“Walk slowly, all hands,” insisted Dan.  “Dick, old fellow, on the way back, amuse yourself by getting in all the full, deep breaths that you can.”

“I’ll be all right,” spoke Dick confidently.

It did not look that way to many of them.  Dick was shorter, and weighed much less than did the sophomore who was waiting back there under the trees.  Ripley had had a good deal of training in boxing, and was not a coward when he thought the odds on his own side.  What none of the fellows knew, though, was that the lawyer’s son, ever since that scene in the school yard, had been at his boxing lessons again with renewed energy.

“Play him for delay, at first, Dick,” whispered Dan.  “If Ripley can rush you, and get you excited, he’ll have a better chance to win out.  If you hold him off, hinder him and delay him, before long he’ll lose some of his nerve.  A fellow like Ripley will begin to go all to pieces, once he gets it into his head that he has a long and hard job before him.”

“I’ll do my best,” Dick promised.  “Hang it, if he hadn’t knocked me down so treacherously, I wouldn’t care about fighting.  I don’t care so much what he says.  Fred Ripley’s mouth is the weakest part of him.”

The sophomore was waiting, a sulky frown on his face.  A few feet away Ben Badger, a grim look on his usually good-humored face, leaned against a tree, his arms folded.

Even had he wanted to get away from this, Ripley couldn’t have done it.  For a sophomore to find any excuse for getting out of a fight with a freshman would bring down upon the soph all the wrath and disgust of the disgraced third class.

“Come on, mucker!  Take off your sweater and get ready to take your real medicine!” snarled Fred, harshly.

But Dick Prescott, young as he was, was much too wise to allow himself to be betrayed into anger.  Instead, he halted a few feet away, looking with a significant smile at his enemy.

“As I understand it,” replied Prescott, “the festivities that are soon to commence are to decide which is the mucker—–­which will go down to the ground to eat his fill of dirt.”

Badger, Thompson and Butler took upon themselves the direction of the coming “affair.”

“See here, Ted, you look after Ripley’s interests,” proposed Badger.

“It’s a mean job.  I’d sooner have the other side of the bet,” grumbled Ted Butler, in an undertone.

“I’ll look after young Prescott,” continued Ben Badger.  “Thomp will do all the honors as referee.”

Ripley was already peeling off his sweater.

“Get down to your fighting rig, Prescott,” urged Badger, leading his principal to one side.  “How are you, boy?” he whispered, anxiously.  “Feeling right up to the fighting pitch?”

“I hate fighting,” Dick answered, simply, speaking so that only his second could hear him.

“Of course it’s necessary sometimes, but I can never quite help feeling that, at best, it’s low-down business.”