Phew! Wonder if that is what Plum calls winning? He had better study his dictionary!"
With a mighty leap Dave cleared the last hur dle, and came in a winner. Then the others finished in the order named, excepting that Gus Plum was so disgusted that he refused to take the last hurdle, for which some of the boys hissed him, considering it unsportsmanlike, which it was.
"My shoe got loose," said the bully, lamely. "If it hadn't been for that, I should have won." But nobody believed him.
"Dave, the way you went ahead was simply great," cried Phil. "It was as fine a hurdle race as I ever saw."
"Yes, and he helped me, too," said Cashod. "I was thinking Plum would go ahead, until Porter laughed at him. It was all right," and Cashod bobbed his head to show how satisfied he was.
If Nat Poole had been disgusted Gus Plum was more so, and he lost no time in disappearing from public gaze. The two cronies met back of the gymnasium.
"You hurt Porter about as much as I hurt Basswood," Plum grumbled. "If you can't do better than that next time, you had better give up trying."
"Oh, 'the pot needn't call the kettle black,'" retorted Poole. "You made just as much of a mess of it as I did. We'll be the laughing stock of the Porter crowd now."
