His eager, glowing face had turned white as marble; the great eyes dilated and flashed. He drew himself up for a moment, quite beyond his poor shrunken height, and then with a wild cry, started from the grounds and fled away down the street. Away, away! Anywhere that his flying feet could carry him, only away from everybody and everything!
The boys stood and looked in each others’ faces without a word. “I guess you’ve done it now,” said Davis, turning to where Carter stood.
“I didn’t do it,” said Carter, too near being really terrified to retort as warmly as he might another time. “Better aim where it belongs if you’ve got anything to say.”
At this moment Aleck ran down the steps, looking as if in search of some one.
“I say, Tom,” he began, “where’s that little fellow that came this morning? I thought he was up stairs, but the professor says he made him over to you. What have you done with him?”
Tom’s tongue was fast to the roof of his mouth, and Aleck looked at the tell-tale faces of the other boys.
“Look here!” and his eyes flashed as the boys had never seen them, “don’t tell me there’s a coward among you dastardly enough to touch a helpless little fellow that’s carrying a burden like that!”
“We didn’t touch him,” muttered Hal Fenimore. “I suppose he didn’t like what we had to say, and he stepped out.”
“Didn’t touch him! You’d better have touched him, better have struck him in the face a hundred times over, than—which way did he go?”