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.
“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!”