spurs musically clinking and jingling on his heels.

Bludsoe was a lithe, wiry man, younger than Higgins and smaller. He wore a smooth face, which was as bronzed as a copper mask. It was a sharp, hatchety face, keen and shrewd—the typical face of the cowboy of the plains, whose intense activity, combined with the dry, sap-extracting climate, tends to keep down all superfluity of flesh.

The opening feature of the contest was an attempt to pull down a tin cup hung by its handle on a nail against a post. A large roping-space had been cleared in the gymnasium by removing some muscle-strengthening machines and horizontal bars.

The room was filled to overflowing, the pushing, laughing crowd seemingly the more jolly because the night without was windy and inclement.

“Makes me think of the plains,” chirped Higgins, as, in a lull of the noise, he heard the singing of the wind round the building. “A feller that’s lived with the wind as I have sort o’ likes to hear its mournful whistle. I’ve heerd it sing that way, wrapped in my blanket, with the stars shinin’ brighter’n diamonds; and oncet I remember it had thet wail when me and some other fellers was lying in a sod house, with the Pawnees creepin’ onto us through the grass.”

It was amusing to notice how the Chickering set and all the enemies of Merriwell invariably became champions of whoever they thought was opposed to him and his friends.

When Bludsoe pulled the tin cup from the post in two throws and Higgins took three throws for the same feat, the Chickering crowd clapped their hands and stamped the floor in their glee.

“Say, I will have to go over to the freshmen side if this keeps up!” Ready moaned in Merriwell’s ear. “It plants an ache in my heart and a desire in my foot to kick somebody. Yet I seem doomed by fate to howl with the Chickering set. Don’t jot it down against me in your book of remembrance!”

The next attempt of the ropers was to catch and hold the corner of a swinging trapeze-bar, and as Higgins turned to get his rope, which he had dropped on a seat while talking with some friends, he roared with rage.

His new rope, in which he took such pride, had been split and ripped and cut in a dozen places by a keen knife. Higgins reddened under his tan as he surveyed the work of the unknown hand.

“If I kin lay my paws on 

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