"I s'pose so," responded Pen. "But it does not follow that by getting the first start you'll come out best in the end."
"Maybe not; but I'd like to show you what I've done."
He took the subscription paper from his pocket and began to unfold it.
"Oh," replied Pen, "I don't care what you've done. It's none of my business. You get your subscriptions and I'll get mine."
Aleck looked for a moment steadily at his opponent. Then he folded up his paper and put it back into his pocket.
"All right!" he said. "Only don't forget that I offered to show it to you to-day."
But Pen was both resentful and scornful. He did not propose to treat his rival's offer seriously, nor to give him the satisfaction of looking at his paper.
"You can't bluff me that way," he said. "And besides, I'm not interested in what you're doing."
And he walked around the corner of the station platform and out into the street.
When Aleck Sands tramped up the hill to school on the following morning it was with no great sense of jubilation over his success. He had an uneasy feeling that he had not done exactly the fair thing in soliciting a subscription from Pen Butler's grandfather. It was, in a way, trenching on Pen's preserves. But he justified himself on the ground that he had a perfect right to get his contributions where he chose. His agency had been conditioned by no territorial limits. And if, by his diligence, he had outwitted Pen, surely he had nothing to regret. So far as his failure to disclose to his rival the fact of Colonel Butler's gift was concerned, that, he felt, was Pen's own fault. If, by his offensive conduct, the other boy had deprived himself of his means of knowledge, and had humiliated himself and made himself ridiculous by procuring unnecessary subscriptions, certainly he, Aleck, was not to blame. Under any circumstances, now that he had gone so far in the matter, he would not yield an inch nor make a single concession. On that course he was fully determined.