“I’ve had a good deal to say about it, at one time and another.”
“You’re the real king of the freshmen, Morgan, and you know it. All your friends know it. It’s for the freshmen to say who shall be their leader. Yet here comes a senior to dictate who the freshman leader shall be!”
“I’d like to help it if I could. I don’t see any way to help it just now.”
“Perhaps not. Merriwell seems to have the whip-hand at present.”
“No need to fear that you’ll be heard outside of this room!”
“Well, about that snowball battle in the morning?”
“I hope so. But that wasn’t it. You ought to be able to do up Starbright, also, while you’re about it.”
There was not the encouragement in Dade’s face that he hoped to see, but he went on.
“I’ve heard of soldiers being shot accidentally by their own men! Stonewall Jackson was killed that way!”
“Well, I thought you might thank me for a suggestion. You hate Starbright. There’s your opportunity. When the fight is on, a snowball with a rock hidden in it would bring that big freshman down like a bullet if it was thrown right.”
Dade flushed, and, getting up, took a turn round the room.
“I’d do it myself if I were one of the freshmen fighters. As it is, I give you the suggestion for what it is worth.”
He began to feel that Morgan would accept and act upon the suggestion. Dade came back and sat down.
“I ought to thank you for that, Pike,” he said in a low tone. “I’m no better than I ought to be, and I presume that if you had come to me yesterday, I should have thanked you for this. But I don’t think I’ll try to do what you say.”
“Just the same with all of them!” Pike snarled, under his breath.
“I don’t think I understand you if you meant that for me.”
“Well, you are just like all the others!” Pike asserted almost fiercely. “I don’t know why it is, for it hasn’t worked on me that way, but nearly every fellow who has started in here at Yale to down Merriwell has done one of two things: He has either become afraid of Merriwell and practically dropped out of the fight, or he has gone over to Merriwell.”
“There was Buck Badger! I’ve told you of him before. He was the bitterest enemy Frank Merriwell had for a while, and he ended by becoming a Merriwell maniac. He thinks now that there never was another such man on earth. Why, I’ve been told that even Browning and Hodge, two fellows who can’t think unless Merriwell first gives them license, were once his enemies! You’re traveling the same road. I was Badger’s chum and saw how he went over to Frank Merriwell, and you’re struck with the same symptoms. What in thunder is the matter with all you fellows, anyway?”