“I’m blest if I know!” answered Woods. “I forgot to see. Who got it, Archer?”
“I didn’t notice,” said Sam. “It wasn’t my business to judge the finish. I was getting ready to catch this fellow.”
“They were right together anyway. We’ll have to call it a tie,” decided the judge.
“That means we don’t get anything,” observed Archer.
“We’ll run it—over again—” panted Shirley, over his shoulder, as Woods led him away to the gymnasium.
“No, we won’t!” whispered Duncan in a broken undertone into his second’s ear. “I’d rather take my chances with swords or pistols. Catch me running any more races without training. I’ll bet we made a new record.”
It developed in the course of the afternoon that there had been unseen witnesses of the spectacle, and these witnesses not only spread highly colored versions of what they had seen, but also asked rude, saucy questions of the actors. The fellows in Odlin House cleverly pried certain admissions out of Shirley, guessed at what they did not know, and put in circulation a tale which was received with greedy ears and grinning faces. Duncan bounced into 7 Hale in the middle of the evening and planted himself, an outraged victim of treachery, before Archer’s chair.
“What did you want to go and blab all this thing for?” he began, glowering fiercely at his room-mate’s startled face.
“I didn’t,” replied Sam, quickly. “I haven’t said a word about it.”
“It’s all over school. Some one’s been giving it away. They say it was you.”