but if you
don't put up your hat and get at that bundle of mail I shall be
compelled to consider discharging you. Where's Johnson?"

"He went out with Mr. Bates, sir."

When Bobby left, Applerod was industriously sorting the mail on his
desk, preparing to open it.

Bobby let himself into the big new gymnasium and walked back through
the deserted hall to the small room that was used for individual
training. As he neared the door he could hear the sound of loud voices
and the shuffling of feet, and heard the commanding voice of Biff
Bates shout "Break!"

The door was locked, but through the slide window at the side a
strange tableau met his eyes. Stooped and lean Johnson, as chalk-white
of face as ever, had paunchy and thin-legged Silas Trimmer by the
collar, and over Biff Bates' intervening body was trying to rain blows
into the center of the circular smile, now flattened to an oval of
distress.

"Break, Johnson, break!" begged Biff. "Don't put him out till you feed
him all he's got coming." Thereupon he succeeded in extracting Mr.
Trimmer from the grasp of Mr. Johnson and forced the former back upon
a chair, where he began to fan him with a towel in most approved
fashion.

"Let me out of this!" gasped Mr. Trimmer. "I'll have you arrested for
assault and conspiracy."

"They'll only pinch a corpse, for the cops'll find me tickled to death
when they get here," responded Mr. Bates gaily. "Now you're all right.
Get up!"

"Let me out of this, I say!" commanded Mr. Trimmer frantically. "I'll
run you into the penitentiary! I'll break you up in business! I'll
hire thugs to break every bone in your body!"

"Is that all?" inquired Biff complacently, and grabbed him as he
started to run around the room in a wild hunt for an outlet. "Stand up
here and put up a fight or I'll punch you myself. I've been aching to
do it for a year. That's why I got Doc Willets to dope it out to you
that you was dyin' for training, and why I kept shifting your hour to
when there was nobody here. Go to him, chum!"

Then ensued the strangest sparring match that the grinning and
stealthily silent Bobby had ever seen. Johnson, with a true "tiger
crouch" which he could not have avoided if he had wished, began
dancing around and around the spherical body of Mr. Trimmer, without
science and without precaution, keeping his two arms going like
windmills, and occasionally landing a light blow upon some portion of
Mr. Trimmer's unresisting anatomy;