“That I shouldn’t care to hit you. I feel as if I couldn’t hit a fellow who saved my life.”
“Look here,” I said angrily, “you’re always trying to bring up that stupid nonsense about the holding you up on the penstock. If you do it again, I will hit you.”
“Boo! Not you. You’re afraid,” cried Mercer derisively. “Who pulled the chap out of the water when he was half drowned, and saved him? Who—”
I clapped my hand over his mouth.
“Won’t do, Tom,” I said. “It’s all sham. We can’t fight. I daresay old Lom’s right, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“That we shall be able to knock Eely and Dicksee into the middle of next week.”
“But it seems to me as if they must feel that we have been learning, or else they would have been sure to have done something before now.”
“Never mind,” I said, “let’s wait. We don’t want to fight, as Lom says, but if we’re obliged to, we’ve got to do it well.”
The occasion for trying our ability did not come off, though it was very near it several times; but as I grew more confident, the less I felt disposed to try, and Mercer always confessed it was the same with him, though the cock of the school and his miserable toady, Dicksee often led us a sad life.