“It’s Carson! Hooray! Carson! Carson!”
Berlin Carson was the man.
Defarge started to go somewhere. He did not know where he wanted to go, but he had a desire to get away. This was the day he had lived for during the past year; and this was what it had brought him!
“Merriwell is to blame for it all!” he cried mentally. “Oh, curse him! But for him this shame would not have fallen on me!”
He was wrong. He alone was to blame. His own treacherous nature, which he had so skilfully concealed at first, had led him on to his downfall. He had been very shrewd in his early days at Yale. It was only when he became ambitious to overthrow Frank Merriwell that his downfall began. With each failure he had dropped lower, but he did not realize how fast he was falling. Merriwell had shielded him by silence, but nothing could keep his rascality secret. He had plotted, and his plots, all of them failures, had reacted upon himself.
As he was moving away, he bethought himself of one last possibility, and paused. Perhaps he had been chosen for Wolf’s Head.
A few minutes ago he would have scorned the thought; he would have asserted with disdain that nothing could induce him to enter that order. Now he stopped and looked round, in hope that the lowest of the three societies might prove a shelter for him in this hour of distress. How gladly he would accept it now!
But even as he paused with this faint hope, the final man was chosen for Wolf’s Head, and he knew at last that he had no chance.