As yet they had not met; but Badger, blinded by his intense anger, decided that the meeting should come without delay, even if the place was a tree-top; and he began to climb up the trunk and boughs of the tree toward Donald. Pike looked about in a despairing way. The distance to the ground seemed dishearteningly great. His first impulse, therefore, was to climb still higher, and this he began to do.
But, recollecting the tenacity of Badger's purpose in whatever the Kansan was engaged, he felt sure that he would be pursued into the very top of the tree and shaken to the ground. Therefore, he hastily crawled out over a horizontal limb, whose drooping ends dipped toward the earth. If driven to the worst, he felt that he could drop from one of those drooping ends without serious injury.
With a howl of rage, Badger climbed on after the frightened youth, and pursued him out on the horizontal limb.
But there were to be other actors in this little overhead drama. A couple of cats, chancing to be in the campus when the students invaded it, had run up this identical elm, and had crouched in wild-eyed fear on that same bough, watching the wild orgies of the students. They had probably been there for a considerable period, not daring to descend while that howling, dancing mob held the grounds. Perhaps they even fancied that those yells and ear-splitting squeals were directed against them. They must have thought so when Don Pike crawled out on the limb toward them, followed by Buck Badger.
The cats looked about, meowing anxiously. There was no other bough near which they could gain by a leap. And as Pike, looking back and gasping with fright, crawled straight on toward them, the cat that was farthest out on the end of the limb launched itself through the air in a desperate leap for the ground.
There was no cleared space in which it could alight, and it struck Bink Stubbs on the top of the head, jamming his hat down over his eyes and hurling him backward.
"Dog my cuc-cuc-cuc-cats!" stuttered Joe Gamp, looking up in open-mouthed wonder.
"The sky is raining cats!" whooped Danny.
"Somebody amputate its tail!" yelled a student.
"Cut off its shirt-tab!" shouted another.