CHAPTER XVI.

“THERE’S MANY A SLIP——”

“Wow! Look out where you’re coming!”

“What is it?”

“It’s a giant owl!”

These and a dozen other exclamations of dismay and alarm mingled with a great splintering, and crashing, and snapping, as Rob came ploughing down to earth. Luckily, he fetched up in a snow bank, into which the velocity with which the winged-sled had been traveling, drove it, for three feet or more.

The wings were reduced to a mass of torn canvas and shattered frames, while the steel-runners were buckled and bent under the strain. A more complete wreck was never seen.

But havoc had been done, likewise, to the group into which Rob had inadvertently plunged. As it so happened, they were the last persons in the world he would have wished to encounter just then, for in the voices that rang out about him, as the four figures were thrown right and left, he had recognized the familiar tones of Freeman Hunt, Bill Bender, Jack Curtiss and Lem Lonsdale. They had, by a strange coincidence, selected the same night upon which Paul’s friends had come to try out their big sleigh with which they intended to capture the silver cup.

“Anybody hurt?” hailed Rob, as he extricated himself from the snow-pile, feeling a little dizzy by the rapidity with which his smash-up had occurred. At one moment he was flying, and the next he was ignominiously toppled into a snow bank, with the splintered wreck of his winged vehicle about him.

“Anybody hurt?” he repeated, coming toward the group, the members of which were brushing off the snow that had clung to them when they were shot here and there by the lad’s sudden descent.

“It’s that cub Blake,” whispered Hunt to Jack Curtiss.

“Well, what of it?” growled Jack in a low voice. “We aren’t scared of him or a dozen like him. Hurt?” he went on at the top of his voice. “No, we ain’t, but I suppose you’d like to have seen us all injured for life by that fool thing you were flopping about on. You’re a great inventor—not.”

“It isn’t my invention,” said Rob, with meaning emphasis. “It was the idea of a friend of mine—a young fellow who made something else that interested a certain man in this town so much that he tried to forge a telegram to get a chance to buy it.”

“Are you aiming at me?” demanded Freeman Hunt, coming forward, “or at my father?”

“If the cap fits, you can wear it,” retorted Rob, thoroughly angry with Hunt and his companions. He was turning contemptuously away when Jack Curtiss stepped forward.

“Hold on there a minute, young fellow,” he snarled, “you’ve got a lesson coming to you, and right here is as good a place as any to give it to you.”

“The same sort of lesson you tried to give me in the road one night, eh?” flung back Rob, scornfully; “the same sort of lesson that the fellow who fired that gun at me in the wood wanted to give me, I guess.”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” blurted out Freeman Hunt, before his wiser cronies could stop him.

“Then my guess was right. It was you that fired it,” said Rob. “Thanks for giving me the proof of it.”

“Bother it all, he’s got a hold over us now,” muttered Jack Curtiss, turning away as Rob’s chums came up.

“Well, the smash-up happened,” said Rob to Paul. “I’m awfully sorry, Paul. I couldn’t help it, though. Something seemed to divert my attention for a second, and the next thing I knew I was head-over-heels in the snow-pile.”

“Good thing it was there,” said Merritt, who, with the others, had been examining the wreck.

“See what a big hole his head made,” cried Tubby, pointing to the hole in the soft snow where Rob had driven into it.

“I’ll make it all right with you, Paul,” Rob promised. “I’ll see that you are able to build a bigger, better flyer than this one. I believe that if we don’t break our necks trying it out, that you have a good idea there.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Paul.

“I do,” rejoined Rob.

“He really does,” sneered Jack Curtiss from the patch of shadow in which he and his cronies were standing.

“I wish you’d broken your skull instead of hitting that snow bank,” he went on.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Rob, serenely; “unfortunately for you, I didn’t.”

“I guess you think you are going to get that cup at the sled carnival, don’t you,” chuckled Bill Bender; “well, you haven’t got a chance.”

“No, you won’t know you’re on earth,” chimed in Lem Lonsdale, viciously.

“Oh, come on, fellows,” urged Freeman Hunt, who had his own reasons for not wishing to linger, “leave the babies alone. They’ve smashed their pretty toy, now let them run home to bed.”

So saying, he turned, and began lugging the long, racy-looking toboggan they had brought with them up the steep, white hill. With a muttered threat about punching heads and “fresh young cubs,” Jack Curtiss and the others followed him.

“Well, I guess we’d better pick up the remains and go home,” said Tubby, dragging out a splintered wing-tip from the snow.

“Hold on a minute,” said Rob, “let’s wait here and see what those fellows can do. I guess they’ve come out here to try that big, new sled.”

Sure enough, a few seconds later there came a loud screech from the top of the hill.

“Here they come,” volunteered Tubby, bending forward.

High up the hill, outlined sharply against the snow, there came rushing toward them a flying object. It seemed to fairly whiz over the frozen surface. Hardly had they sighted it before it flashed past with yells of defiance from its occupants, and vanished into the darkness cast by a clump of big fir trees.

“Well!” exclaimed Rob, “they’ve got a flyer; no mistake about that.”

“It’ll be faster yet when they get those runners rubbed down,” vouchsafed Merritt; “it only came in this afternoon from New York. They got it from a big sporting-goods house.”

“Maybe the same one Jack got his flying machine from,” chuckled Paul, smiling over the remembrance of the bully’s discomfiture on the occasion of the aeroplane model contest, as told in the first volume of this series.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” responded Tubby, in reply to Paul’s observation.

“Where did they get the money from?” wondered Merritt. “That sled must have cost a lot.”

“Oh, Hunt’s father gives him plenty of money,” was Rob’s response, “and the others are not exactly poor. They could easily afford such a sled for the gratification of winning the cup away from us.”

“I guess that’s about all they’ve gone into the competition for,” suggested Paul.

The others agreed with him. It would be a big feather in the caps of the arch enemies of the Boy Scouts if they could capture any of the events which were to take place on the hill after Christmas, especially the big cup event.

“It’s up to us to look out for any crooked work, then,” said Tubby, as, with arms full of such parts of the shattered Pegasus as seemed worth keeping, they started for home. “Those fellows won’t stick at anything as we know.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on them,” was Rob’s comment; “there’s good in most chaps if you look for it.”

“Hum,” sniffed Merritt, “you’d have to go prospecting with a pickaxe and dynamite to find it in Jack Curtiss’ crowd.”

“And then use a microscope,” commented Tubby, in spite of Rob’s protests that they ought to use “fair play.”

As Rob had prophesied, Paul managed to build a new winged-sled, and despite an occasional flop, it proved to be a handy sort of contrivance, making short glides and alighting on its spring runners without more than almost dislocating the rider’s vertebrae. However, boy-like, the lads of Hampton regarded it as a wonderful invention, and lauded it to the skies, so much so, that a paragraph concerning “our ingenious young fellow townsman, Paul Perkins,” was inserted in an issue of the _Hampton Local_.

“Wouldn’t that make you sick,” sneered Jack Curtiss, when he saw the item. “Ingenious indeed—anybody could do things like that if they had a mind to.”

In this saying, Jack came as near to the truth as in anything he had uttered for a long time.

Jones’s Hill became alive now in the gloaming, and on moonlight nights, with sleds of all descriptions, from small, old-fashioned “foot-steerers” to the big, polished, nickel-trimmed, flexible-guiding store varieties. One thing the trials had shown, on comparison with previous records, and this was that the capture of the silver cup probably lay between the big toboggan of the Curtiss faction, and the six-seater manipulated by Rob and his chums.

“If there is no dark horse entered, Hampton gets the cup this year sure,” Rob declared one evening as the happy, tired boys began to retrace their steps to the village, after an evening of exciting practice.

“I don’t see much satisfaction in that if Curtiss and his crowd win it,” mumbled Tubby, which brought down upon his head another lecture from Rob, who, as should all good scouts, did not believe in harboring a grudge.

“Let the best team win,” he said; “that’s all we ask for—that, and fair play.”

On the evening of which we have spoken, Paul and his chums met at his house to discuss final plans for the race and talk over the advisability of showing off the paces of the winged-sled. In the midst of their talk, Rob got up from the table and started for the door with a plate containing sundry apple cores, the remains of the fruit which the deliberators had consumed as an aid to their counsels.

He had opened the portal and was about to chuck them out into the night when he suddenly paused and stood listening sharply. He thought—was sure, in fact—that he had heard a furtive footstep creep away from the house as he flung the door open.

“Shut that door for goodness sake,” howled Tubby, as Rob stood there peering out; “you’re freezing us to death in here.”

The others added their voices of protest. Thus admonished, Rob closed the door, and returned to the table. Although he said nothing about it, he could not get out of his head the idea that he had seen a form, darker than the surrounding blackness, slip away from the house as he gazed forth.

It was not far from midnight when the boyish conference broke up, and Rob, Tubby and Merritt started for their homes, which lay in the same direction. They had reached Tubby’s house and were just saying good-night when there came a sudden alarming shout. On the frosty air it rang out, as clearly and as startlingly as a midnight bell.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”