CAPTURING THE FORT.
The snowball battle was raging again, with Dick Starbright captain of
the freshmen and Jack Ready of the sophomores.
There had been some hasty preliminary work given to the manufacture of
an abundant supply of ammunition. Now, with great heaps of snowballs
near each man and deposited along the line of advance, and with other
snowy heaps inside the reconstructed fort, the conflict was on once
more.
“Don’t throw away your ammunition. Take time to aim, and throw to hit
something whenever you throw. It don’t do any good to hammer the walls
of the fort. Aim at the openings and at the men behind the walls!”
These were Starbright’s instructions, and his men were trying to carry
them out. The balls for this reason, did not fly so thick and fast as
when the sophomores were the attacking force, but they did quite as much
execution.
Starbright intended to make the preliminary “rifle-fire” and “cannonade”
comparatively short, and charge suddenly, in the effort to take the
sophomores by surprise. But when his forces quickly ceased raining
snowballs on the white fort and swept forward, they found themselves
confronted by the sophomores leaping the walls and coming at them.
Ready had ordered a sortie in force, for the purpose of surprising the
freshmen. In the front of the walls of the snow fort the contending
parties came together.
Unfortunately for Ready’s plan, some of his men, seeing the freshmen
coming, did not leap over the walls, but remained behind them; and
these, now beginning to shoot snowballs at the enemy, rained their
missiles alike on friends and foes. Within less than a minute it was
hard to tell sophomores from freshmen, for each party, in attempting to
shower and beat down the other with armfuls of snow, found its members
transformed into snowy images of men, in which clothing and features
were hidden under the white coating.
Again Starbright and Ready came face to face. For a moment they stopped,
looking at each other as if trying to measure strength. Ready tossed
back his hair with a flirt of his right hand that at the same time
cleared the snow out of his face.
“I’m coming for you!” he panted.
“Here’s where the Giant of the Wheel evens the score!” Starbright
laughed back.
Then, with armfuls of snow suddenly snatched up, they dived at each
other, and the hottest fight of the whole field began.
Starbright had the advantage by being taller; yet Ready was as supple,
lithe, and active as a panther.
The air was filled with snow. Other sophomores and freshmen were
struggling almost as fiercely on every side, the sophomores trying to
keep the freshmen out of the fort, and the latter desperately struggling
to walk over the opposition and enter the enclosure.
Ready went down under Starbright’s assault, but clung to one of Dick’s
legs, as this could not be considered, he thought, a violation of
Merriwell’s rules.
But Starbright, not to be thus impeded, sprang for the fort, dragging
Ready; and the latter, letting go with extraordinary suddenness,
Starbright fell over the wall upon the inside.
A half-dozen other freshmen had scaled the wall, beating back the
opposition, and these now engaged with the defenders of the fort within.
In less than ten minutes from the time of the beginning of the struggle
the fort was in the hands of the victorious freshmen.
Dick seized the flag which had at first been planted on the wall, but
which had been knocked down, and, mounting to the defences, swung it
over his bandaged head and led the almost breathless freshmen in a
cheer.
It was not loud, for the freshmen were too spent to give the cheer
volume; but an exploding roar was added to it, coming from the throat of
Bill Higgins, the cowboy, who had watched the fight with great interest
at one side of the quadrangle, out of the way of the snowy bullets.
“Whoop!” Higgins howled, yelling again when the freshmen yells subsided.
“I’d never believed so much fun could be got out o’ a little snow.
B’jings, that’s a sport I’ll ’naugurate on the ranges soon’s I git back
there. If I don’t wallop and throw down and bury Saul Henderson so deep
that a badger can’t dig him out, I’m a liar! That’s the sport fer the
short-grass country!”
He was speaking to Merriwell.
“Which Badger?” Frank quietly asked.
“Which badger? Why, ye don’t reckon I know the names of all the badgers
of Kansas, do ye?”
Then, seeing the pun, he roared again.
Starbright came up to them, digging the snow out of his hair.
“How is your head?” Bruce asked.
Starbright put a hand to his bandage.
“Oh, I was so determined to do up Jack Ready that I forgot I had a
head!”
“You didn’t fight as if you’d forgotten your head, anyway,” said
Browning. “You kept it on your shoulders pretty well, I’m thinking.”
“Yes, that was a great fight, Starbright!” Merriwell declared warmly.
“And you showed good leadership. I want to congratulate you.”
The words and the handshake that followed were more to honest Dick
Starbright than had been the winning of the battle.
That evening Dade Morgan received another call from Donald Pike.
Dade’s head was bandaged, but he had otherwise entirely recovered. The
blow of the stone hidden in the snowball had been a heavy one,
sufficiently heavy to temporarily knock him out, but, with the exception
of the cut on the head, which promised to heal readily, he had already
thrown off its effects.
“Nice little souvenir of the fun of the morning!” said Pike, nodding at
the bandaged head. “I guess you know you have Starbright to thank for
that?”
“I did think so at first, but I don’t know now. He denies it.”
“Of course he denies it! He’d be an idiot to confess, wouldn’t he?”
“Then who struck him? I didn’t. How do you account for the fact that he
was also hit on the head with a stone hidden in another snowball?”
“You’re easy, Morgan!”
“What do you mean by that?” Dade queried, flushing.
“Just what I say. You’re dead easy. Starbright threw that snowball. How
do I know? Jimmy Seldon saw him!”
Dade straightened in his chair, while the dark look on his face
deepened.
“Did Seldon tell you that?”
“Oh, I’m giving it to you straight! You were so soft that you declared
you’d play fair in that battle, and the man you were to play fair with
gave you that.”
“Then who hit Starbright?”
“He wasn’t hit. He fell as he was rushing toward the walls of the fort,
and was kicked on the head by accident. The kick laid open his head; and
he made a great fuss about it for the purpose of making you think that
he, too, was hit on the head. That’s all there was to that. Seldon was
in the rear at the time, and saw the whole thing!”
“Why didn’t Seldon come and tell me, then?”
“He’s ready to tell you now!”
Don Pike pushed the door open, and a stripling, with a pale, nervous
face, entered. He came in hesitatingly and stood with hat in hand till
Dade asked him to take a seat.
Morgan knew Seldon well, and did not highly regard him, though the
fellow had been one of the twenty freshmen selected to take part in the
snowball battle.
“We’ve talked it over, and Seldon is ready to tell you all about it,”
said Pike, as Seldon dropped into a chair.
“Yes, I saw it!” Seldon avowed. “Starbright was behind you, and he aimed
that snowball straight at your head, while pretending to be aiming it at
the sophomores. I was so close to him that I’m sure I couldn’t be
mistaken.”
“Did you see Starbright when he was struck?” Dade asked, his heart
flaming again against Dick.
“No. I don’t think he was struck. He fell, and one of the fellows kicked
him. I think so, anyway, for I saw a fellow stumble over him. A moment
later I saw there was blood on Starbright’s fingers. But I’m sure he
wasn’t hit by a ball.”
“Why didn’t you make a report of it to Merriwell, or to me?” Morgan
demanded.
“Well, to tell the truth, I was afraid to.”
“Afraid to?”
“Afraid of Dick. He would say it was a lie, and perhaps try to take it
out of my hide. So I kept still.”
“And only told Pike?”
“Yes. Pike and I have been pretty good friends, and we got to talking
about the fight, and I told him.”
“And I insisted that he should come and tell you,” said Pike. “I thought
you ought to know it.”
Morgan looked at Seldon.
“This is all right!” he declared. “I’m glad you came to me with it. You
needn’t think I’ll blab and get you into trouble. It’s not my way.”
“I assured Seldon that it would be perfectly safe for him to tell you,
though he was doubtful at first.”
“No, I won’t say anything about it. But I’ll get even with Dick
Starbright!”
When Seldon had gone, Pike sat talking with Morgan for some time, trying
to fan into fiercer energy the anger which Dade again felt toward the
big freshman. Starbright was Merriwell’s friend, and Pike had come to
hate Merriwell so much that he wanted to injure whomever Merriwell
liked, though Frank had never done anything to win such enmity from
Donald Pike. There are some natures, however, which increasingly hate
the man they try to injure, and their hate grows more and more bitter
with each failure. Pike really feared to test strength with Merriwell,
hence resorted to the use of tools to accomplish what he feared to
attempt himself.
Scarcely was Pike gone when Roland Packard came in with Gene Skelding.
With Don Pike, they formed a trio who seemed to live on hate of
Merriwell. They were no sooner seated than they began to talk of the
snowball fight of the morning, and of the blow which Morgan had
received.
“It was Starbright who did that,” said Skelding. “I know, because I saw
it. I was standing near one of the monuments where I had a good view of
all that was going on. I thought, when I saw him lift his hand to throw,
that he was aiming at the sophomores, but when I saw you drop as if you
were hit by a rifle-bullet, I knew whom he had aimed at.”
If Dade Morgan had doubted the story told by Jimmy Seldon, this would
have driven away his doubts.
“It’s all right, fellows, and I’m obliged to you. I shall remember that
little blow against Richard Starbright. You needn’t be afraid that I
won’t. He did me a good turn the other day, and I was feeling a bit soft
toward him, but I shall not hold back now.”
“I don’t know how you are going to even the score with him,” Packard
craftily suggested.
“Oh, there are plenty of ways,” Morgan snarled. “I’ll find a way.”
“Or make one?”
“Or make one!”
“Well, you know that you can count on our aid in anything you want to
undertake.”
There were times when Dade Morgan despised these tools. He saw their
innate cowardice, but often he felt forced to use them, for he knew he
could not fight the battle he had undertaken against Merriwell alone.
When his pretended friends had departed, he sat for a long time alone,
lost in thought, trying to plan some means to “even the score” with the
big freshman.
“I wish Hector King were here!” he muttered finally, as he prepared to
turn out his light. “But he has disappeared since Merriwell unmasked
him. Given up the fight, probably. Well, I haven’t given it up! I’ll
have to be careful, though, and strike in the dark. Merriwell and
Starbright are too dangerous for me to fight them in the open.”
Then he extinguished his light and crept into bed, where he lay awake a
long time, discarding plan after plan as impossible or impolitic, and
listening to some freshmen singing in another part of the building.
The silver moon crept aloft in the cold sky and looked down on the snowy
and deserted campus.
Dade’s heart burned when he heard the deep, rich voice of Dick
Starbright join in the rollicking college songs. Bert Dashleigh was with
the singers, gleefully thumping his mandolin.
By and by Dade slept.
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