Putnam Hall Rivals."

With the coming of the next summer, the thoughts of the students turned
to various sports, and in the third volume, "The Putnam Hall Champions,"
I told how the chums entered several contests, both on land and on the
lake, and won out. At that time Fred Century was a pupil at Pornell
Academy, but Fred became so disgusted at the actions of Roy Bock, Bat
Sedley, and some others, that he quit the rival institution of learning
and came to Putnam Hall, where he was given a warm welcome.

The encounters that Jack and his chums had with Reff Ritter and his
cronies were numerous, and more than once Ritter did his best to get the
young major into serious trouble. Once he drugged Jack with some French
headache powders, and when he was exposed Captain Putnam would have
expelled him had not Jack very generously asked that he be given another
chance. For this any ordinary youth would have been grateful, but
gratitude did not appear to be a part of Reff Ritter's make-up, and he
soon showed himself to be as mean as ever.

For some time matters ran along smoothly at Putnam Hall, but then came
trouble of an entirely new kind. Once, during the absence of Captain
Putnam and George Strong, the school was left in charge of two other
teachers--Josiah Crabtree and Pluxton Cuddle. Crabtree was dictatorial
to a degree and Cuddle was a man of queer ideas, one being that boys ate
entirely too much.

As told in the volume called "The Putnam Rebellion," the two teachers
sought to subdue the boys by starving them and locking them in their
dormitories. They rebelled, left the school by stealth, and marched
away, to camp in the woods. There the rebels split up, one party under