"Trip him up!"
Those were the shouts that filled the room with pandemonium. One moment the struggling pair were over against the wall, the next they bumped the bed or knocked over a chair. Surprise showed on the face of Bassett; he could not understand how this little chap was able to keep his feet. He grunted more fiercely and tried to get a new grip, but Teeny-bits squirmed and shifted and somehow saved himself. The Western Whirlwind began to puff and wheeze; sweat came out on his forehead and his face became redder than ever. Then for an instant he let up in his heaves as if to take breath for a new and more furious attack.
It was a fatal pause. Until that moment Teeny-bits had been content to cling on and make a defensive fight of it. Now suddenly he changed his tactics to the offensive. By clever leg-work he got Bassett lurching backward. He pressed home his advantage and while a shout of amazement and delight rang in his ears, brought his big antagonist down to the floor with a jar that made the windows rattle.
Bassett, the Whirlwind, lay on his back, half dazed with amazement and feeling too weak to rise because most of the wind seemed to have been knocked out of him. Once more, as of old, David had slain Goliath, and the victor was receiving congratulations.
At that moment a boy larger than any who had been in the room pushed his way through the crowd. "No fighting in the dormitory!" he cried. "What's all this about?" And then he saw Bassett just rising weakly to a sitting posture and observed the other boys slapping Teeny-bits on the back. He gazed in doubt from one to the other and then said to the diminutive conqueror: "Did you put this big lummux down?"
"You bet he did!" cried a dozen voices.
"Well, you did a mighty good job," he declared. "You're new here, but a lot of these other fellows are not, and they know as well as I do that we're not supposed to fight or have wrestling matches in the dormitories. Get on your feet there, Bassett, and mind your own business hereafter. I know well enough that you started this. You got just what you deserved, didn't you!"
In an authoritative way that was confident without being "bossy" he ordered the boys out of the room, and when the last of them had gone and the sound of their joking remarks to the crestfallen Bassett was receding, he said to Teeny-bits:
"You must be a whale of a scrapper for your size—and I'm mighty glad you gave that fresh-mouthed Bassett a good lesson. But don't get into any more trouble with him. You know we have a sort of self-government here, and we can't be smashing up things in the dormitory. I room downstairs in Number 26. Come in sometime soon."
Later in the day Teeny-bits learned that his visitor was Neil Durant, pitcher on the baseball team, and captain of the football eleven. He was dormitory leader, which meant that he represented Gannett Hall on the self-government committee of the school. Turner, who gave Teeny-bits the information, was only one of many boys who dropped in that day to see the conqueror of Bassett, the Whirlwind. Turner—the same Terrible Turner who had been willing enough for combat earlier in the morning—confessed with a grin that he was pretty glad Teeny-bits hadn't wrestled with him! "If I'd hit the floor as hard as Bassett did, I'd bet my backbone would have been broken into forty pieces," he said. "Oh, what a pippin of a thump!"