"I wish I had knocked him down," he said in a low tone.
"What good would it have done?" returned Roger. "It would only get you into trouble with the doctor, and that is just what Plum would like. When it comes to a standing in the class, he knows he hasn't as much to lose as you have. He is almost at the bottom already, while you are close to the top."
"But, Roger, he said--oh, I can't bear to think about it! I suppose he blabs it to everybody, too, and they will think----"
"Don't give it another thought, Dave," said Phil, soothingly, and he turned his chum toward the river again. "Dismiss Plum and all his meanness from your mind."
"I wish I could," answered Dave, and his voice had a great deal of seriousness in it.
As the three boys hurried to the river, Dave Porter felt that all his anticipated sport for that afternoon had been spoiled. He had been brought face to face once more with the one dark spot in his history, and his heart was filled with a bitterness which his two loyal chums could scarcely comprehend.
Dave was indeed a poorhouse boy, and of unknown parentage. When but a few years of age, he had been found one evening in the summer wandering close to the railroad tracks just outside of the village of Crumville. How he was found by some farm hands and taken to a house and fed and cared for otherwise, has already been related in the first volume of this series, entitled "Dave Porter at Oak Hall."
At first, every effort to learn his identity was made, but, this failing, he was turned over to the poorhouse authorities. He said his name was Dave, or Davy, and sometimes added Porter, and then Dun-Dun, and from this he was called Dave Porter--a name which suited him very well.
Dave remained at the poorhouse until he was about nine years old, when he was taken out of that institution by a broken-down college professor named Caspar Potts, who had turned farmer. He remained with the old professor for several years, and a warm friendship sprang up between the pair. Caspar Potts gave Dave a fair education, and, in return, the boy did all he could for the old man, who was not in the best of health, and rather eccentric at times.
Unfortunately for Professor Potts, there was in the neighborhood a hard-hearted money-lender named Aaron Poole, who had a mortgage on the old educator's farm. The money-lender had a son named Nat, who was a flippant youth, and this boy had trouble with Dave. Then the money-lender would have sold out the old professor, had not aid come opportunely from a most unexpected quarter.