"That's a lie!" the man addressed as Gaston fiercely a.s.serted. "You wouldn't see me at the office, so I've come here, and I want justice done. You have been turning me away every day. I was right so long as I could hustle votes for you, and now I'm dirt!"

"You are simply a lunatic."

"And you mean to put me in an asylum?" the man hissed.

"That is the appointment I'll get for you, Gaston, if you trouble me."

"I'll kill you!" Gaston snarled, drawing a knife. "That's what I have made up my mind to do to you!"

"Stand aside, sir, and let me pa.s.s!" Lee commanded, though his voice was shaky. "I shall have you arrested if you----"

For reply, the man leaped at Lee with a snarl like that of an enraged dog.

"Loony as a locoed cowboy!" thought Badger. He was on the point of rushing to Lee's a.s.sistance. But there was no need. Lee, who was light on his feet, avoided the rush and ran for a side door, through which he escaped into the house, leaving Gaston to rave and mutter, and at last retreat into the street and hurry away.

Not until the man had disappeared did the Westerner leave the grounds.

Then he leaped the fence, and hurried back to the campus. Here a large number of students were rollicking in the somewhat wild and reckless student fashion, to their own great delight and the amus.e.m.e.nt of hundreds of spectators.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FUN IN THE CAMPUS.

Under an elm in front of Durfee some students were gathering "fruit."

They began by collecting it from members of the Chickering set. Of all the men in the college, the Chickering set were the most unpopular with their fellow students. Their silliness and superciliousness were so unbounded as to be disgusting to all sensible men. From the immaculate Rupert, with his patent-leather shoes and shining tile, down to the cowardly little lisper, Lew Veazie, they were alike detested. Hence it came about that when Rupert Chickering appeared under the famous "fruit"

tree wearing a more than ordinarily gorgeous shirt, the cry of "Fruit!"

was immediately raised.

Rupert uttered an exclamation of dismay and turned to run. He had heard that cry before. But he only hastened what he sought to evade. A foot outstretched for the purpose tripped him, and brought him sprawling to the ground. Before he could rise, one of the laughing students was upon him.

"See here!" he exclaimed, "I'll have you know that I will not submit to any such outrage! I know you, and I shall report you to the faculty!"

He tried to fight off the youth who held him, but a dozen other men rushed to this youth's a.s.sistance. Then a wild-eyed fellow produced a shining pocket-knife and slowly and exasperatingly opened its sharpest blade.

"Help!" Rupert squawked.

The knife was flourished in the air, and the tag on the lower end of Rupert's shirt-bosom was deftly amputated.

"Fruit!" was again shouted, and a dash was made for Gene Skelding, who, as usual, wore a rainbow shirt that outshone Joseph's "coat of many colors."

"Help!" Skelding howled.

But a score of hands outstretched to grasp him, and he, too, went down, screeching l.u.s.tily. Another knife flashed and another shirt-tag was neatly severed.

Lew Veazie, who had been with Rupert and Gene, started to run, deeming discretion the better part of valor. But he took only a step when he, too, went down. And again an amputating knife did its work. As soon as a shirt-tag was cut off, the amputator, flourishing it on the blade of his knife, like an Indian flaunting a scalp-lock, made a dash for the elm, where it was pinned up as a trophy.

Then it was found that a "taste" for shirt-tags had been created by this exciting bit of experience, and other men, who had been loudly laughing and cheering over the discomfiture of Chickering and his inane friends, found themselves suddenly on the ground, with wicked-looking knives flashing before their eyes, and their shirts being mutilated by the pressure of keen knife-blades.

In the midst of this "fun," Buck Badger arrived on the campus from his stolen interview with Winnie Lee. Though his face wore a perplexed expression, it had lost its gloom. There might be trouble for him in the future, but Winnie's words had for the present driven the blackest of the shadows out of his heart. The desire uppermost in his mind just then was to meet and whip Donald Pike. He had sworn to himself that he would do that the first thing, and he meant to keep the oath.

Nevertheless, reaching the elms of the campus at this exciting moment, he was willing to cease temporarily his search for Pike and view the fruit-gathering. It would be rare sport, provided, of course, that his own shirt was not forced to yield "fruit."

To prevent this, and that he might see better, he grasped a low-hanging limb and swung up into one of the elms.

"Fruit!" was being shouted everywhere, and the indications were that scores of trophies would adorn the old elm the next morning, if some stop was not put to the thing by the college authorities, which was not likely. "Society week" is expected to be noisy, and things are winked at which on ordinary occasions would bring reprimands.

Another person had invaded the branches of the elm but a minute before the ascent of the Westerner. That other person was Donald Pike, who looked down now on the man he felt instinctively to be his mortal foe with a little shiver of dread. More than once Pike had regretted making that revelation to Fairfax Lee, for the chances that discovery would come and that Badger would fiercely summon him to answer, seemed very great, when he gave himself time to reflect. And he feared Badger.

All might have gone well on this evening with Pike, however, if his fear of discovery had not made him try to climb farther up the tree. The Kansan heard the low sc.r.a.ping sound, in spite of the din in the campus, and glanced upward, and when he did so he saw and recognized the man he was looking for. A calcium-light was sending its rays through the higher branches, and Pike's white, scared face was as plainly revealed to Badger as if the two were facing each other in a lighted room.

The hate which Badger had been nursing swelled to the point of bursting.

He forgot the search for "fruit," in which he had been interested, seeing only the enemy whom he had sworn to whip as soon as they met.

As yet they had not met; but Badger, blinded by his intense anger, decided that the meeting should come without delay, even if the place was a tree-top; and he began to climb up the trunk and boughs of the tree toward Donald. Pike looked about in a despairing way. The distance to the ground seemed dishearteningly great. His first impulse, therefore, was to climb still higher, and this he began to do.

But, recollecting the tenacity of Badger's purpose in whatever the Kansan was engaged, he felt sure that he would be pursued into the very top of the tree and shaken to the ground. Therefore, he hastily crawled out over a horizontal limb, whose drooping ends dipped toward the earth.

If driven to the worst, he felt that he could drop from one of those drooping ends without serious injury.

With a howl of rage, Badger climbed on after the frightened youth, and pursued him out on the horizontal limb.

But there were to be other actors in this little overhead drama. A couple of cats, chancing to be in the campus when the students invaded it, had run up this identical elm, and had crouched in wild-eyed fear on that same bough, watching the wild orgies of the students. They had probably been there for a considerable period, not daring to descend while that howling, dancing mob held the grounds. Perhaps they even fancied that those yells and ear-splitting squeals were directed against them. They must have thought so when Don Pike crawled out on the limb toward them, followed by Buck Badger.

The cats looked about, meowing anxiously. There was no other bough near which they could gain by a leap. And as Pike, looking back and gasping with fright, crawled straight on toward them, the cat that was farthest out on the end of the limb launched itself through the air in a desperate leap for the ground.

There was no cleared s.p.a.ce in which it could alight, and it struck Bink Stubbs on the top of the head, jamming his hat down over his eyes and hurling him backward.

"Dog my cuc-cuc-cuc-cats!" stuttered Joe Gamp, looking up in open-mouthed wonder.

"The sky is raining cats!" whooped Danny.

"Somebody amputate its tail!" yelled a student.

"Cut off its shirt-tab!" shouted another.

Bink and Danny, Gamp and all the others of Merriwell's friends who chanced to be grouped there, had already suffered the amputation of their shirt-tabs, and having no further fear on that point, were hilariously anxious that not a shirt-tab should be worn by a Yale man that night. The "fruit" on the tree at Durfee was increasing in quant.i.ty and variety at a prodigious rate.

"A dollar apiece for its ears!" some one else screeched.

But the cat was too agile for the hands that were reached out to stop its flight. It whisked under the legs of the students and was out and away like a shot.

"Been up there watching the performance!" some one sung out.

"Gug-gug-goshfry! There's a man up there!" Joe Gamp howled, as his eyes fell on Donald Pike. "It will be raining mum-mum-men, as well as cuc-cuc-cuc-cats, next thing! Ahaw! ahaw! ahaw!"

As his lips flew open to their widest extent to emit this roar, the other cat sailed downward out of the tree and struck him squarely in the mouth. He tumbled backward with a roar, which, however, was not at all hilarious, and began to dig sputteringly at his tongue and lips, which were liberally coated with cat hair.