merely meant to inflict a punishment
which should be in a measure commensurate with the wrong which Pike had
committed against him. But the Kansan's great rage, combined with his
humiliating experience in the campus, which had still further inflamed
him, had driven him to more than ordinary recklessness. He had been
fairly insane. The fire began to go out of Badger's eyes when Pike did
not stir and seemed not to breathe.

"I reckon I squeezed a bit too hard!" Badger muttered, regarding the
unconscious youth with some degree of anxiety. "Well, I was wild enough
to choke his heart out!"

He stooped over Pike and saw the livid finger-marks on the throat. Still
Pike did not stir, and the Westerner's anxiety correspondingly grew. He
put a hand on Pike's left breast, and failed to locate the heart-beats.
At last, after an alarming interval, Pike gasped, to Badger's intense
relief.

"I allow I'd better let it go at this," he reflected. "I don't want to
kill the skunk, though if any man whatever deserved to be murdered, he
does. But I don't want anything of that kind against me. As Merry has
told me, I've got an awful temper when it gets started. I shall have to
watch myself against that, same as against red-eye!"

Pike gasped again, and then his breathing came at increasingly frequent
intervals. The students were wildly howling in and around the campus,
but Badger scarcely heard them. He was thinking only of Pike.

"This may keep him in his room a few days," he muttered.

"If it does no more than that, I don't care. He deserved that much. But
he's got to keep clear of me, or I can't be responsible for the
consequences. I'll tell him so as soon as he comes to himself and knows
what has happened."

CHAPTER XIX.

A CRUSHING BLOW.

Buck Badger stared at a letter in a familiar handwriting which had come
to his room in the afternoon mail. He had delivered to Donald Pike that
threatening talk the night before, when Pike came back to the land of
sentient things after that awful choking.

The infliction of this punishment on Pike, and the feeling that Winnie
would stand by him in spite of everything, had so satisfied the
Westerner that he had been in an uncommonly comfortable frame of mind,
in spite of the fact that the powerful opposition of Fairfax Lee was yet
to be overcome. With Winnie true, and time and youth in their favor,
there seemed no good reason why he should be in the dumps.

But the letter at which