The New London men found that they simply were not in it, though they tried to pull themselves together and prevent this furious goal-making on the part of the Yale team. Bascom hopped up and down and to and fro in front of the cage, like the proverbial chicken on the proverbial pan of live coals. He lunged, kicked, flounced, and writhed; but he could not prevent the goals, for they seemed to shoot from Merry’s stick past his lunging feet, over them, under them, and between them.
Everybody in the big barnlike building was standing up in mad excitement, as the game thus drew toward its close, and Bill Higgins was whooping as if he meant to take off the roof.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BLOW OF THE HYPNOTIST.
While the polo-teams were battling at New London, Dion Santenel was not idle. Charles Conrad Merriwell, sitting up-stairs in his pleasant front room at the New Haven House, looking over a paper, heard a knock on the door, and a colored boy came in bearing a card.
“Fisher Stokes, stock-broker and mining-agent, Denver, Colorado,” was what Mr. Merriwell read on the card.
“Been waiting for you,” said Merriwell, smiling pleasantly, when “Stokes” was shown into the room.
“Detained by a little business down-town,” the man explained suavely, giving the apartment a comprehensive, sweeping glance out of the corners of his dark eyes before sinking into the chair which Merriwell politely placed for him.
The furnishing was substantial and old-fashioned. In the center of the room was a round-topped table covered with a heavy slab of marble. Between the two windows which looked out on Chapel Street and the green was a long pier-glass. A green velvet carpet covered the floor, and the room was furnished with an abundance of comfortable chairs and a sofa. An alcove bedroom opened off from this main room, its doorway half-concealed by curtains. In addition to this there was a bathroom. The apartments were the best and most expensive in the house, and the house the best that New Haven afforded.
As Fisher Stokes took all this in, he came to the quick conclusion that the white-haired man who had been waiting for him, seated at the round marble-topped center-table, was comfortably situated, to say the least.