The boys had resolved on revenge, and nothing could turn them from their purpose. The trouble was this: Some one not otherwise engaged had fed the furnace an overshoe which it did not need. As incident to its consumption the overshoe had filled the building with an odour of which nothing favourable could be said. The professor afterwards, in denouncing the author of the outrage, had referred to it as “effluvia.” It had as a perfume much force of character, and was stronger and more devastating than the odour which goes with an egg in its old age, when it has begun to hate the world and the future holds nothing but gloom.

As stated, the schoolhouse reeked and reeled with this sublimated overshoe. It all pleased the boys excessively. They made as much as possible of the odour; they coughed, and sneezed, and worried the professor by holding up their hands one after the other with the remark:

“Teacher, may I go out?”

The professor, after several destructive whiffs of the overshoe, made a fiery speech. He said that could he once locate the boy who lavished this overshoe on mankind in a gaseous form, that boy's person would experience a rear-end collision. He would be so badly telescoped that weeks would elapse before the boy could regard himself as being in old-time form. The professor said the boy who founded the overshoe odour was a “miscreant” and a “vandal.” He demanded his name of the boys collectively; and failing to get it, the professor said they were all miscreants and vandals, and that it would be as balm to his spirits were he to wade in and larrup the entire outfit.

After school the boys held a meeting.

Frank Payne, aged fourteen, the boy who could lick any boy in school, denounced the professor. He referred to the fact that his father was a school trustee; and that under the rules the professor had no right to bestow upon them the epithets of miscreants and vandals. Frank Payne advised that they whip the professor; who must, he said, while a large, muscular man, yield to mob violence.

The proposition to whip the professor was carried unanimously under a suspension of the rules.

In the ardour of this crusade for their rights the boys did not feel as if they could await the slow approach of trouble in the natural way. It was decided by them to bring matters to a focus. It was planned to have Tony Sanford stick a pin in John Dayton. That would be a splendid start! John Dayton, thus stuck, would yell; and when the professor asked the cause of his lamentations, John Dayton would point to Tony Sanford as his assassin. When the professor laid corrective hands on Tony all of the conspirators were to rush upon the professor and give him such a rough-and-tumble experience that succeeding ages would date time from the emeute. The boys were filled with glee; they regarded the business, so they said, as “a pushover.”

The hour for action had arrived.

Tony Sanford had no pin. But Tony was a fertile boy; if there was a picket off Tony's mental fence at all, it was his foresight. Lacking a pin, the ingenious Tony stuck the small blade of his knife into John Dayton. The victim howled like a dog at night.

“Please, sir, Tony Sanford's stabbed me,” was John Dayton's explanation of his shrieks.

Tony Sanford was paraded for punishment. The cold-blooded enormity of the crime seemed to strike the professor dumb. He did not know how to take hold of the situation. But Tony pursued a course which not only invited but suggested action. As Tony approached, he dealt the professor an uppercut in the bread-basket, and with the cry, “Come on, boys!” closed doughtily with the foe.

The boys beheld the deeds of the intrepid Tony; they heard his cry and knew it for their cue. Nevertheless, notwithstanding, not a boy moved. They sat in their seats and gazed fixedly at Tony and the professor. With the call of Tony to his fellow-conspirators the professor saw it all.

“Tony Sanford,” quoth the professor, “we will adjourn to the library. When I get through, you will be of no further use to science.”

The door closed on Tony Sanford, and a professor weighing 211 pounds. The sounds which came welling from the library showed that some strong, emotional work was being done within. Tony and the professor sounded at times like a curlew at night, and anon like unto a man falling downstairs with a stove. Tony Sanford said afterward that he would never again attach himself to a plot which did not show two green lights on the rear platform of its caboose.