But even under these conditions it was not easy to keep warm. The boys stood with their backs to the fire, then faced it, then turned sideways, but always with that uncomfortable feeling of being roasted on one side, and, oh, so cold on the other.
"Never thought I had a chance to get that bird," Hackett was saying. "It was making a bee-line for the woods—you know how fast they fly—well, I just raised my gun, and—"
He was interrupted in a most startling fashion.
A snowball—nothing more or less than a nice, round snowball—made in the most approved schoolboy fashion, suddenly flew from out of the darkness and fell in their midst. It struck the ground and broke into a dozen fragments.
Then came another—and another. The coffee-pot, struck squarely in the centre, toppled over into the fire and poured forth its lamentations in a great cloud of hissing steam, while the boys looked at each other in the greatest wonder.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GUARDIANS
"Why, what, which—" cried Hackett, looking wildly in the direction from which the missiles came. "Must be those fellows again."
"We'll show them they can't frighten us!" burst out Bob.