Chapter 5 THE HAZERS ARE HAZED

What Jack had in one pocket of his coat was an ammonia gun used by wheelmen to keep off the attacks of troublesome dogs who attempt to bar their progress on the road often at the risk of giving them an upset.

This, as most boys know, is shaped like a pistol and has a bulb at one end.

A slight pressure upon this bulb causes a stream of ammonia, or hot water, or whatever else one chooses to squirt in the faces of the annoying dogs and to put them to flight.

When Jack had gone up to the dormitories, after receiving the message which he had every reason to believe to be spurious, he had taken the little gun from his suitcase, where he had placed it, in anticipation of needing it in some such emergency as the present.

As the masked figures came rushing toward him from two sides, he quickly took account of stock, as one might say, and decided which one of the maskers was Herring.

Then he aimed his little gun at the fellow's face and gave the bulb a good squeeze.

There was a howl and a gasp and the boy in the mask and the old clothes suddenly sat down with more force than elegance.

Jack then turned his gun on one of the intruders from the other side of the clump.

"Ouch, stop that!" yelled the fellow, dropping a stout stick he held in his hand and beating a hasty retreat, half stifled by the fumes of the ammonia.

Jack then turned his attention to the other members of the party of hazers and discharged another gun at them, holding it in his left hand.

This was worse than the first, for it contained assaf?tida instead of ammonia.

The stench was something dreadful, and two of the hazers got full doses of the stuff directly in their faces.

Jack was on the windward side of it or he could not have endured the horrible smell.

The victims simply fell on the ground and began to vomit in spite of themselves.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm poisoned!" wailed Holt, who was one of the fellows dosed. "Oh! get me some water. Oh, dear! I shall die, I know I shall!"

"You need a good cleaning out," laughed Jack, who had no sympathy whatever for the sneak. "You are dirty enough inside and out to make it necessary. Turn yourself inside out. You need it."

The other victim was retching and gasping and groaning by turns and all at once, but Jack only laughed.

If one had been in pain and needed his help, no one could have been more sympathetic, but in this case the victim was simply getting his deserts, and the boy wasted no sympathy upon him.

"Oh! I am poisoned, I know I am!" howled Holt. "Go send for a doctor. I know I am going to die!"

"No danger of it, Holt," laughed Jack. "That's nothing but a cleaning out medicine that will be good for you. Take off that mask of yours and you will breathe better. If it had not been for that, you would have got a bigger dose, but it will do, I guess."

Jack had easily recognized Holt, but the other hazer was unknown to him, as he did not yet know all the boys at the Academy.

Holt retched, and coughed, and choked, and gasped, and was in a very uncomfortable state, but there was no danger of his dying and Jack knew it perfectly well.

"I know you, Holt," he said. "I don't know the other fellow, but he will know me after this, I guess. I haven't got through with you fellows yet, but first I want to see how Herring and Merritt are coming on. He is a pickled Herring now, I warrant," and Jack laughed heartily at the recollection of the bully's sudden retreat.

He hurried back the way he had come, and shortly found Herring bending over a spring and trying to wash the ammonia from his face and eyes.

He had laid aside his mask and the stick he had carried, and was totally unprepared for Jack's coming.

"What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the herring," laughed Jack as he came up behind the bully and suddenly sent him plunging headfirst into the spring.

Herring sputtered and gasped, and Jack gave him another ducking, and without the slightest compunction.

"I don't believe in taking a mean advantage of a fellow, as a rule," he laughed, "but that is the only thing that a fellow like you will understand. This is the two-four-six degree, Herring."

Then he gave the bully another ducking and finally left him to look for Merritt, who also deserved something more than he had received.

"I am going to give you a reward of Merritt, Ernest," he laughed, as he finally came upon the sneak sitting on a stone at the edge of the woods, looking very miserable.

"Get out of here, I haven't done nothing," snarled Merritt, too weak to get up. "It wasn't me, it was Pete Herring."

"What is that mask doing on the ground, Merritt?" asked Jack. "And you have your old clothes on also. How does that happen, if you were not in this plot the same as Herring?"

"I was going blackberrying and wore my old clothes so's they wouldn't get hurt. You gotter wear something over your face, too, to keep it from getting scratched."

"Well, here's something else," laughed Jack as he plunged his hand into a mudhole close by and brought it up fairly reeking with black ooze.

Then he gave a generous plaster of the stuff to the bully's face, and chuckled as he went away:

"They say that mud is a sure cure for a lot of things, Merritt, and maybe it will cure you of trying to haze a fellow unawares. Think it over. Thinking won't hurt you, anyhow. You don't do enough to injure you."

Herring had taken himself off by the time Jack went back to the spring, evidently fearing that he would get another dose, which in his weak state he had no desire for and the boy did not find him.

"Well, he has had enough to last him for a time, at any rate," he said with a grin, "and I am not resentful enough to further add to his troubles. I wonder how those others are doing?"

He found Holt sitting on the ground looking very wretched and said, wiping his muddy hand on the fellow's face:

"There's a plaster for you, Holt. You don't look very pretty, but it may do you good."

"Ouch! it stinks!" yelled Holt.

"So does your reputation," laughed Jack. "One will act as a counter irritant to the other. And like curses like, you know. That's the new school of medicine. Who got up this little scheme to waylay me?"

"Pete Herring," muttered Holt. "I had nothing to do with it. I was just going to catch rabbits."

"With a mask? H'm! you are ashamed to look a rabbit in the face, are you? Well, you are homely enough to give a young rabbit nervous prostration, so I can't blame you for that."

"I didn't have nothing to do with it," said Holt, trying to wipe the mud from his face and making it worse.

"How about the telephone?" asked Jack. "Where was Herring when I called him up?"

"On the switch. How did you know it was him?"

"There are some voices that are so disagreeable that you can actually smell them, Holt. Herring's is one. Then I did not get the station at all? I thought not."

"No, you didn't, but if you knew it was Herring, what did you want to come for? That was foolish."

"Oh, no, it was not. It was foolish for Herring to use the phone and try to disguise his voice. Why didn't he get some one I did not know at all? He was the foolish one. And then I thought I might give him a dose of his own medicine."

"Huh! did you give him as bad as you gave me?"

"Well, it was different," and Jack laughed.

"I don't treat all alike, you see. Have a little more of the mud cure?"

Then, without waiting for an answer, Jack plastered the bully's face and neck with the sticky mud and left him.

"This is hazing the hazers," he said. "They may not like it, but, then, that is merely the point of view. There is no reason why I should like it any better than they do."

The other bully was sneaking away when Jack found him and he let him go, having really had enough fun with the bullies to last him some time, and considering that he had punished them enough for one while.

"Four to one was pretty good odds," he laughed, "but I had the advantage of knowing what they were about. That was stupid of Herring to get on the wire himself. Why didn't he get some one else? Fellows like these always make some stupid mistake which betrays them."

Jack then returned to the house, where he found Bucephalus washing the wagon with warm water and soap.

"Give me a chance to wash my hands, Bucephalus," he said. "Honest Injun, now, did you know anything about a plan to haze me? That telephone message was all a hoax."

"Wha' yo' mean by dat, sah?" asked Bucephalus. "Wasn' dere no tullyphome message? I done heard it mahse'f, sah, an' Ah done give it to yo' same as Ah heard it m'se'f, sah."

"Then you did not know of any trick to get the best of me?"

"No, sah, 'deed Ah didn't, sah."

The man spoke so earnestly that Jack was convinced that he was telling the truth and believed him.

When he had finished washing his hands, he went to the doctor's study, where he found the principal himself, and asked permission to use the telephone.

Finding the number of the station below, which was not the one given to him, he called up Mr. Jones and asked if there was any package for him.

The agent said that there was not, and the boy then knew that the whole affair had been a hoax and that probably Bucephalus was as innocent of it as the station agent himself.

"They must have come in here when the doctor was out, switched the barn line on to this one, and taken my call without Jones knowing anything about it," he said as he hung up the receiver and went out. "It was a pretty good plot, but one little blunder will spoil the best of plots."

He said nothing to Percival nor any of his new friends about the matter, being satisfied to have gotten the best of his enemies without publishing it, and feeling that he would be safe from further annoyance for a time at least.

It was said at the supper table that Holt and Haddon were sick from eating too much, and that Merritt had fallen into the brook and taken cold, and Jack did not take the trouble to correct the rumors.

Herring was there, looking as well dressed and conceited as usual, and probably he had more ways of getting over his troubles than the others had, for he showed no effects of the hazing.

He glared at Jack in a manner that promised future trouble, but the boy paid no attention to it, and did not mention the affair to any of his friends, although he knew that they would have liked well enough to hear of it.

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