“You certainly can,” said Carter impulsively. “Just tell me what to do, and if it can be done, you can be sure that I’ll do it. I’d give a good deal to see Parker’s goose cooked. And I think he’s at the head of the whole business. Moreover, it isn’t Jim he’s after, especially. He’s hitting at you through him. If he’s elected captain of the football team, he’ll make all the trouble for you that he can.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, either,” said Dick grimly. “That makes me just a little angrier than I was before. The idea that some one may be trying to get at me by hitting at my friends. I’ll remember this, Carter, and I think you can help a lot when the time comes.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE WORM TURNS.
When Steve Carter told Dick Merriwell that Parker had been surprised by his own anger into revealing the charge against Jim Phillips to his assembled classmates, he was quite right. But Parker, though he let his temper run away with him at times, was shrewd as well as unscrupulous, and he was not long in seeing that, by a slight change in the plan of his campaign, he could make the general knowledge of the case work to his own advantage, or, at least, to the advancement of his plan. That the discrediting of Jim Phillips, and, consequently, of Dick Merriwell, would certainly advance his own interests, he never doubted at all. Already he was laying his plans for the coming football season, which, if he had his way, was likely to be more for the benefit of Parker than of Yale.
He went to Shesgren’s room after he had finally torn himself away from the curious crowd that wanted to know all he could tell it about the registered letter and the Harvard protest, and there found Carpenter as well as the owner of the room. The news had spread all over the campus by that time, and they, remembering how strictly Parker had ordered them to maintain secrecy about the whole affair, were afraid that he would think that they had told. He soon reassured them, however, when they began, as soon as he entered, to protest their innocence and say that they had no idea of how the story had got out.
“I have,” said he curtly. “I changed my mind, and told it myself. It’s best the way it is, too. We can settle the whole thing now and make sure that there’s no way for Phillips to squirm out of this thing and prove that he is innocent. He is innocent, you know, and that’s why we’ve got to be careful. I read once that if a man hadn’t done a thing he was accused of, there always was some way, no matter how long it took for him to find it, to prove the truth, or to prove, at least, that he couldn’t have had a hand in it. Here’s where we fool the man that wrote that. Still got that letter, Carpenter?”
Carpenter nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “You told me to keep it. I wanted to burn it. It isn’t safe to have around. It might turn up some way, and then where would we be?”
“I’ll do all the worrying that’s needed around here,” said Parker harshly. “Just you leave that to me. You do as I tell you and there’ll be no trouble. I want you to go to see Phillips right away, and tell him you don’t believe all this story. Say you were with him that morning, and that you certainly didn’t see any registered letter. See?”