Bobby let himself into the big new gymnasium and walked back through the deserted hall to the small room that was used for individual training. As he neared the door he could hear the sound of loud voices and the shuffling of feet, and heard the commanding voice of Biff Bates shout "Break!" The door was locked, but through the slide window at the side a strange tableau met his eyes. Stooped and lean Johnson, as chalk-white of face as ever, had paunchy and thin-legged Silas Trimmer by the collar, and over Biff Bates' intervening body was trying to rain blows into the center of the circular smile, now flattened to an oval of distress. "Break, Johnson, break!" begged Biff. "Don't put him out till you feed him all he's got coming." Thereupon he succeeded in extracting Mr. Trimmer from the grasp of Mr. Johnson and forced the former back upon a chair, where he began to fan him with a towel in most approved fashion. "Let me out of this!" gasped Mr. Trimmer. "I'll have you arrested for assault and conspiracy." "They'll only pinch a corpse, for the cops'll find me tickled to death when they get here," responded Mr. Bates gaily. "Now you're all right. Get up!" "Let me out of this, I say!" commanded Mr. Trimmer frantically. "I'll run you into the penitentiary! I'll break you up in business! I'll hire thugs to break every bone in your body!" "Is that all?" inquired Biff complacently, and grabbed him as he started to run around the room in a wild hunt for an outlet. "Stand up here and put up a fight or I'll punch you myself. I've been aching to do it for a year. That's why I got Doc Willets to dope it out to you that you was dyin' for training, and why I kept shifting your hour to when there was nobody here. Go to him, chum!" Then ensued the strangest sparring match that the grinning and stealthily silent Bobby had ever seen. Johnson, with a true "tiger crouch" which he could not have avoided if he had wished, began dancing around and around the spherical body of Mr. Trimmer, without science and without precaution, keeping his two arms going like windmills, and occasionally landing a light blow upon some portion of Mr. Trimmer's unresisting anatomy; but finally a whirl so vigorous that it sent Johnson spinning upon his own heel, landed squarely beneath the jaw of Silas. That gentleman, with a puffed eye and a bleeding lip and two teeth gone, rose from his feet with the impact of the blow, and landed with a grunt in a huge basket of soiled bath-towels. "Johnson," called the laughter-shaken voice of Bobby through the window, "I'm ashamed of you!" Mr. Johnson looked up happily from his task of wiping away a little trickle of blood from his already swollen nose.