Somehow Frank had hoped in the face of all the evidence of Bart’s culpability that it was not really true—that Hodge had not taken the money.
But now it seemed there could no longer be a doubt of it. This gambler Rafferty had fallen in with Hodge, and had given him a “tip” concerning the proper manner to get to the prize fight that was to take place in St. Jo.
Hodge had seemed to have a roll and he was aiming straight in the proper direction to get rid of it. Having cut clear from Frank, it was plain he was seeking the low and vicious.
Although a youth who could “handle his dukes” and take care of himself in a fight, Frank Merriwell thought very little of prize fights and prize fighters. He regarded professional pugilism as brutal, and the “sports” who followed it up and took delight in it as a low type of humanity. It was his belief that such affairs should be prevented by law, and the participants in them should be severely punished by fines and imprisonment.
Not that Frank wished the encounters stopped for the sake of the principals, but because he believed such spectacles aroused the worst instincts in the witnesses of them and tended to lower and degrade human beings who saw them.
Frank knew there was not a little that was cruel in Bart Hodge, but he had suppressed this instinct in his endeavor to model after Merry. He was one, however, who would have no mercy on an enemy, should it happen that that enemy fell into his power. And always had he seemed to take great satisfaction in a square standing fight.
Merry thought of his first battle with Hodge one moonlight night in an old pasture at Fardale. That fight had not been finished, but Frank recalled how like a fiend the black-haired boy had struggled. Since that time he had seen Bart in many encounters, and always Hodge had fought with the same terrible fierceness, as if he was burning with a desire to kill his antagonist.
Such a fellow would take pleasure in witnessing a bloody and brutal prize fight—a fight to a finish.
Somehow Frank’s sympathy for Hodge lessened. Had Bart taken the money because he was in need of it, had he taken it to pay debts, had he taken it with the hope of going somewhere and starting in business for himself, then Frank could have been more lenient. But for Hodge to seem to hasten with the stolen money straight to the companionship of “sports,” gamblers, prize fighters and men of that order—it was too much!
“These men must not get away,” thought Frank. “I must follow them. I must find out where this fight is to take place and I must get into it.”