“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[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: