Don Gordon's Shooting-Box by Harry Castlemon (10 best novels of all time .TXT) 📕
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- Author: Harry Castlemon
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At the time of which we write the school had been in session about two weeks. Two hundred and fifty of the old students had returned, and the places of the large number who were graduated at the close of the last term were filled by the second class, which became the first; the third became the second, the fourth became the third, and the new fourth was made up of the “Plebes” who had signed the muster-roll. Why the new-comers were called “Plebes,” which is short for “plebeians,” it is hard to tell. Perhaps it was because their fathers, in the days of their boyhood, had given that name to all new scholars, or it may have been for the reason that everybody was down 13on them. They certainly looked out of place there. They still wore their citizens’ clothes, the uniforms for which they had been measured when they first arrived not having yet been received. They were not allowed to go on dress-parade because they could not handle a musket; and as they had not yet been “broken in,” they were a little too independent in their conduct to suit the old students, who exacted the greatest show of respect from those who were below them.
Among these “Plebes” was one whose advent created the profoundest astonishment among some of the students. The boys we have already introduced to the reader were talking about him as they came up the path. They were Tom Fisher and his crowd. Having drawn the capes of their overcoats over their heads, they were strolling leisurely along, paying no heed to the cutting wind that swept across the snow-covered parade-ground; but the thinly clad young fellow who came up the path behind them was shivering violently under its influence. His hands and face were blue with cold, and his feet were so poorly protected that he was obliged to stop now and then and stamp them on the ground to get them 14warm. The noise he made attracted the attention of Tom Fisher and his companions, who turned to see what had occasioned it.
“Here he comes now,” exclaimed Dick Henderson, a fair-haired, sunny-faced little fellow, whose mother would have been ashamed of him if she had known what sort of company he was keeping at the academy. “Say, you fellow, where are your manners?”
Only one short year ago Dick was a “Plebe” himself; but now he was a third class boy, and he was resolved that everybody should know it and treat him accordingly.
“Let him go, Dick,” said Tom Fisher, in a tone of disgust. “You would be highly honored by a salute from a bootblack, wouldn’t you, now?”
“Who are these?” said Clarence Duncan, in a low tone.
Tom and his crowd looked down the path and saw two other new-comers approaching. In appearance they were very unlike the shivering, half-frozen boy who had just gone along the path. They were warmly clad, wore sealskin caps and gloves, and there was something in their air and 15bearing that proclaimed them to be boys who respected themselves, and who intended that others should respect them. One of them was tall and broad-shouldered, and carried himself as though he had never been in the habit of submitting to any nonsense, and the other was small, slender, and apparently delicate.
“Why, they are the Planter and his brother,” said one of the students, all of whom had had opportunity to learn more or less of the history of the boys who composed the fourth class. “They’re from Mississippi. Their father is worth no end of money, and they say he gives his boys a very liberal allowance.”
“Then they’ll be good fellows to foot the bills at Cony Ryan’s, will they not?” said Fisher.
“They say that the little one is a saint,” chimed in Dick Henderson. “He never does anything wrong; but his brother must be a brick, for he was expelled from the last school he attended on account of some violation of the rules.”
“Then he’s the fellow for us,” said Tom Fisher. “We must make it a point to see him after taps.”
The near approach of the new-comers cut short the conversation. Tom and his crowd strolled 16leisurely on, filling up the path so completely that it was impossible for any one to pass them without stepping out into the deep snow that had been thrown up on each side. This the new scholars did not seem inclined to do. The smaller one came up behind Dick Henderson, and placing the back of his hand against his arm, said pleasantly:
“Will you be good enough to give us a little room?”
Tom and his friends faced about at once, and the former stepped up to the speaker and laid his hand rather heavily on his shoulder.
“Look here, Plebe,” said he, in an insolent tone. “‘Subordination is of discipline the root; when you address an old cadet, forget not to salute.’ Mind that in future.”
“Take your hand off that boy, or I will salute you with a blow in the face that will bury you out of sight in that snowdrift,” said he who had been called the “Planter.”
“Who are you?” demanded Fisher.
“Take a good look at me so that you will remember me,” was the reply.
The boy drew off his gloves and pulled down his muffler, revealing the familiar features of our 17old friend, Don Gordon. Just then the clear notes of a bugle rang out on the frosty air. It was the “study call,” and all the students within hearing made haste to respond to it.
DON AND BERT AT SCHOOL.
Don Gordon and his brother Hubert were two of the heroes of the Boy Trapper series. Those who have met them before will not need to be told what sort of boys they were; and strangers we will leave to do as the boys of the Bridgeport Academy did—become acquainted with them by degrees. They lived near the little town of Rochdale, in the State of Mississippi, where their father owned an extensive cotton plantation. That was the reason why the students, who had a new name for every new-comer, called Don the Planter. The last time we spoke of him and Hubert was in connection with the building of a Shooting-Box on the site of the one that had been burned by Bob Owens and Lester Brigham. We then informed the reader that the new structure was much better than the old one, and that is all we shall say about it until such time as the owners get ready to take possession of it.
After Bob Owens ran away from home to become 19a hunter, and Godfrey Evans and his son Dan went to work to earn an honest living, and David Evans became mail carrier, and Lester Brigham withdrew himself from the society of the boys in the neighborhood, the inhabitants of Rochdale and the surrounding country settled back into their old ways, and waited for something to happen that would create an excitement. They marveled greatly at the sudden change that had taken place in Godfrey and Dan, talked of the indomitable courage Bob Owens had displayed on the night the steamer Sam Kendall was burned, and cast jealous eyes upon David Evans, who, they thought, was making money a little too rapidly, and throwing on a few more airs than were becoming in a boy who had a woodchopper, and a lazy and worthless one at that, for a father.
Rochdale was like some other country towns that you may have heard of. The people, most of whom had been impoverished by the war, were envious of one another, though outwardly they were friendly, and all one had to do to gain enemies was to be successful. If he made money one year by planting potatoes, when the next season came around everybody planted potatoes. If he 20set up a blacksmith shop or opened a store, and seemed to be prospering, some one was sure to start opposition to him. When David Evans began riding the mail route for Don Gordon’s father, who had the contract, and exchanged his rags for warm and durable clothing, and purchased a fine horse for himself, there were a good many who thought that he was getting on in the world altogether too fast. His most bitter enemy was Mr. Owens, who had tried so hard to secure the contract for his son Bob, the runaway. He generally rode a very dilapidated specimen of horse-flesh, and whenever David passed him on the road, mounted on his high-stepping colt, Mr. Owens always felt as though he wanted to knock him out of his saddle.
“Just look at that beggar on horseback!” he would say to himself. “Things have come to a pretty pass when white trash like that can hold their heads so high in the air. If it hadn’t been for him and that meddlesome Gordon, Bob might have been riding that route now instead of roaming about the world, nobody knows where. If the opportunity ever presents itself I’ll get even with both of them for that piece of business.”
21As for Don and Bert, they hardly knew what to do with themselves. Their private tutor left them—being a Northern man he could not stand the climate—and then they were as uneasy as fish out of their native element. They galloped their ponies about the country in search of adventure, paddled around the lake in their canoe, roamed listlessly through the woods with their guns in their hands; in short, to quote from Don, “they“they became as shiftless and of as little use in the world as ever Godfrey Evans had been.”
“I don’t at all like this thing,” the general one day said to his wife, “and there must be a stop put to it. The boys will grow up as ignorant as the negroes. I shall pack them both off to school.”
Mrs. Gordon thought of the way in which Don had conducted himself at the last school he attended (he had been expelled from it on account of the “scrapes” that his inordinate love of mischief brought him into), and made no reply.
“I have not forgotten that unfortunate occurrence,” said the general, who well knew what was passing in his wife’s mind. “But I think it was a lesson to Don, and one that will never fade from 22his memory. Being blessed with wonderful health and strength, he is fairly overflowing with animal spirits, and some of his surplus energy must be worked off in some way. I’ll put him where he will be held with his nose close to the grindstone. I’ll send him to Bridgeport.”
“Do you think he can endure the discipline?” asked the anxious mother, who knew how easily Don could be governed by kindness, and how obstinate he was under harsh treatment.
“He’ll have to; it is just what he needs. After he has spent six hours in racking his brain over the hardest kind of problems in mathematics, and two hours and a half more in handling muskets and broadswords under the eye of a strict drillmaster, he will feel more like going to bed than he will like running the guard to eat Cony Ryan’s pancakes and drink his sour buttermilk. I know, for I have been right there.”
When General Gordon once made up his mind to a course of action he lost no time in carrying it into effect. Before the week was passed he and his two boys were on their way to Bridgeport, where they arrived in time to learn something of the life the students led while they were in 23camp. The veteran superintendent welcomed the general as an old friend and pupil, received him and his boys into his marquee, and took pains to see that the latter made some agreeable acquaintances among the members of the first class, who showed them every thing there was to be seen. Bert did not have much to say, but Don was all enthusiasm.
“That’s the school for me,” said he to his father when they were on their way to Rochdale, after Don and Bert had passed their examination and been admitted as members of the academy. “How nicely those fellows were drilled, and what good-natured gentlemen all the instructors are! We shall have easy times during the first year. It will seem like play for me to go back to the beginning of algebra again.”
The general smiled, but said nothing until they reached home and the boys began to get ready to go back to the academy at the beginning of the school year. Then he tried to make them understand that “easy times” were entirely unknown in Bridgeport; that the instructors, although they were “good-natured” enough to the guests they met while
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