But Billy's had been so near and his chance with his many assailants had seemed so slim that he had done what seemed the right thing to do on the spur of the moment.

He had not fancied that the sophomores would be able to get Harry away before he could arouse the freshmen and bring them to the rescue.
"Poor Harry! I wonder what they will do with him ?" Frank speculated.
"Oh, they won't do a thing with him!" gurgled Bandy Robinson.
"How did it happen, anyway ?" asked Roland Ditson, who had joined the freshmen after the affair was over.
He tried to appear innocent and filled with wonder and curiosity, but his unpopularity was apparent from the fact that nobody paid enough attention to him to answer his question.
Frank, however, found it necessary to tell his companions all about the assault, and Ditson pretended to listen with interest, as if he had known nothing of the affair.
The freshmen went back to Billy's and held a council.

It was decided to divide into squads and make an attempt to find out where Harry had been taken.
This was done, but it proved without result, and not far from midnight all the freshmen who had been there at the time of the capture, and many others, were again gathered at Billy's.

They were quite excited over the affair, and it seemed that the beer they had absorbed had gone to the heads of some of them.
In the midst of an excited discussion the door burst open, and a most grotesque-looking figure staggered into the room.

It was a person who was stripped to the waist and painted and adorned like a redskin, his face striped with red and white and yellow, his hair stuck full of feathers, and his body decorated with what seemed to be tattooing.
"Bive me a gear--I mean give me a beer!" gasped that fantastic individual.