CHAPTER XVIII
A PLOT AGAINST BILL
Whatrejoicing 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 thinkthey’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. Thatwould 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 goodstunt 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 intotrouble, 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.