"Help! Assistance! Aid! Succor!" shouted the happy-go-lucky Hicks, as the behemoth Butch and Beef seized him, swinging him aloft with ludicrous ease, "Police! Fire! Murder! Take care of my banjo, Monty. Tell all the fellows at old Bannister I died game, and plant Hair-Trigger Bill with his boots on! _Oooo_, Beef, Butch, _have a heart_, that water is _cold_!" T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., relieved of banjo and revolvers, but his shadow-like structure still clad in shoes, trousers, with imitation "chaps" and flamboyant red shirt, with his classic head still adorned by the sombrero, was swung back and forth by the two bulky football stars--once--twice-- "_Three_--Let him go!" shouted Butch Brewster, and like a falling meteor, the splinter-like youth, who had already fallen from grace, shot from the rock, head-first, disappearing with a spectacular splash in the icy waters of Lake Conowingo. Knowing Hicks to be as much at home in the water as a fish in an aquarium, the hilarious squad on shore prepared to jeer his reappearance above the water; however, their program was interrupted by old Hinky-Dink, who stood in the cook-tent doorway, belaboring a dishpan lustily with a soup-ladle, and shouting: "Breakfus' am served; fus' an' las' call fo' breakfus; all dem what am late don't git no breakfus!" "Breakfast!" exclaimed Monty Merriweather, who, with Roddy, Butch, and Beef, remained on the rock, despite the summons of the Cookee. "Hurry up, Hicks, I'm ravenous. Say, Butch, suppose all that Western regalia makes him water-logged; he's a terribly long while down there! Didn't he look like the hero in a moving-picture feature? We've given him the water-cure, but he will do that same stunt over again. That sunny-souled Hicks is simply Incorrigible!" A second later, the grinning, cheery countenance of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., shot above the water, and simultaneously with his appearance, just as though he had been chanting below the surface, for the entertainment of the finny denizens of Lake Conowingo, the irrepressible youth roared: "A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw-- But Sure-Shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!" CHAPTER II "LEAVE IT TO HICKS" Head Coach Patrick Henry Corridan, known to toil-tortured Gold and Green football squads from time immemorial as "the Slave-Driver," Captain Butch Brewster, and serious Deacon Radford, the star Bannister quarter-back, foregathered around a table in the Camp Bannister grub-shack. It was ten-thirty of the morning whose dawn T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had blithesomely hailed with an impromptu musicale and saengerfest on "Lookout There!" rock, and the football triumvirate were in togs. The squad, over in the bunkhouse, noisily donned gridiron armor for the morning practice, and the pestiferous Hicks was maintaining a mysterious silence, somewhere.