CHAPTER III.
BATTLE ROYAL.
Winter came to Montpelier, and with it frost, snow, and a new school year.
The first snowfall was in the night, and by noon of the next day it was soft enough to pack, presenting an opportunity for fun such as American boys never forego. Big or little, studious or indolent, every one of those whose acquaintance we have made in the preceding pages, together with many of their schoolmates whom we have not named, took up handfuls of the cold, white substance, fashioned them into balls, and tried his skill at throwing. It is the Yankee form of carnival, and woe to him who fails to take the pelting good-naturedly.
That day the fun was thickest at the orchard near the schoolhouse. Half a dozen boys, partly sheltered by the low stone wall, were considered to be in a fort which a dozen others were attacking. At first it was every man for himself, "load and fire at will," but as the contest grew hotter (if that term will do for a snow battle) it was necessary to organize the work a little. So the smaller boys were directed to give their attention entirely to the making of balls, which the larger ones threw with more accuracy and force. One boy, having a notion to vary the game with an experiment, rolled up a ball twice as large as his head, managed to creep up to the wall with it, and then threw it up into the air so that it came down inside the fort. When it came down it landed on the head and shoulders of Teddy Hawkins, broke into a beautiful shower, and for a moment almost buried him out of sight. This feat of military skill received its appropriate applause, but the author of it had to pay the cost. Before he could get back to his own lines he was a target for every marksman in the fort, and at least half a dozen balls hit him, at all of which he laughed—with the exception of the one that broke on his neck and dropped its fragments inside his collar.
When there was a lull in the contest a boy looked over the wall and hailed the besiegers with:
"Boys, see who's coming up the road!"
A tall man who carried a book under his arm and apparently was in deep thought was approaching. This was Pangborn, the schoolmaster, fresh from college, still a hard student, and assumed by the boys to be their natural enemy from the simple fact that he had come there to be their teacher.
When he appeared at this interesting moment there was no need of any formal proclamation of truce between the contending forces. The instinct of the country schoolboy suggested the same thought probably to every one, whether besieger or besieged. The word passed along, "Make a lot of them, quick! and make them hard."