friends here, you are a pretender, a big sham, and a brute in the bargain. This being so, we intend to dispense with your services from this day forth. We will pay you what is coming to you, give you your share of our outfit, and then you can go your way and we will go ours. We absolutely want nothing more to do with you."
This long speech on Sanders' part was delivered amid a deathlike silence. As the student went on, Josiah Crabtree bit his lip until the blood came. Once his baneful eyes fairly flashed fire at Sanders and then at Dick Rover, but then they fell to the ground.
"And so you—ahem—throw me off," he said, drawing a long breath. "Very well. But I demand all that is coming to me."
"You shall have every cent."
"And a complete outfit, so that I can make my way back to the coast."
"All that is coming to you—no more and no less," said Sanders firmly.
"But he shan't go without that thrashing!" cried Dick, and catching up a long whip he had had Cujo cut for him he leaped upon Josiah Crabtree and brought down the lash with stinging effect across the former teacher's face, leaving a livid mark that Crabtree was doomed to wear to the day of his death. "There you are! And there is another for the way you treated Stanhope, and another for what you did to Dora, and one for Tom, and another for Sam, and another—"
"Oh! oh! let up! The boy will kill me!" shrieked Crabtree, trying to run away. "Don't—I will be cut to pieces! Don't! don't!" And as the lash came down over his head, neck, and shoulders, he danced madly around in pain. At last he broke for cover and disappeared, not to show himself again until morning, when he called Chester to him, asked for and received, what was coming to him, and departed, vowing vengeance on the Rovers and all of the others.
"He will remember you for that, Dick," said Sam, when the affair was over. "He will be your enemy for life."
"Let him be—I am not afraid of him," responded the elder brother.