THE STORY OF JASON
HARDIE’S appearance on the football field unquestionably raised him from
the condition of nonentity into which he had fallen, but it did not
materially help him to get into the charmed circle of the initiate who
occupied the social centre of the school on a kind of ancestral tenure.
He felt himself an outsider, even more after Talbot had shown him favor
than before, for friendliness on the part of one served only to
emphasize the lack of interest of others. It was not that he was
objectionable or disliked; his schoolmates were merely content without
him, seeing nothing in the newcomer that commended him especially to
their notice. His mother’s name was not on their mothers’ calling lists;
he possessed no cousins or near friends who knew their cousins or
friends; he lacked the ready tongue which creates on short acquaintance
a reputation for wit. He had no special resources to enhance his
attractiveness—no fast auto waiting for him at the corner, no shooting
lodge in the marsh to which his friends might be invited. He was just
plain, undistinguished, unvalued Hardie, a new boy who lived at Adams’s
and played tackle on the second.
Dunn still floated with the tide. Judgment regarding him was still in a
measure suspended, but aside from Talbot, who was silent about him, and
Wilmot, who jollied him, the trend of opinion was in his favor. As a
prospective member of the first eleven, he possessed prestige, and as a
good-natured loafer whose excuses and garrulity were entertaining, he
appealed to the indiscriminate humor of the mob. But with one of the
smaller, though not altogether impotent, members of the school, he early
fell into conflict.
“Mike” McKay was a red-headed, freckle-faced, wing-eared urchin, filled
to the brim with activity and energy, who dominated the fifth class. He
lived at Adams’s, and held the proud position of captain and half-back
on the fourth eleven. Mike was no lover of lessons, but they constituted
a part of his day, and with his natural habit of putting into everything
that he undertook all the vim he possessed, he labored on them devotedly
until they were accomplished. Behind Mike in the schoolroom sat
Archibald Dunn. Dunn lacked the zeal of his little neighbor; he could
endure about ten minutes of mental effort at a stretch, after which his
brain demanded rest. In these intervals of rest he often refreshed
himself by slouching down in his seat and bracing his toes against the
chair in front of him, achieving, in the meantime, some distraction by a
languid survey of the room. Mike, intent on the French sentences which
he was laboriously manufacturing, word upon word, like a conscientious
bricklayer, would feel the tip of Dunn’s toe thrust into his exposed
haunch, and violently reacting, would make a scrawl or drop a blot to
disfigure the work of his hands.
Expostulations served only to convert what had at first been accidental
into a deliberate and repeated annoyance. Dunn had discovered a
diversion for the idle moments of brain recuperation.
Stung one day by this persecution, Mike turned fiercely and attacked the
exposed ankle of the offender with his pen. A teacher, sharp-eyed but
not far-sighted, caught the boy in the act and gave him long minutes
after school. This result appeared to Dunn exquisitely amusing; he could
hardly wait for the lunch hour to bring him the opportunity of telling
the story.
“You’d better let Mike alone,” said Ben Tracy. “He’s a miniature
fire-eater when he’s mad.”
Dunn sniffed contemptuously. “What do I care for him? I could lick a
couple of such little fresh kids with one hand.”
“He seems to me a rather nice little chap,” Redfield remarked.
“That shows he isn’t,” answered Dunn. “You never get things right.”
Silenced by this blunt personality, which Dunn would classify under the
head of wit, Redfield abandoned the conversation and devoted himself to
his luncheon. Bumpus came rolling in just in season to hear Redfield’s
remark and Dunn’s rejoinder.
“Who’s the nice little chap?” he asked, as he removed one chair and took
possession of the territory belonging to two.
“You!” sang out Wilmot, giving Bumpus a slap as he tripped past to
another table.
Bumpus beamed with joy, not at the jest, which indeed was worn as smooth
as a pebble in a pot-hole, but at Wilmot’s cordial manner, and at the
intimacy suggested by the playful tap on the shoulder. Word had gone out
from Captain Harrison that Bumpus was to be encouraged.
“Captain Mike McKay,” explained Tracy. “Dunn’s got him stung!”
“You don’t suppose I’m going to have him jabbing pens into my legs, do
you?” protested Dunn, disappointed to be thrown upon his defence when he
had expected to be amusing.
Of course no one did suppose any such thing, and the conversation
zigzagged gayly off to distant fields. Meantime Mike was temporarily
allaying his indignation by a brisk and noisy game of indoor baseball in
the playroom. Later on he paid his penance with stoicism, working out
half his home arithmetic problems during the period of his detention.
On the next day Mike endured two or three toe thrusts with Christian
forbearance. By squeezing himself against his desk he could put a
neutral zone between his own person and the convenient range of the
prods. By this pretence of retreat he tempted the enemy into an
incautious advance. To reach his prey in spite of bars, Dunn slid
farther down in his own seat, and bent his foot around the chair back,
so as to come within striking distance.
Instantly the boy recognized his opportunity. Seizing the foot with both
his nimble hands, he twisted off the shoe and passed it across the aisle
to a faithful clansman, who handed on the emblem of victory to another,
who as speedily got rid of it in his turn. By the time Dunn recovered
himself sufficiently to demand its restoration, the whereabouts of the
shoe was actually unknown to the first plunderer. It ultimately found
its way, wrapped in a page of a returned exercise, to the waste-basket.
The call to recitation broke in upon Dunn’s efforts, greatly handicapped
by the presence of a teacher at the other end of the room, to make clear
to Pirate Mike the fate in store for him if the shoe were not
immediately returned to its owner. The fifth Latin rose with cheerful
readiness and crowded to the door. Dunn fell in behind them, though he
had no recitation at that time, hoping in the confusion to get his hand
on his enemy. Once out of sight of the room teacher, he pressed on
hotly, scattering the fifth like a flock of sheep, and with an
imprecation on his lips reached for his quarry,—only to be met by the
stern face of Mr. Westcott as he emerged from his room at the foot of
the stairs.
Dunn was questioned in the office in a most unpleasant secret session,
while the fifth in their Latin room were forced to trace the route
between Mike’s desk and the waste-basket. When the different stations on
this underground railroad were located, and the shoe was produced by the
boy who had consigned it to its last resting-place, the guilty received
the regular penalty for small misdemeanors, and the Latin lesson took
its usual course.
Dunn’s session was longer. He emerged with a very red face, and sat with
a book open before him, staring angrily and unprofitably at its pages
for many minutes. He was very late for football practice for several
days after, on an excuse that was evidently valid. This, however, might
have been but a passing experience, forgotten in a fortnight, had not a
heartless sally from Wilmot perpetuated the memory of the unpleasantness
and given Mike a telling advantage over his bigger foe.
As was to be expected, Dunn had no history lesson that morning. He never
did compass more than half a lesson, but to-day he was as ignorant on
the subject of Greek Oracles and Greek Colonization as the Esquimau in
his hut of ice on the edge of No Man’s Land.
More than this, he showed himself distrait, and totally impervious to
the cleverly pointed shafts with which Mr. Downs sought to pierce a way
to thick-crusted brains. The patient instructor, ignorant, of course, of
the disturbance of the morning, and faithful to duty even under
discouraging circumstances, detained Dunn after the class was dismissed
for recess to admonish him of the evil consequences of idleness and
inattention. As a result, Dunn arrived at the lunch room late, facing
with an uneasy and unnatural grin a full collection of unsympathetic
teases.
“Jason!” cried Wilmot, loudly. “Beware of the man with one shoe!”
About one first class boy in five understood the reference, and this one
was immediately besought by his four ignorant companions to explain the
joke, for joke they were sure it must be. Johnny Cable, the book-learned
but otherwise incapable, was in excessive demand for the next few
minutes to clear up the mystery. These few minutes Dunn employed in
strengthening his defence of indifference and preparing himself for the
coming questions as to what Mr. Westcott had said to him, and what he
was going to do to Mike. He answered the questions in very ambiguous
terms, but his threats against the chief agent in his misfortunes were
no less awful because of their vagueness, while the grins of a dozen
fifth class boys at the long table opposite kept his wrath at the
boiling-point. Ben Tracy at last succeeded in diverting the general
interest to Redfield, who had made a new record that morning in the
smashing of glass tubes in the laboratory.
But the fifth were not to be diverted. They had no need of Cable’s
learning to explain Wilmot’s comparison. Having fought their way, line
by line, through sundry tales of Greek heroes presented in simple Latin,
they knew the stories from end to end. “Jason Dunn!” they whispered
ecstatically to one another along the table. The names fitted as if made
to go together. No combination could be better!
“We’ll call him Jason after this,” proposed Dickie Sumner, Jack’s
younger brother. “Nobody can help saying it after he’s heard it once.”
This suggestion was put into practice as soon as the youngsters left the
table. They gathered at the door and sang out in chorus three times
before they scattered: “Jason Dunn! Jason Dunn! What has Jason done?”
“Fresh little mutts!” exclaimed Tracy, in disgust. “That’s the result of
being tied up with a kindergarten. Let’s go out and wring their necks!”
“Don’t notice ’em,” said Wilmot. “They’ll forget it to-morrow if you let
’em alone.”
But the title stuck. Before a week was out, the name, Archie Dunn, or
Baldie Dunn, ceased to be heard on a boy’s lips. It had become Jason
Dunn.
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