"Get back! I'm bad, I tell ye!"

"You, bad; you cheap Piute from Rhode Island!" sniffed Tom contemptuously.

Reaching forward, quick as a flash, Reade twisted a revolver from the fellow's left hand.

"Now, pa.s.s me the other," continued Tom. "If you don't I'll wring that wooden head of yours from your neck! I'm coming, now!"

Having tossed the captured revolver in the street behind him, Reade made a sudden leap at the "bad wolf."

"Hold on!" cried the fellow sheepishly. "Don't get excited.

Here it is; take it!"

Seeing how readily their companion had surrendered, the other two headed Hazelton's demand for their weapons.

From the doorway Chief Simmons had looked on at this brief, bloodless battle like one dazed.

From up and down Main street at respectful distances, crowds of Gridleyites gazed in stupefied wonder.

"Come on out, Chief, and talk to these naughty boys!" called Tom good-humoredly. "They didn't mean to be troublesome, but Fourth of July had got into their blood."

The police reserves came running up now. First of all, the revolvers of the five wild ones were gathered up. Then the officers turned to the prisoners that had been captured by the West Point cadets and the Young Engineers.

"These fellows are only medicine-show cowboys," Tom explained, with a grin, to the chief of police. "I know the real kind---and these sorry specimens are not it. Probably these fellows have never been west of Ohio."

"You're an Indian, I'm pretty sure," said Cadet Prescott to the painted redskin whom he now held by one arm. "But you're a tame Indian. What part of Maine do you come from?"

"Yes, I'm an Indian," grinned d.i.c.k's captive "I own a farm on the east end of Long Island."

"Humph! You've been through the pubic schools, too?" demanded d.i.c.k.

"Yes, sir."

Greg's Indian was quite as docile. The police now had the weapons of all the party, except one automatic weapon that Greg was examining.

"Yah!" grinned Holmes. "This gun is loaded with blank cartridges.

I guess all the others were, too."

The guess was a wholly correct one.

By this time the Main Street crowd, wholly over its fright, was crowding about the police and their captives.

"Say, this seems like old times!" called Sam Foss, laughingly.

"d.i.c.k & Co. right in the thick the excitement."

"There hasn't been any," grinned Prescott.

At this instant a new actor arrived on the scene. Wild Charlie, the Indian medicine "doctor," immaculate in black frock suit and patent leather shoes, with a handsome sombrero spread over the glistening black hair that hung down over his shoulders, rushed up.

"Let these people go, Chief," begged the picturesque quack doctor.

"I'll pay for any damage they've done."

Chief Simmons looked the long-haired "doctor" over with a broad grin.

"You're Wild Charlie, are you?" demanded the chief.

"Yes, partner."

"What part of Vermont do you come from! Or is Germany your hailing place, Wild Charlie?"

"Don't josh me too hard, Chief," pleaded the medicine fakir "Will you let my people go, if I settle?"

"These terrors," retorted Chief Simmons, "are about due for thirty days for disturbing the peace."

"But that would bust my summer season, Chief," pleaded "Wild Charlie."

"Oh, don't run these innocents in, Chief," urged Tom Reade. "They aren't really bad, and they admitted it as soon as we told 'em so.

These people are not dangerous---only a bit nervous."

"See here, Wild Charlie," grinned the chief of police, "I don't want to do anything to make you wilder. I'll let these human picture books go on condition that you take your show at once and clear on out of town."

"I may just as well go," sighed the long-haired one. "This job has ruined my business here. And say, Chief, won't you break the guns and knock the cartridges out, and then let me have the guns, too? They cost a lot of money!"

But on this point Chief Simmons was firm.

"No, sirree! You can take your infant terrors and load them on the first train away from here. But the revolvers are confiscated, Wild Charlie, and they'll stay here. You can try to recover the revolvers by a civil suit, if you want to risk it in court. Otherwise, make your get-away as fast as you can. I'll admit that your outfit had the josh on me, and had me tickling the wire for the reserves.

But just now the town holds two West Point cadets, and two young engineers from the real West, which makes Gridley no place to turn a vaudeville powder-play loose in."

"Wild Charlie" and his band fled as fast as they could, for the crowd was jeering loudly and talking of taking all six to the nearest horse-trough for a ducking.

"Is that the best the old town can do for excitement in these days?" laughed Reade, as soon as our young friends had separated themselves from the laughing crowd and had started on a stroll.

"Why, that little episode was doing well enough for any town,"

smiled d.i.c.k. "A laugh is better than a fight, any day."

"Queer text for a soldier to preach from," grinned Hazelton.

"Not a bit," d.i.c.k retorted. "The soldier, above all men, hates a fight, for the soldier knows he's the only one that's likely to get hurt."

"Oho!"

"Yes; and moreover," broke in Greg, "armies aren't organized, in the first place, for fighting, but for preserving peace."

"Just as railroads are built to keep people from traveling," jeered Reade.

"If we don't look out the greatest excitement that we'll find today will be starting a fight among ourselves," warned Harry dryly.

"Rot!" scoffed Tom. "The old chums of d.i.c.k & Co. couldn't fight each other, any more that they can avoid joshing each other."

Though none of the chums guessed it, excitement enough for two of them, possible, was brewing in another part of Gridley at that moment.