“I can attend to them myself,” he said, and he proceeded to do so, taking from a drawer an old handkerchief, which he tore into strips to bind about the bleeding digits.
When this was done, Don took off his coat and discovered in the left sleeve a long slit from the shoulder nearly to the elbow, made by the knife of his antagonist that now lay in his pocket.
This wound in his shoulder proved to be scarcely more than a scratch, and he easily attended to that with some strips of plaster.
“But he came near fixing that arm!” he exclaimed, picking up his coat and looking at the slit in the sleeve. “Jupiter! Just see that! My best coat, too! What can I tell Aunt Ella? It won’t do to tell her just how it happened.”
Happening to glance at a mirror, he found his face was very pale and that he still showed signs of agitation. He also noted that his handsome red necktie was gone, having, without doubt, been torn off in the encounter.
“I don’t want to lose that necktie,” he said. “I ought to go back, and look for it.”
But at that moment he heard his father close and lock the front door, and he knew the house was being shut up for the night.
“I’ll look for it in the morning,” he decided. “It isn’t likely I could find it to-night, anyway.”
Having flung himself down on an easy-chair, he fell to thinking the entire adventure over from start to finish, it being of a nature to take his mind for the time from his trouble with Renwood. When he had reviewed it up to the moment when he concealed himself behind the bushes on the approach of four members of the village eleven, he speculated again over the cause of their visit to the football field at that hour of the night. Then he remembered that Mayfair had spoken of their being able to take care of some “stuff” at the club-rooms, and all at once it dawned on him that they were proceeding to the dressing-room under the grand-stand with the intention of removing to the club-rooms the paraphernalia and suits of the football team.
Then his face hardened, and he sprang to his feet as he thought of Chatterton’s words.