“Me and that young Hindu, Kadir Dhin, was charged with doin’ it; and they’d have fastened it on him sure if Colonel Gunn hadn’t come to his help; for, you see, it was Kadir Dhin’s Hindu trunk that they found Merriwell in. It looked mighty bad for him a while, and looked bad for me, too, jest because I had been with him not long before, and had given the baggage man a quarter at the station for bringin’ down for me a box of stuff from Dickey’s that it would have cost me a dollar to send in the reg’lar way.
“There’s a whole big story back of it, dad,” Bully explained, “and there were some things I didn’t know myself until Gunn made that statement to the officers. Kadir Dhin had been treating me fine as silk, and I was going around with him a lot. He had spendin’ money, and he wasn’t afraid to blow it. It wasn’t my bizness to ask him how he got it. Yet he came to Fardale, as you recklect, as a sort of charity student. I thought he had mebby been gamblin’, and had been lucky.
“He was talkin’ ag’inst Merriwell, and plannin’ ways to do him, and I liked that. And we did ‘do’ him, in the end, as I’ll tell you.
“It started when that girl was missin’ out of Gunn’s house, where she has been stayin’. Old Gunn sent out an alarm about it, and telephoned the constable. In a little while it seemed as if half the town was searchin’ for her. Kadir Dhin and me had been trying to annoy Merriwell that forenoon, when he was out sleighin’ with her, by follerin’ him round in another sleigh.”
“You did that?” growled the elder Carson, with a sniff of displeasure, as he pulled at his yellow-gray goatee. “’Twasn’t the act of a gentleman, son.”
But Bully answered, with a careless laugh:
“Anyhow, ’twas fun. We was hopin’ to make him so mad that afterward he would want to climb us, and so give us a chance to double on him together and trim him good. Kadir Dhin had it in for him for a knock-out blow Merry had given him, and I’ve got some things to remember.
“Well, when she was missin’ that afternoon, and we saw Merriwell goin’ toward the lake lookin’ for her, we follered him again. When we got down there, I turned back, because it was so cold; so I didn’t see what happened, and there’s two stories about it.
“Kadir Dhin says he found the girl bewildered and wanderin’ about in that timbered cove beyond the Pavilion, and was tryin’ to lead her home, when Merriwell came on him and attacked him; the attack comin’ so sudden, Kadir Dhin says, that he had no time to defend himself before he was knocked stiff in the snow.
“I think that’s right, too,” said Bully. “For that’s the way he told it to me, when he met me again, close by the corner, at Gunn’s. Merriwell had brought the girl home, and was then in the house. Kadir Dhin had follered. And, say, he was lookin’ wicked; a man lookin’ as he did then would sure put a knife in a feller in the dark!