As was but natural in the case of an old army officer, Captain Putnam had organized his school upon military lines, and his students made up a battalion of two companies, as related in details in the first volume of this series, called “The Putnam Hall Cadets.” The students had voted for their own officers, and after a contest that was more or less spirited, Jack Ruddy was elected major of the battalion, and a youth named Henry Lee became captain of Company A, and Bart Conners captain of Company B. Some of the boys wanted Pepper to try for an officer’s position, but he declined, stating he would just as lief remain “a high private in the rear rank.”
At the school there was a big youth named Dan Baxter, who was a good deal of a bully. He had wanted to be an officer, and it made him very sore to see himself defeated. Together with a crony named Nick Paxton and a boy called Mumps he plotted to break up a picnic of Jack and his friends. This plot proved a boomerang, and after that Baxter and his cohorts did all they could to get Jack and his chums into trouble.
The first assistant teacher at the Hall was Josiah Crabtree, a man of good education, but one who was decidedly sour in his make-up and who never knew how to take fun. With him the cadets were continually in “hot water,” and more than once the boys wished Crabtree would leave Putnam Hall never to return.
The second assistant teacher was George Strong, and he was as much beloved as the first assistant was despised. George Strong had not forgotten the time when he was a boy himself, and he often came out on the lake or the athletic field, or in the gymnasium, to take part in their sports and pastimes. Pepper voted him “the prince of good teachers,” and Jack and the others endorsed this sentiment.
During the first session of Putnam Hall, George Strong had mysteriously disappeared. Two strange men had been seen around the school, and it was learned that the strangers had something to do with the missing instructor. A hunt was instituted by Captain Putnam, and in this he was joined by Jack, Pepper, Dale, and an acrobatic pupil named Andy Snow. George Strong was found to be a prisoner in a hut in the woods, and it was learned that his captors were the two strange men. These men were related distantly to the teacher and both were insane—their minds having been affected by the loss of their fortunes.