"I can't be angry with Hicks!" breathed Butch, beholding a spectacle more impressive than dawn. "So, the irrepressible wretch has Coach Corridan's revolvers, used in starting our training sprints, and a lot of blank cartridges! He is giving an imitation of a Western bad man. No wonder I dreamed of Indians, cowboys, and hold-ups; I'll have revenge on the heartless villain, routing me out at five!" He saw a massive rock, rising thirty feet in air, its sheer walls scaled only by a rope-ladder the collegians had rigged up on one side. Atop of "Lookout There!" as the campers humorously designated the rock, roosted a youth who possessed the colossal structure of a splinter, and whose cherubic countenance was decorated with a Cheshire cat grin. Quite unaware that his riotous efforts had brought out the wrathful Butch Brewster, the youthful narrator of Chuckwalla Bill's stormy career continued his excessively noisy séance. His costume was strictly in character with his song. He wore a sombrero, picked up on his Exposition trip the past vacation, a lurid red outing-shirt, and he had wrapped a blanket around each locomotive limb to imitate a cowboy's chaps. Two revolvers suspended from a loosened belt, _à la_ wild West, and as Butch stared, the embryo Western bad man twanged a banjo noisily, and roared the concluding stanza of his desperado hero's history: "Said Chuckwalla Bill, 'Oh, boys, plant me With my boots on--on the wide prair-eee'-- Where the coyotes howl, they planted Bill-- An' so far as _I_ know, he's sleepin' there still!" "Here they come," grinned Butch, hearing a tumult in the bunkhouse, and a confused Babel of voices. "Hicks has awakened the camp. Now watch the fellows wreak summary vengeance on his toothpick frame!" From the sleep-shack, aroused at that weird hour by the clamor of the irrepressible youth, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., tumbled others of the squad, in varying stages of _déshabille_; big Beef McNaughton, right half-back, Roddy Perkins, the Titian-haired right-end, Pudge Langdon, a ponderous tackle, and Monty Merriweather, a clean-cut, aggressive candidate for left end. From within, other wrathy youths howled vociferous protests at their tormentor: "Stop that noise; put your muzzle on again, Hicks!"--"Where's the fire? Say, Hicks, muffle your exhaust!"--"Say, Coach, must we endure this day and night?" The bunkhouse fairly erupted angry collegians, boiling out like bees swarming from a disturbed hive; Hefty Hollingsworth, the Herculean center-rush. Biff Pemberton, left half-back, Bunch Bingham, Tug Cardiff, and Buster Brown, three huge last-year substitutes; second-string players, Don Carterson, Cherub Challoner, Skeet Wigglesworth, and Scoop Sawyer. A dozen others, from sheer laziness, hugged their bunks devotedly, despite the terrific turmoil outside.