She was not to be shaken off, and they went together to the school-house door. There Flea nodded her thanks, lugged the bucket with both hands to the head of the room, and set it down upon a bench. She would not offer her tormentor what she had brought, as if she were his negro slave. In her absence her slate had been laid upon her seat. _Both sides were bare!_ In fact, the teacher had found her work correct, and chose this ungracious mode of dismissing her for the day. She instantly concluded that he meant for her to do the sum over from the beginning. The match had touched the powder-magazine of temper. Rising to her feet she surveyed him with desperate eyes. He sat quite erect as he wrote, and worked his month oddly, compressing and loosening his lips, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. Now he drew his eyebrows together, and then he would smile at what he was writing. He was comfortable and at peace with himself, this natty, prosperous, and powerful little man, whom she knew to be the vilest of the vile. If she thought that the blow would kill him, she would bring her big slate crashing down upon his skull. She could not kill him, but she could injure and mortify him. [Illustration: "A TORRENT OF ICE-COLD WATER DELUGED HIM."] Quickly and easily she lifted the pail she had carried with difficulty just now. Wrath lent her strength. In a twinkling it was turned upside down upon the head of the unsuspecting writer; a torrent of ice-cold water deluged him, and as she let go the bucket it clattered down upon his shoulders, covering his head like an enormous cap. It was the deed of a second. In another second Flea had cleared the school-house and was running for her life. [TO BE CONTINUED.] RICK DALE. BY KIRK MUNROE. CHAPTER XXI. A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY. The revenue-cutter whose appearance caused Alaric and Bonny so much anxiety had, indeed, been absent from Tacoma for two weeks, as the man in the sail-boat told them. On their first night in the Siwash camp she had gone to Port Townsend to turn over the captured smuggler _Fancy_ to the Collector at that place. Knowing how important the testimony of her crew would be during the proceedings against her, the commander of the cutter intended to return to the upper sound and to institute a thorough search for them the very next day. Before he could carry out this plan news was received that an American ship was ashore near Cape Flattery, one hundred miles away in the opposite direction, and the cutter was despatched to her assistance.