“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.  “I am nearly dead!”

“It’s Rattleton!” shouted the freshmen.

They crowded around him.

“Well, say, you are a bird!” cried Lucy Little, whose right name was Lewis Little.

“A regular bird of paradise,” chuckled Bandy Robinson.

“Where are those fellows?” demanded Frank Merriwell.  “Where did they leave you?  Tell me, old man.”

“At the door,” faintly replied Rattleton as he reached for a mug of beer which some one held toward him.  “They took me right up to the door and made me come in here.”

“Out!” shouted Frank—­“out and after them!  Capture one of them if possible!  We want to even this thing up.”

Out they rushed, but once more the crafty sophomores had vanished, and not one of them was to be found.

The freshmen went back and listened to Harry’s story.  He told how he had been blindfolded and taken somewhere, he did not know where.  There they had kept him while his friends were searching.  When there was no danger that the freshmen would discover them, they set out to have fun with Rattleton.

“Say, Merry, old man,” said Harry, “I know Browning was the leader of this job, although he was disguised.  They seemed to feel pretty bad because you got away.  They got twisted—­took me for you at first, and by the time they discovered their mistake you were knocking them around like tenpins.  One chap insists you broke his jaw.”