The Dreadnought Boys on Battle Practice

"Good boy, Ned," breathed Herc, as he saw his companion wading into Hank Harkins in such surprising style.

Even the loyal Herc had not hitherto dreamed that beneath Ned's quiet personality had been hidden such ability to take care of himself.

Hank, after the first few minutes, was breathing heavily, and the sweat began to pour off his face. A pampered, only son, he never did much hard work about the farm, whereas Ned's muscles were trained fine as nickel-steel by hay-pitching, wood-sawing and other strenuous tasks. His training stood him in good stead now.

Overmatched by Hank, he undoubtedly was, but his hard frame was the more enduring. Hank's punches, terrific enough at first, began gradually to grow weaker, more particularly as most of them had been wasted on empty space.

Finally Hank, perceiving that he was reaching the end of his rope, clenched his teeth and, with set face and narrowed eyes, made up his mind to end the fight in one supreme effort.

He hurled himself on his lighter antagonist like a thunderbolt, but Ned, with a skillful duck, avoided the full fury of the onslaught, and rising just as the bully launched his blows into thin air, caught his lumbering opponent full under the chin.

Swinging his arms, like a scarecrow in a windstorm, the bully plunged backward under the effective blow.

"Hurray for Ned Strong!" shouted Herc ecstatically, as the bully's big frame reeled staggeringly backward.

The next minute, however, his delight changed to a groan of dismay as Hank, unable to control himself, crashed, full tilt, into the stove. With a deafening clatter, like that of a mad bull careening round a tinware shop, the heater and its long pipe, came toppling in a sooty confusion to the ground. Red-hot coals shot out in every direction.

In the midst of the wreckage sprawled the unlucky bully, his features bedaubed with black. Through this mask his look of puzzled rage at his defeat came so comically that Ned and Herc could not restrain themselves, but, even in the face of the disaster to the store stove, burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter. In the meantime some one hurled a bucket of water on the coals, and the bully was drenched.

The onlookers, their risibilities also tickled by the downfall of the bully, and the noisy demolition of the stove, joined in the merriment and the laden shelves of the store were echoing to a perfect tempest of laughter when suddenly the rear door opened and Paul Stevens entered. A look of dismay appeared on his lean features as his eyes lighted on the wreckage.

With him was another figure whose unexpected appearance caused the boys' faces to assume almost as dismayed a look as the countenance of the storekeeper.

"Grandfather!" gasped Ned, as his eyes encountered the angry glare of the newcomer's pale orbs.

"Yes, – grandfather," snapped the other, whose weather-beaten face was adorned with a tuft of gray hair on the chin, in the style popularly known as "the goatee."

"What have you got to say in explanation of this?"

As he rasped out this query in a harsh, rusty voice like the creaking of a long disused hinge, old Zack Strong pointed to the wreckage. From the midst of it was rising the bully, plentifully besmeared with soot, but doing his best to maintain a look of injured innocence.

CHAPTER II.

"WE'RE GOING TO JOIN THE NAVY."

Old Zack Strong was not one of those men who can distinguish between boyish high spirits and what he would have termed "downright pesky cussedness." In this latter quality, indeed, he believed both his grandsons – Ned, and his dead second son's offspring, Herc, – to be plentifully endowed. Not naturally bad-hearted, however, the old man had assumed the care of the cousins on the death of their parents, but even with his act of adoption there came the thought to his frugal mind: "They'll be a great help 'round the farm."

In his hopes in this direction the old man had not been disappointed. Both boys had entered into the work with painstaking thoroughness; but it must be admitted that to adventurous lads, the monotonous grind of a remote farm in the hills is somewhat dampening. Ever since Ned and Herc had left the district school and become, in a more thorough sense than ever, "helps" to their grandfather, the old man had chafed at their hunting expeditions and proclivities toward baseball and other games. He could not see that pitching hay, milking, and doing chores, was not the full-rounded end of existence for any lads.

So, when, on this bitter December afternoon, he entered the store unexpectedly on his way back from delivering a wagon-load of grist at the water-driven mill at Westerlo, a nearby village, his chagrin may be imagined when he discovered his two young charges occupying the centre of the scene depicted in the last chapter.

In Zack Strong's hard creed there was only one sin worse than playing – or "fooling," as he called it – and that was fighting.

And it was only too evident that in the latter of these heinous offences one at least of the boys had been indulging.

Worse still, in the wrecked stove the old farmer foresaw a demand for damages on the storekeeper's part, and there was only one thing harder to wring from Zack than a smile, and that article was money. If the average farmer is what may be described as "close-fisted," old Zack was "cement-fisted."

With this side-light on their grandfather's character in view, the consternation of the boys may be understood when they met his amazed and indignant gaze resting accusingly on them.

"Mean?" stammered Hank, wiping as best he could some of the soot off his mottled countenance and echoing the old man's last words. "It means that your two boys here have made a brutal and unprovoked attack on me and that – "

"And that my stove is busted to Kingdom Come!" disgustedly sputtered Paul Stevens, whose cadaverous features had been busily scanning the wreckage in the brief interval of time that had elapsed between the entrance of himself and Zack Strong and the seemingly righteously indignant outburst of the bully.

"Never mind your stove now," grated out the hard-featured old farmer, wishing devoutly that the stove could be "never-minded" altogether, "what I want to find out is what these boys here have been up to. What kind of deviltry they have been at."

"We haven't been at any deviltry, as you please to call it, grandpa," burst out Ned, striving to keep cool, though he was burning inwardly with indignation and humiliation.

"Eh-eh-eh?" grunted the old man incredulously, "that's fine talking, but what's all this I see? How did that young man come to be all mixed up in the stove?"

"Through no wish of his own you may be sure," chuckled the irrepressible Herc. "Say, Hank, you look like a skunk – all black and white, you know – "

"Silence, sir," roared his grandfather, with as near an approach to a stern bass as his wheezy voice would allow. "Who started this?"

Ned remained silent. It was not his wish to tell tales, and he had no desire to act as an informer.

"Why, Hank Harkins here started it," spoke up Si Ingalls, a young farmer who had formed one of the group about the demolished stove, "he slapped Ned in the jaw and Ned – rightly, too – came back at him. Am I correct?" he asked, turning to the others.

"Hank's face looks it," grinned Luke Bates, the village wit, regarding Hank, who was quivering with fury, in an amused way, "never mix it up with a stove, Hank," he went on, "it'll get the best of you every time."

"Is this right?" demanded old Zack, turning to his grandson as soon as the laugh at Hank's expense subsided.

"Oh, yes, that's about the way it happened, I guess," said Ned in a low voice.

"What I want to know is who's going to settle for my stove," wailed Paul Stevens. "Here's a cracked draught-piece, a busted door, two lengths of stove-pipe flattened out like pancakes and soot all over a fine piece of dress goods."

"Name your price," groaned old Zack, wincing as if a twinge of rheumatism had passed through him, "but don't make it too steep," he added, cautiously, "or I won't pay it. How much, now?"

The storekeeper made a rapid mental calculation, in which his fingers and various grimaces played an important part.

"There's the stove door, say seventy-five cents; and the pipe, two lengths, a dollar; and the draught-piece – I'll have to send to New York for another, sixty cents; and the spoiled dress goods – "

"You'll only have to cut the outside edge off them," objected old Zack, his lips twitching nervously as the rising tide of expenses swamped his cautious senses.

"Wall, that'll be a yard, anyhow," announced the storekeeper, "that is twenty-five cents, we'll say. Two dollars thirty-five for the whole shebang."

"Two dollars thirty-five. It's rank robbery," objected the old farmer, almost giving utterance to a groan.

"Of course I may be able to straighten out the stove pipe," admitted Paul Stevens, reluctantly, "and you are an old customer. I'll make it two dollars and ten cents to you."

Reluctantly old Zack drew out a battered wallet and drew from it two one-dollar bills, being careful not to display the rest of its contents. Then, after much fumbling in the recesses of his clothing, he produced a small leather purse from which he drew a ten cent piece. These he tendered with an agonized expression to the storekeeper.

"Canadian," sniffed the storekeeper, regarding the bit of silver.

"It's good," objected old Zack.

"Not to me. Come, I let you off light on the stove and the other damage them boys have done; give me a good dime."

Reluctantly old Zack took back the rejected coin and substituted for it a piece of United States silver.