He looked swiftly around. There was no one in sight. It was a good chance to get some sort of revenge for the way in which Jim had beaten him in every past encounter. He sprang at the Yale baseball captain.
Jim was taken by surprise for the moment, and Harding, in his first swift rush, bore his lighter opponent down by sheer weight. But his advantage lasted only for a moment. Harding was strong, but he was self-indulgent, and took no care of his really fine body, smoking and drinking as much as he liked, and it took only a couple of minutes for Jim to reduce him to complete submission.
“I thought you’d have enough, Harding,” said Jim, panting a little, but quite unhurt, and completely master of the situation. “What did you expect to gain by attacking me in that fashion?”
“I wanted to give you the thrashing that’s coming to you,” said Harding viciously. “You’ll get it some day, never fear, even if you’ve escaped now. Let me up. I won’t try to hurt you now.”
“I know you won’t,” said Jim cheerfully, releasing him, and dusting himself off with absolute unconcern. “You know you can’t—that’s the reason. You’d better clear out of town, Harding, now that we know you’re here. You can’t accomplish anything, with the watch we’ve put on you, and I warn you that the next time you get caught in one of your conspiracies, you won’t get off so easily as you have in the past. Mr. Merriwell is a patient man, but you’ve tried him too far.”
“I’m not afraid of Merriwell or you, either,” said Harding, with a coarse laugh. “You’re four-flushers, both of you. But you can’t bluff me out. You haven’t got anything on me, and you never will have, that will do you any good in a court, and you know it as well as I do.”
“Well,” said a new voice, “I don’t know about that. Assault and battery isn’t a hanging offense, of course, but I guess they’d send you to jail for ten days or so, even at that. And you wouldn’t like that, you know.”
Harding’s first instinct was to run away. But he didn’t obey that instinct. The reason was that the hand of big Bill Brady was firmly fixed in his coat collar, and that he couldn’t have got away if he had been even stronger than he was.
“Where did you spring from, Bill?” asked Jim, in great surprise.
Harding was speechless with rage and astonishment. He was fairly trapped.