discovery would
come and that Badger would fiercely summon him to answer, seemed very
great, when he gave himself time to reflect. And he feared Badger.

All might have gone well on this evening with Pike, however, if his fear
of discovery had not made him try to climb farther up the tree. The
Kansan heard the low scraping sound, in spite of the din in the campus,
and glanced upward, and when he did so he saw and recognized the man he
was looking for. A calcium-light was sending its rays through the higher
branches, and Pike's white, scared face was as plainly revealed to
Badger as if the two were facing each other in a lighted room.

The hate which Badger had been nursing swelled to the point of bursting.
He forgot the search for "fruit," in which he had been interested,
seeing only the enemy whom he had sworn to whip as soon as they met.

As yet they had not met; but Badger, blinded by his intense anger,
decided that the meeting should come without delay, even if the place
was a tree-top; and he began to climb up the trunk and boughs of the
tree toward Donald. Pike looked about in a despairing way. The distance
to the ground seemed dishearteningly great. His first impulse,
therefore, was to climb still higher, and this he began to do.

But, recollecting the tenacity of Badger's purpose in whatever the
Kansan was engaged, he felt sure that he would be pursued into the very
top of the tree and shaken to the ground. Therefore, he hastily crawled
out over a horizontal limb, whose drooping ends dipped toward the earth.
If driven to the worst, he felt that he could drop from one of those
drooping ends without serious injury.

With a howl of rage, Badger climbed on after the frightened youth, and
pursued him out on the horizontal limb.

But there were to be other actors in this little overhead drama. A
couple of cats, chancing to be in the campus when the students invaded
it, had run up this identical elm, and had crouched in wild-eyed fear on
that same bough, watching the wild orgies of the students. They had
probably been there for a considerable period, not daring to descend
while that howling, dancing mob held the grounds. Perhaps they even
fancied that those yells and ear-splitting squeals were directed against
them. They must have thought so when Don Pike crawled out on the limb
toward them, followed by Buck Badger.

The cats looked about, meowing anxiously. There was no other bough near
which they could gain by