forbidden by the teacher from the day
when Hughie, in his eagerness to bring his quarry down, left his ramrod
in his pistol, and firing at Aleck Dan Campbell at point-blank range,
laid him low with a lump on the side of his head as big as a marble. The
only thing that saved Aleck's life, the teacher declared, was his
thick crop of black hair. Foxy was in great wrath at Hughie for his
recklessness, which laid the deer-hunting under the teacher's ban, and
which interfered seriously with the profits of the store.

But Foxy was far too great a man to allow himself to be checked by any
such misfortune as this. He was far too astute to attempt to defy the
teacher and carry on the forbidden game, but with great ability he
adapted the principles of deer-hunting to a game even more exciting and
profitable. He organized the game of "Injuns," some of the boys being
set apart as settlers who were to defend the fort, of which the store
was the center, the rest to constitute the invading force of savages.

The result was, that the trade in caps and gunpowder was brisker than
ever, for not only was the powder needed for the pistols, but even
larger quantities were necessary for the slow-matches which hissed their
wrath at the approaching enemy, and the mounted guns, for which earthen
ink-bottles did excellently, set out on a big stump to explode, to the
destruction of scores of creeping redskins advancing through the bush,
who, after being mutilated and mangled by these terrible explosions,
were dragged into the camp and scalped. Foxy's success was phenomenal.
The few pennies and fewer half-dimes and dimes that the boys had hoarded
for many long weeks would soon have been exhausted had Hughie not
wrecked the game.

Hughie alone had no fear of Foxy, but despised him utterly. He had stood
and yelled when those heroes of old, Murdie and Don Cameron, Curly Ross,
and Ranald Macdonald, and last but not to be despised Thomas Finch, had
done battle with the enemy from the Sixteenth or the Front, and he could
not bring himself to acknowledge the leadership of Foxy Ross, for
all his bull's-eyes and liquorice. Not but what Hughie yearned for
bull's-eyes and liquorice with great yearning, but these could not atone
to him for the loss out of his life of the stir and rush and daring of
the old fighting days. And it galled him that the boys of the Sixteenth
could flout the boys of the Twentieth in all places and on all occasions
with impunity.