After that all was confusion and noise. Perry suddenly found himself shaking hands laughingly with Mr. Addicks, although what the latter said he couldn’t hear. Then his attention was attracted to a commotion nearby as the crowd pushed and swayed. On the shoulders of excited, triumphant schoolmates, Fudge, half in and half out of his crimson robe, was being borne past. He espied Perry and waved to him, and Perry forced his way through the throng just as Guy Felker reached up and placed the purple pennant in Fudge’s hand. “W-w-w-what’s this?” stammered Fudge. “It’s yours, Fudge!” shouted Guy. “You’ve won the meet and you get the pennant!” “B-b-but I d-d-didn’t w-w-win this, d-d-did I?” gasped Fudge. “You bet!” “W-w-well, but wh-wh-why?” “Because we needed three points to win the meet, you old idiot,” laughed Guy, “and you got them for us!” “And,” supplemented a voice that sounded like Curtis Wayland’s, “for numerous other reasons!” And Fudge, borne forward again, waving the purple pennant high in air, had the grace to blush. * * * * * Transcriber’s Notes: ――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to follow the text that they illustrate. ――Printer’s, punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected. ――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved. ――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.