"All right; we'll see."
And Jimmy did see, and it was a glorious sight—a splendid picture of a righteous triumph in which the best man won; to revel in the joy of victory a space, and then to meet, and join in combat, with a foeman vastly worthier of his steel. For, in spite of Jimmy's discouragement—which could not have been that, really, and perhaps was not even meant for that—Nibs posted the challenge.
It was written in huge letters, that all who ran might read, and was made doubly conspicuous, by its poster style, among the score or more announcements of class-meetings, conferences, and graduate-events that fluttered with it on the Board.
Nibs hung up the challenge one evening while the janitor's back was turned. He carried it into the corridor folded beneath his coat. Satisfied that they were not observed, he drew it out and spread it upon the long, marble-topped radiator, and invited the criticism of Jimmy, the which Jimmy was not loth to utter.
"Big as a barn, eh?" he said, sniffing.
"But I want him surely to see it," the author of the broadside replied, tilting his head and viewing his work admiringly in the dim light of the slim chandelier above.
"Well, I'm still thinking you're a fool,—a blamed big fool."
"Don't you think he'll accept?" Nibs asked eagerly, passing lightly over Jimmy's expression of what appeared at least superficially to be a definite opinion.
"Of course he will, that's just it; he'll see it and he'll accept it, and he'll beat the life out of you," was the discouraging rejoinder. "Hurry, hang it up," he added, "I don't want to wait here all night." And Jimmy slouched away in the direction of the great door.
So the document challenging Billy Shaw to run against Nibs Morey in State Street, on the evening of October nineteenth, at seven o'clock, was forthwith tacked upon the Board to the complete concealment of one bill announcing the publication of the Palladium, and another displayed to notify the scornful that the Dramatic Club would—at an early date—repeat its marvelously successful and delicately artistic performance of "Among the Breakers."