THAT burglars had broken into Dickey’s, but had been frightened away by the constable, was the story that got over town. Gale was heard bragging of how courageously he had acted in scaring them off, and how one of the burglars, hard pressed, had shot at him.
Chip Merriwell and his friends kept their own counsel. As the days passed, they watched for the Hindu and watched Kadir Dhin. If the fussy and important constable were to be believed, other burglarious attempts had been forestalled by him, and he was as busy as a man with five hands.
The normal routine of the academy was for a time outwardly unbroken. Study and lectures, winter sports, work and play in the gymnasium, went on as usual, under the rather rigid semimilitary discipline which Gunn and the faculty enforced.
But it could be seen that the Duke and his friends were hard at work lining up against Chip Merriwell every man they could. The apparent result was small. Chip had a host of friends who were disposed to stand by him loyally. And of that closer and more intimate band consisting of such fellows as Clan and Kess, Jelliby and others, that they would stand by Chip through thick and thin on any and every occasion, was, of course, known to every one.
Some hockey matches on the cleared ice of the lake were exciting enough to thrill the whole school and bring a mob of spectators out from the village. Twice Chip led scrub teams against the regular Fardale team, once going to victory and another time to defeat.
That Rhoda Realf and her brother were at Fardale Chip knew from Kess’ report; and it was not long before he met them. Chilled a bit by Rose Maitland’s championship of Kadir Dhin, Chip was in a mood to be moved again by the beauty and charm of the younger and slighter girl.
Yet, having a good memory, Chip could not forget even while he was out on the lake in the full swing of enjoyment, skating with Rhoda Realf, that whatever break there had ever been between them had been produced solely because he could not endure the insufferable qualities of Rhoda’s brother.
But when Chip went over to Gunn’s for a talk with Rose Maitland on the subject which was constantly in her mind—her fears of the Hindu who had slain her father and who was believed by herself and Gunn to be in concealment at Fardale—the feeling again mastered him which had swayed him when he first saw her.
“I could wish you were an American,” he said, as he talked and jested with her; “and I don’t say that because I hold any feeling whatever against the English. Now I have offended? I’m sure I didn’t intend it, and beg your pardon.”
She had flushed; but a slight heightening of the color in her cheeks made her only the more charming.