Publisher's Synopsis
"I say you did!" cried Fred Ripley, hotly. Dick Prescott's cheeks turned a dull red as he replied, quietly, after swallowing a choky feeling in his throat: "I have already told you that I did not do it." "Then who did do the contemptible thing?" insisted Ripley, sneeringly. Fully forty boys, representing all the different classes at the Gridley High School, stood looking on at this altercation in the school grounds. Half a dozen of the girls, too, hovered in the background, interested, or curious, though not venturing too close to what might turn out to be a fight in hot blood. "If I knew," rejoined Dick, in that same quiet voice, in which one older in the world's ways might have detected the danger-signal, "I wouldn't tell you." "Bah!" jeered Fred Ripley, hotly. "Perhaps you mean that you don't believe me?" said Prescott inquiringly. "I don't!" laughed Ripley, shortly, bitterly. "Oh!" A world of meaning surged up in that exclamation. It was as though bright, energetic, honest Dick Prescott had been struck a blow that he could not resent. This, indeed, was the fact.
