The coming of Merriwell saved the game for Yale, the final score standing six to five. It was a tight squeeze, but one score was quite enough.
“And I owe everything to Jimmy Lee,” Merry declared, when the men gathered around him after the game.
Then he told how Jimmy, disguised as Old Ferret, the Sleepless Detective, had come to his rescue. And Jimmy was dragged forward and made a hero, while his subjects looked on and yelled like wildcats in their delight.
But when Frank sent an officer to look for the ruffians, they had awakened from their drunken slumbers, taken the alarm, and disappeared.
Hodge, however, had better luck in finding Ditson. He had a very agreeable interview with Ditson—that is, it was agreeable to him. It may have been somewhat painful to Ditson.
As Bart was washing the blood from his knuckles at the hotel somebody asked him what he had been doing.
“Licking the meanest cur in Virginia,” he replied.
When the Yale team departed for the North, a great crowd gathered at the station and cheered them off. Elsie was there, and she pressed the hands of both Frank and Bart, smiling upon them.
Just as Frank was about to step onto the train, somebody cried:
Three cheers for Frank Merriwell, the man who won the game!”
As they finished giving the cheers, Merry lifted in his arms a ragged, freckle-faced, blushing boy, crying:
“Here, gentlemen, is the man who won the game! Three cheers for Jimmy Lee!”
And the Yale men cheered handsomely. Then they gave him a regular Yale yell.
And he thought he was going to die right there from happiness.
Not until the train had rolled away did he come out of a trancelike state. Then somebody told him to wake up, for Frank Merriwell was gone.
“But he’s great!” said King Jimmy. “He’s the greatest feller that ever lived in all the whole world, and I can lick the man who says he ain’t, I don’t care if it is Jim Jeffries!”
Although Bertrand Defarge had failed in his attempt to injure Merriwell and prevent him from leading the Yale nine to victory in the South, his malice had in no wise abated, and the team had scarcely returned to New Haven before he was again plotting darkly against the young athlete.
This time he felt confident of success, but he needed assistance to carry out the scheme, which he finally evolved for the undoing of Merriwell. He thought long over the men on whom he believed he could depend, but the list of Frank’s enemies had been considerably thinned and there were few to whom he could look for aid in his dastardly plans or whom he dared to take into his confidence.