Now, go home, drowse out your summer in the hot town and reflect on what a mean cad you have shown yourself to be to-day." While Fred was thinking this all over he glanced up suddenly, to see fourteen pairs of Gridley eyes fixed upon him.

The young people, as soon as they found themselves observed, immediately turned their glances away from the sullen looking young pedestrian from their school.
"I wonder what has happened to Fred Ripley ?" Susie repeated, when the object of their remark was some distance away.

"Something has gone very wrong with him.

A blind man could see that much." During this time Fred was thinking to himself: "If the guv'nor subjects me to this degradation just for one sharp answer to an old man, what would that same guv'nor do to me if he knew all the things that I've been engaged in up here at the lake?
What if he knew that I hired that farmer's son to swim under the float and attach that drag to the canoe?
What would the guv'nor do if he knew that I tried to wreck Prescott's outfit ?" Fred shivered at the mental prospect of his father's stern, grim wrath.
But young Ripley, as sometimes happens, wasn't caught just then.
He would go on for the present planning mean tricks against those whom he had no just reason to dislike.

Yet his time was sure to come.
Soon after Dick & Co.