And Hodge had acted as if he had a “roll to blow!” In the midst of his feeling of satisfaction, Frank was stricken by a sharp pain. He was glad to be on the track of Bart, but the evidence of his former friend’s complete depravity filled him with distress. Hodge had taken the money, and he was bound to have a gay time while it lasted. At least, everything seemed to indicate that. Merry fancied that Bart had given up at last in his attempt to be honest and upright. For a long time he had struggled against his natural inclinations and against the unjust suspicions of others. He had grown tired fighting fate, for it had seemed that fate was determined that he should go wrong. No one save Frank Merriwell had shown absolute confidence in him. Merriwell had ever seemed to believe that Bart would turn out well in the end, but now it appeared that his faith had been sadly at fault and his confidence woefully misplaced. Frank could understand how a proud, sensitive fellow like Hodge could be driven to dishonesty by suspicion and mistrust. But there was one thing Merry could not understand. How had Hodge smothered his conscience and his sense of justice and gratitude enough to permit him to rob the best and truest friend he had ever known? That was a puzzle to Frank. He did not like to think of it. He could not bear to believe he had been entirely wrong in his estimate of Bart’s character. Somehow Frank had hoped in the face of all the evidence of Bart’s culpability that it was not really true—that Hodge had not taken the money. But now it seemed there could no longer be a doubt of it. This gambler Rafferty had fallen in with Hodge, and had given him a “tip” concerning the proper manner to get to the prize fight that was to take place in St. Jo. Hodge had seemed to have a roll and he was aiming straight in the proper direction to get rid of it. Having cut clear from Frank, it was plain he was seeking the low and vicious. Although a youth who could “handle his dukes” and take care of himself in a fight, Frank Merriwell thought very little of prize fights and prize fighters. He regarded professional pugilism as brutal, and the “sports” who followed it up and took delight in it as a low type of humanity. It was his belief that such affairs should be prevented by law, and the participants in them should be severely punished by fines and imprisonment. Not that Frank wished the encounters stopped for the sake of the principals, but because he believed such spectacles aroused the worst instincts in the witnesses of them and tended to lower and degrade human beings who saw them. Frank knew there was not a little that was cruel in Bart Hodge, but he had suppressed this instinct in his endeavor to model after Merry. He was one, however, who would have no mercy on an enemy, should it happen that that enemy fell into his power. And always had he seemed to take great satisfaction in a square standing fight.