His fingers tightened with every exclamation.
"Don't kill me!" Pike begged wheezingly. "I'll go to him and take it all back!"
"Then you did tell him? I allow I ought to kick you clean out of your hide, you onery varmint!"
There was no answer, and Donald Pike, apparently ceasing to breathe, fell back as limp as a rag.
A bit of reason began to glimmer into the brain of the Westerner. Though he had asserted that he would almost kill Pike, he did not really intend to do anything of the kind. He merely meant to inflict a punishment which should be in a measure commensurate with the wrong which Pike had committed against him. But the Kansan's great rage, combined with his humiliating experience in the campus, which had still further inflamed him, had driven him to more than ordinary recklessness. He had been fairly insane. The fire began to go out of Badger's eyes when Pike did not stir and seemed not to breathe.
"I reckon I squeezed a bit too hard!" Badger muttered, regarding the unconscious youth with some degree of anxiety. "Well, I was wild enough to choke his heart out!"
He stooped over Pike and saw the livid finger-marks on the throat. Still Pike did not stir, and the Westerner's anxiety correspondingly grew. He put a hand on Pike's left breast, and failed to locate the heart-beats. At last, after an alarming interval, Pike gasped, to Badger's intense relief.
"I allow I'd better let it go at this," he reflected. "I don't want to kill the skunk, though if any man whatever deserved to be murdered, he does. But I don't want anything of that kind against me. As Merry has told me, I've got an awful temper when it gets started. I shall have to watch myself against that, same as against red-eye!"
Pike gasped again, and then his breathing came at increasingly frequent intervals. The students were wildly howling in and around the campus, but Badger scarcely heard them. He was thinking only of Pike.
"This may keep him in his room a few days," he muttered.