him.

"Here, what's all this trouble?" he demanded.

"You just keep out of it, Merritt Crawford," said the elder lad, a
hulking, thick-set youth with a mean look on his heavy features. "I'm
just reading this kid here a lesson. This orchard is my father's and
mine and you'll keep out of it in future or suffer the consequences,
understand?"

"Why, we aren't doing any harm," protested Rob Blake heatedly.

"I don't care what you are doing or not doing," retorted the other,
"this is my father's orchard and you'll keep off it. You and the rest
of you tin soldiers. I don't want you stealing our peaches."

"I guess you are sore, Jack Curtiss, because you couldn't get a boy
scout patrol of your own! I guess that's what the trouble is,"
remarked Tubby Hopkins softly, but with a meaning look at the big lad.

"You impudent little whipper-snapper," roared Jack Curtiss, "if you
weren't such a shrimp I'd lick you for that remark, but you're all
beneath my notice. All I want to say to you is keep away from my
orchard or I'll give you a trimming."

"Suppose you start now," said Rob Blake quietly, "if you are so anxious
to show what a scrapper you are."

"Bah, I don't want anything to do with you, I tell you," rejoined
Curtiss, turning away, with a rather troubled expression, however, for
while he was a bully the big lad had no particular liking for a fight
unless he was pretty sure that all the advantage lay on his side.

"It was too bad you didn't get that patrol of yours, Jack," called the
irrepressible Tubby after him as the big youth strode off across the
orchard toward the old-fashioned farmhouse in which he lived with his
father, a well-to-do farmer. "Never mind; better luck next time," he
went on, "or maybe we'll let you into ours some time."

"You just wait," roared the retreating bully, shaking his fist at the
lads, "I'll make trouble for you yet."

"Well," remarked Rob Blake, as Jack Curtiss strode off, "I guess the
run is over for to-day. Too bad we should have come out on his land.
Of course he feels sore at us; and I shouldn't wonder but he will
really try to do us some mischief if he gets a chance."

As it was growing late and there did not seem much chance of restarting
the "Follow the Trail" practice, that day at least, the boys strolled
back through the woodland and soon emerged on a country road about
three miles from Hampton Inlet, where they lived.

While they are covering the distance perhaps