A PLOT AGAINST BILL
What rejoicing there was among the members of the nine and the
supporters of the team! How the lads howled, their hoarse voices
mingling with the shrill cries of the girls! Sober men danced around
with their gray-haired seat-mates, and several “old grads” who had
witnessed the contest jumped up and down pounding with their canes on
the grandstand until it seemed as if the structure would collapse.
“Good boy, Cap!” cried Bill, clapping his brother on the back. “Good
boy!”
“All to the horse radish,” added Pete.
“Oh, you fellows didn’t do so worse yourselves,” remarked John, as he
tried to fight off a crowd that wanted to carry him on their shoulders.
He was unsuccessful, and a moment later was hoisted up, while a
shouting, yelling, cheering procession marched around the grounds,
singing some of the old school songs of triumph. It was a glorious
victory.
It was fought all over again in the rooms of the boys that night, and
the team was praised on all sides.
“Still it was a narrow squeak,” declared the coach to the captain,
“and we’ve got to do better if we want to keep the championship.”
“Oh, I guess we’ll do it,” answered Graydon. “Those Smith boys are a
big find.”
“I should say so! I don’t know what to do about the battery, though. We
can’t let Mersfeld and Denby slide altogether.”
“No, we’ll have to play them occasionally. And Mersfeld isn’t so bad
sometimes. He gets rattled too easily, and Bill Smith doesn’t. Well,
come on out and I’ll blow you to some chocolate soda.”
Meanwhile the Smith boys were having a jollification of their own in
their rooms, whither many of their friends had gone. Bill brought out
some packages of cakes, and bottles of ginger ale and other soft stuff,
on which the visitors were regaled.
“Here’s more power to you!” toasted Billie Bunce, a little fat junior,
who was not above making friends with the freshmen.
Mersfeld did not attend the little gathering in the rooms of our
heroes. And had they seen him, in close conversation with Jonas North,
a little later, and had they heard, what the two were saying, they
would not have wondered at his absence. Mersfeld met North as the
latter was strolling about the campus.
“What’s going on up there?” asked North, as he motioned to where lights
gleamed in the rooms of our friends, for it was not yet locking-up time.
“Oh, Smith Brothers and Company are having some sort of an improvised
blow-out,” replied the temporarily deposed pitcher. “Those fellows
make me tired. Just because they helped pull one game out of the fire
they think they’re the whole cheese. I’d like to get square with
Four-eyes somehow or other.”
“Why don’t you?” proposed North, with a grin. “Seems to me you ought to
be able to ‘do’ him.”
“I am, if it came to a fight, but I wouldn’t dare mix it up with him.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’d be a howl, and everyone would say I did it because I
was jealous. I’d have to have some mighty good excuse to warrant wading
into him.”
“Well, can’t you think of one?”
“No, I can’t. I’d like to get square with him, though.”
“Put him out of business you mean—so he couldn’t pitch for a while?”
asked the bully.
“That would do, yes.”
“You might put up a job to burn his hands with acid in chemistry
class some day. Just a little burn would do. You could say it was an
accident.”
“No, that’s too risky,” remarked Mersfeld, after thinking it over.
“I’d like to have it come about naturally. Now if he or his brothers
would try some trick, and get caught—suspended by the faculty for a
month—or laid off from athletics, that would do. But the Smith fellows
seem to have given up pranks lately, and have buckled down to lessons.
I guess they’re afraid.”
North did not answer for a few moments. He walked along, apparently
deeply thinking. Suddenly he exclaimed:
“I believe I have it! Get them caught while doing some fool cut-up
thing, such as is always going on around here. That would do it, if we
can get them into something desperate enough so they’ll be suspended.
Fine!”
“Yes, it’s all very well enough to say ‘fine!’ But how are you going to
work it? Haven’t I told you that they’ve cut out jokes?”
“That’s all right. We can get ’em into the game again.”
“How?”
“Easy enough. All they need is to have some one to make a suggestion.
They’ll fall into line quickly enough, and then—have McNibb catch ’em
in the act, and it’s all off with their baseball. I haven’t any love
for ’em, either, and I’d like to see ’em out of the game. They don’t
belong in our class here.”
“Oh, they’re all right, but they think they’re the whole show,”
complained the pitcher bitterly. “All I ask is for Bill Smith to get
out of the box, and let me in. I can do as good as he!”
“Of course you can,” agreed North, though if Mersfeld could have seen
the covert sneer in the bully’s smile perhaps he would not have been so
friendly with him. “Well, if you’ll help, I’ll work it. We’ll have ’em
caught in the act—say painting the Weston statue red or green—that
ought to fetch ’em.”
“Yes, but how are you going to arrange to have ’em caught?” asked
Mersfeld.
“Easy enough. Here’s my game,” went on North. “First we’ll propose to
Bill or Cap, or to the other brother, that as things around the school
are a little dull, they ought to be livened up. They’ll bite at the
bait, for they like fun, and when they hear that it would be a good
stunt to decorate the big bronze statue of old man Weston, in front of
the main building with green or red paint, they’ll fall for it.”
“Yes, but they know enough not to get caught, even if they go into the
trick.”
“They can’t help being caught the way we’ll work it,” was the crafty
reply.
“Why not?”
“Because the night they select for the joke—and we’ll know when it
is—there’ll be an anonymous letter dropped at Proctor McNibb’s door,
telling him what is going to be pulled off. He’ll get on the job, and
catch the Smith boys at the game. How’s that?”
Mersfeld meditated a moment.
“I guess it will do,” he said slowly—“only,—”
“Well, what’s the matter with my plan?” demanded the bully half angrily.
“If you or I propose such a game to Bill or his brothers they’ll smell
a rat right away.”
“Of course they will, but you don’t s’pose I’m such a ninnie as to
propose it ourselves; do you?”
“What then?”
“Why I’ll have some one who is friendly to them do it. Oh, don’t worry,
they’ll fall for it all right enough. Now come on over to my room,
and we’ll fix it up,” and the two cronies, one a rather unwilling
participator in the plot, walked along the campus, casting back a look
at the gaily lighted windows of the apartments of the Smith boys.
“Hang it all!” mused Mersfeld as he tried to quiet an uneasy
conscience, “I don’t want to get those fellows into trouble, but I
want to be back in my rightful place as pitcher on the Varsity.”
And then he and North went into the details of the plot against our
heroes, against Bill more particularly, for it was he whom Mersfeld
wanted to displace.