A furious roar went up from the excited freshmen.
“Tricked!” they shouted. “Frank Merriwell did it! He’s taken up Ready’s challenge!”
“What challenge?” asked one, who did not seem fully enlightened.
“Why,” explained another, “Ready said he’d like to have Merriwell the leader of the sophs. He’s said publicly that he’d like to see Merriwell try to haze him.”
Mrs. Harrington’s “respectable boarding-house for students” was in a fearful uproar. The excitement had brought every freshman who lodged there into the lower hall and onto the stairs. They were all talking to one another. Their faces looked wild and wrathful. They flourished their fists in the air and uttered dire and awful threats. Their oaths of vengeance were blood-curdling in the extreme.
In an adjoining room, Mrs. Harrington herself clasped her hands and shuddered, while her daughter was on the verge of taking refuge beneath the haircloth sofa. The frightful things they heard made them stop up their ears in terror.
“The sophs are behind this!” shouted a frenzied freshman on the stairs, his football head of fiery-red hair and his rolling eyes making him look like an anarchist.
“We’ll get even!” shouted another man, climbing on the shoulders of his companions and waving his clenched fist in the air. “We’ll make the sophs shed tears of blood!”
“We’ll murder every soph we can catch!” thundered a fellow with a hoarse voice. “We’ll decorate our rooms with their skins!”
“I’ll have a door-mat made of soph scalps!” shrieked yet another.
“Revenge! revenge! revenge!” they all howled in chorus.
No wonder Mrs. Harrington was alarmed, even though she had known considerable of such outbreaks on former occasions.
“Where have they taken Ready?” snarled one man, shaking the fellow who had witnessed the kidnaping.
“Why, hu-hu-how dud-dud-do I kuk-kuk-know!” chattered the one who was being shaken.
“That way.” The frightened freshman pointed.
“See here, fellows!” yelled the one who had elicited this information; “while we’re raising all this row, they are carrying Ready off. We must follow!”
Out through the door tore the leader, yelling for them to follow him, and they came pouring after, still seething with fury, still uttering awful threats. The cab that contained Ready and his kidnapers had passed out of view some time before, but the leader of the freshmen pointed down the street, crying: