CHAPTER VIII

DONALD PIKE’S PLOT.

There was no more disgusted individual in New Haven that night than Donald Pike. All his scheming and lies seemed to have come to naught. Morgan had not only done nothing to Merriwell or Starbright, but had been badly worsted in every way.

He met Gene Skelding, and they talked it over, but could get no cheer out of the situation. Roland Packard came along, in an equally unamiable mood, and after walking round a while together, the worthy trio climbed up to Chickering’s rooms.

They found Rupert and some of his friends trying on various sorts of costumes for the masked-ball of that night.

This was another of Merriwell’s “entertainments,” and it seemed that nearly everybody who had a right to go was going.

“You fellows make me sick!” said Pike.

“What troubles you now, Donald?” asked Chickering.

“Lotht on the watheth thith afternoon, I’ve no doubt!” lisped Veazie.

“A plague on the races!” Pike growled.

“Why do we fellows make you sick?” queried Julian Ives, looking at himself admiringly in the long mirror. Julian had arrayed himself in a glittering imitation of chain armor, and was going to the ball in the character of a Knight of the Round Table.

“For thinking of going to that ball.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mith it for anything!”

“You’re just like all the rest of the fools, Veazie!”

Veazie looked immensely fierce for a moment; then concluded to change his attitude, and mildly inquired:

“I don’t underthand you?”

“You’re just helping Merriwell out! Can’t you see it? Now, look here! Yale wins a lot of victories—beats Carlisle, Princeton, Harvard, and everything else that comes its way. The claim is made by Merriwell’s friends that Yale’s glorious victories of this season were made possible because Merriwell had the running of things. Merriwell sits back and smiles and fans himself and believes that he is ‘it’!

“Then the idea is conceived that it would be the proper thing to celebrate the victories of Yale. Immediately Merriwell is put in charge of that, as if the other things were not enough. He and his two inseparable chums, Hodge and Browning, are the committee of arrangements. They are called the ‘committee of three,’ and they proceed to run things to suit themselves and favor their friends. Again they contrive to cover Merriwell with glory. Everything is Merriwell. Will you kindly tell me if we are celebrating the victories of Yale or the victories of Merriwell?

“And here, now, I find you fellows arraying yourselves in chain armor and other togs, for the sole purpose of going to Merriwell’s mask-ball, that you may help it out with your presence and commendation. After it’s over you’ll come home, saying what a tremendous success it was, and so help to stick another star on the gilt crown of Yale’s little tin god. I’m sick of it!”

Julian Ives drew his long sword, and, holding it in hand, stood posed before the mirror.

“Too late to help it now,” he said, “even if all you say is true, and I guess it is. The way the fellows are talking, that ball is going to be a howling success, and it will be that whether I stay or go. So I’m going!”

There was small likelihood that Julian would lose any opportunity to put himself on exhibition.

“Well, you’re a set of fools! That’s all I’ve got to say!”

Don Pike was too uneasy in mind to remain long in Chickering’s, and strolled out shortly, leaving Roland Packard and Gene Skelding still there. As he went away a thought came to him.

“Just the thing!” he said.

“What is?”

Bertrand Defarge clapped him on the back.

Pike started and bit his lip.

“I didn’t know I was talking to myself!” he said. “It’s a bad habit, and I shall have to break myself of it. Going to the ball?”

“Certainly. There will he hosts of pretty girls there, and I shouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Another fool!” Pike growled, as he and Defarge separated. “No matter what Merriwell plans, not only his friends but his enemies turn in to make a success of it. Is it dead luck, or is the man positively a genius?”

Hurrying away now to a costumer, Pike hired a cowboy-suit as nearly like that worn by Bill Higgins as he could get, and, with the long lasso that went with it, sneaked back to his rooms.

“Higgins has been drinking a little,” was his thought, “though the fellow has been awfully mild for a plainsman. He wasn’t drinking any to-day, to be sure, but who’s to say that he didn’t fill up this evening? He’s made himself a general nuisance here, whooping things up for Merriwell. He’s Merriwell’s protégé quite as much as Dick Starbright is. If I can bring him down and roll him in the gutter of disgrace, it will be a little something.”

The trick he contemplated was a small one, worthy of a smaller brain than Pike was usually supposed to possess.

In an angle of the wall near the steps which he had seen Professor Warburton ascend but a few moments before, Donald Pike crouched in his cowboy garb. Hiding his face was a mask which he had also obtained of the costumer.

“If I can just rope Warburton, and make him think it the playful work of Bill Higgins, I couldn’t ask anything better. Warburton is a fellow who would hate a creature like Higgins by instinct.”

Warburton was, indeed, a man of considerable pomposity and self-importance, whose dignity would have been outrageously offended by such a thing as Pike contemplated.

“If I can do it, and Warburton makes a row over it, as he surely will, Higgins will be in such bad odor that Merriwell will feel precious small. If the thing gets to the faculty, or into the courts, so much the better. I’d like to have the newspapers of New Haven make a few roasting comments on Merriwell’s dear friend from the Western ranches.”

Don Pike had taken roping-lessons from his former chum, Buck Badger, and could throw a rope reasonably well, though he could not be called an expert. He felt sure, though, that if Warburton came down the steps in his customary leisurely way that there would be no difficulty in getting the noose over his head. Even if it only struck him, that would answer, for it would show what Higgins’ intentions were and serve to prove, also, that Higgins was intoxicated.

Pike expected Warburton to come out as he went in, but the man who appeared on the steps five minutes later was masked and wore a cowboy-suit which looked, in the rather dim light, identically like the one worn by Pike himself.

“That costumer lied to me!” was Pike’s thought. “He said I had the only cowboy-suit anything like that. And I had no idea that Warburton would think of attending that ball! He’s masked close and tight, and does not intend to reveal his identity.”

If Pike had been given time for thought, he might have reached radically different conclusions. He was not given time, and thinking that if he made a mistake he could run away and the thing would not be serious, he let fly with his rope at a venture, and caught the supposed Warburton round the neck, giving, at the same time, a sharp jerk on the rope. Then he turned to run.

The roar that went up was disillusioning; but not more so than the noose that now dropped over Pike’s own neck.

“What in time d’ye mean by that?” came in the voice of Bill Higgins himself.

Then Higgins began to draw in on the rope, pulling the startled youth toward him. Pike tried to cast the noose off, and, failing in that, sought for his knife.

All the while Higgins was drawing the scared student toward him, making the air blue with his exclamatory questions and objurations.

“I’ll learn ye some sense!” Higgins howled. “I’ll wring yer neck fer ye, b’jings! I’ll hang ye up on one o’ these hyer trees fer the crows to eat! That’s what! Why, you stepfather to a hoss-thief——”

He almost fell to the ground as the rope parted under a cutting slash from Pike’s knife, and, having freed himself, Pike darted away, with Higgins bellowing at his heels.

Merriwell and Browning came down the steps, having heard the outcry.

“What’s up?” Frank demanded.

Higgins turned back, finding Pike too light-footed for him. He brought with him the rope which Pike had dropped in his flight.

“Some feller slammed this hyer round my neck as I come down the steps!” Higgins declared. “One o’ yer dinged student friends, I reckon, fer no real cowboy’d do another cowboy sich a measly trick as that. Playin’ cowboy! Well, if I git my hands onto him, he won’t monkey no more with yer Uncle William!”

* * * * *

The mask-ball was the success Don Pike had known it would be. Everybody praised it and its excellent arrangements.

Three nights later Merriwell’s “entertainments” concluded with a banquet at the New Haven House, which witnessed a crush.

When the toast came round, “To Yale!” Merriwell responded in his usual happy way.

“There was one thing I should have been pleased to say in that little speech,” he remarked to a number of friends later, “but it wasn’t the time and place.”

“What was that?” asked Browning.

“It’s a bit of news which I must convey to Starbright and Morgan. As the result of an investigation, I have discovered who threw the rocks in the snowball battle which struck those two fellows.”

Hodge was at once interested.

“It was Jimmy Seldon! I ran the thing down, and then confronted him, and he confessed. The fellow has fancied from the start that he is an athlete, and that he ought to be the real leader of the freshmen. It was a case of unappreciated and unobserved genius! He brooded over it. Perhaps it turned his head. Anyway, he went into that fight determined to knock out the men he fancied had without merit been chosen above him. When the opportunity came, he threw his prepared snowballs.”

“You’ll report it?” Bruce asked.

“As he left Yale and New Haven this morning, and isn’t coming back, it isn’t worth while!”

“You told him he would have to go?”

“Well, I talked with him! He said he was going, anyway, for he has failed in his examinations. Perhaps that was one of the things that made him desperate. He is better out of Yale than in it, and Yale is better without him than with him.”

“And who roped Higgins?” asked Hodge.

“I don’t know about that, but I think it was Don Pike. He is likely to go out of Yale, too, very suddenly, unless he mends his ways!”

“A few other villains came near being unmasked in this series of entertainments!” droned Browning. “I’m keeping my weather-eye on Dade Morgan.”

“If it will show that scoundrel up in his true light, we’ll have another series!” said Hodge.

Then he arose and proposed this toast:

“To the confusion of the few enemies of Frank Merriwell! To the success of his legion of friends!”