nd were rolled bodily out of the square by the stream,
others ran wildly with their arms over their heads. The air was full
of leather hats, spinning as the water struck them. Every now and
then the hosemen elevated the nozzle and gave Colonel Gideon Ward
his share. A half-dozen times he nearly fell off his perch and flapped
out like a rag on a bush.

"It certainly ain't no place for ladies!" communed Hiram with himself,
gazing abroad from his elevated position on Imogene's neck. "I
thought it was once, but it ain't."

"Colonel Gideon Ward," he shouted to the limp and dripping figure
in the tree, "do you own up?"

The Colonel withdrew one arm to shake his fist at the speaker, and
narrowly saved himself by instantly clutching again, for the
crackling stream tore at him viciously.

"We'll drownd ye where ye hang," roared the foreman of the Ancients,
"before we'll let you or any other pirate rinky-dink us out of what
belongs to us."

Like some Hindu magician transplanted to Yankeedom he bestrode the
neck of his elephant, and with his hand summoned the waving stream
to do his will. Now he directed its spitting force on the infuriated
Colonel; now he put to flight some Vienna man who plucked up a little
fleeting courage.

And at last Colonel Ward knuckled. There was nothing else to do.

"I made a mistake," he said, in a moment of respite from the stream.

"You spit on the paper and measured in twenty extry feet jest as Cap'n
Aaron Sproul said you did," insisted Hiram. "Say that, and say it
loud, or we'll give old Hecly the wickin' and blow you out of that
tree."

And after ineffectual oaths the Colonel said it--said it twice, and
the second time much the louder.

"Then," bellowed the triumphant Hiram, "the record of old Hecly
Number One still stands, and the championship banner travels back
to Smyrna with us to-night, jest as it travelled down this mornin'."

"Hain't you goin' to squirt?" asked some one posted safely behind
a distant tree.

"If you'd been payin' 'tention as you ought to be you'd have jest
seen us squirtin'," replied the foreman of the Ancients with quiet
satire. "And when we squirt, we squirt to win."

Cap'n Aaron Sproul turned away from a rapt and lengthy survey of
Colonel Ward in the tree.

"Did you ever ride on an elephant, Cap'n Sproul?" inquired Hiram.

"Never tried it," said the seaman.

"Well, I want you to come up here with me. Imogene will h'ist you.
I was thinkin', as it's get