“Will you be good enough to give us a little room?”
Tom and his friends faced about at once, and the former stepped up to the speaker and laid his hand rather heavily on his shoulder.
“Look here, Plebe,” said he, in an insolent tone. “‘Subordination is of discipline the root; when you address an old cadet, forget not to salute.’ Mind that in future.”
“Take your hand off that boy, or I will salute you with a blow in the face that will bury you out of sight in that snowdrift,” said he who had been called the “Planter.”
“Who are you?” demanded Fisher.
“Take a good look at me so that you will remember me,” was the reply.
The boy drew off his gloves and pulled down his muffler, revealing the familiar features of our old friend, Don Gordon. Just then the clear notes of a bugle rang out on the frosty air. It was the “study call,” and all the students within hearing made haste to respond to it.
CHAPTER II.
DON AND BERT AT SCHOOL.
Don Gordon and his brother Hubert were two of the heroes of the Boy Trapper series. Those who have met them before will not need to be told what sort of boys they were; and strangers we will leave to do as the boys of the Bridgeport Academy did—become acquainted with them by degrees. They lived near the little town of Rochdale, in the State of Mississippi, where their father owned an extensive cotton plantation. That was the reason why the students, who had a new name for every new-comer, called Don the Planter. The last time we spoke of him and Hubert was in connection with the building of a Shooting-Box on the site of the one that had been burned by Bob Owens and Lester Brigham. We then informed the reader that the new structure was much better than the old one, and that is all we shall say about it until such time as the owners get ready to take possession of it.
After Bob Owens ran away from home to become a hunter, and Godfrey Evans and his son Dan went to work to earn an honest living, and David Evans became mail carrier, and Lester Brigham withdrew himself from the society of the boys in the neighborhood, the inhabitants of Rochdale and the surrounding country settled back into their old ways, and waited for something to happen that would create an excitement. They marveled greatly at the sudden change that had taken place in Godfrey and Dan, talked of the indomitable courage Bob Owens had displayed on the night the steamer Sam Kendall was burned, and cast jealous eyes upon David Evans, who, they thought, was making money a little too rapidly, and throwing on a few more airs than were becoming in a boy who had a woodchopper, and a lazy and worthless one at that, for a father.