"I'll ask her to take it back!" he muttered. He dropped the ring into a pocket of the suit he was wearing, that he might be sure to have it with him when he met her—for that he would meet her in some way or other he was firmly resolved.
"Her father has driven her into this. It's not her wish, I know. But she is so good and dutiful that she may stick by this decision, to please him. I allow that there is where the trouble is going to come. But I won't give her up! Not unless she tells me positively with her own lips that everything is ended."
Badger now did something which he would never have dreamed of doing a short time before. Even the thought of it would have been greeted with scorn. He carefully put the letter in an inner pocket, put away the trinkets which Winnie had returned, and set out to find Frank Merriwell. The act did not even strike him as incongruous.
"Inza and Elsie will do anything for Merriwell! He can go in and out of Lee's house as he wants to. I allow he will be glad to help me in this thing, if he can. The trail looks to be so confoundedly tangled that a bit of help in ciphering it out will be mighty welcome just now!"
He scowled as he crossed the campus and remembered the unpleasant experience of the previous night. The tree in front of Durfee still bore a large quantity of "fruit." The tab of Badger's shirt was there.
"Come over here and pick out your property!" shouted a student who was standing in a group near the tree.
Badger strode on without a word, for he was in no humor for pleasantries.
"Fruit!" squealed Danny Griswold.
"Where are you going, my pretty maid?" Bink Stubbs sang from his perch on the fence.
"Going to hunt up those cats," said the Westerner, with sarcastic scorn. "I hear their kittens squawling for them!"