The various and varying newspaper accounts of the affair awoke Ann Arbor
from its peaceful slumber and for a space the town lived. For two days
interest developed with the passage of the hours. Speculation became
general. Opinions were as many as those who offered them; until there
was not a man or woman from the Cat Hole to Ashley Street who did not
advance a theory, new or old.
A like puzzlement, but one tempered by more original conjecture,
characterized the attitude of the undergraduate body as a whole. For two
days Catherwood had not appeared upon the campus, but at all hours
friends and mere nodding acquaintances called at his rooms only to be
refused admittance by Mrs. Turner, whom he had bade inform all callers
that he was ill, very ill, quite too ill to be seen.
Little Green was one of these callers. He had expected the refusal of
admission which Mrs. Turner, with many apologies, gave him and
straightway he telegraphed his papers that Catherwood was dying as the
result of the great bodily injuries he had received at the hands of his
unknown undergraduate assailants. For little Green knew by instinct what
many a reporter requires long years to learn--that a "story" is "good"
just as long as there is a drop of "life" blood left in it, and not an
instant longer.
Little Green fairly reveled in the commotion he had caused. The regular
college correspondents, anæmic, frightened little fellows, were at a
loss to know who had beaten them in their own papers. It was little
Green's game, absolutely his, and he purposed playing it alone, aided
and abetted in the achievement of this purpose by the various telegraph
editors whom he sought to serve. And so far as the faculty was
concerned, the frequenter the dispatches, the more woefully addled did
the professorial brain become.
Out in the state, and in adjoining states, wise editors, looking down,
as it were, from some high place, wrote venomous and vicious editorials
in which the legislature was called upon to pass laws abolishing hazing
in institutions of the commonwealth by making the practice of it a
felony, punishable by imprisonment. Parents in the further west with
sons and daughters at Ann Arbor feared for their children's lives.
School boards passed resolutions. Guardians wrote to the heads of
various university departments asking if their wards were quite safe,
alone and unprotected in Ann Arbor. A New York newspaper, on the second
day, dispatched its most ingenious "woman reporter" to the scene of
action and in three hours the sprightly creature had woven a fictional
fabric beside which the tale of Ali Baba was the glowing, gleaming
truth. She revived all the half-forgotten stories of ancient hazing
rites, dead these many years, and wrote of them as of contemporary
practice. And the imaginative artist in the home office illustrated her
vivacious article elaborately, seeking to convey to the eye horrors of
undergraduate torture that words were useless to describe.
Skeletonized, the story was wired across the sea and the ponderous
_Times_ gave forth an editorial in which it averred that such refined
cruelty had never been heard of in English academic life; not even in
the palmiest days of Rugby and of Eton at the height of the fagging
system.
Amidst the wild excitement, little pink-cheeked Green grinned at his
reflection in his mirror and exclaimed:
"Gad! You've got 'em goin', Greeny; you've got 'em goin'. Greeny,
_you're it_!"
And he was; for three swift, brilliant days.
For then the president came.
He came unannounced save by the telegram the dean received at breakfast
on the second day.
He was driven direct to his home; and ten minutes after entering the
front door he issued from the back and hastened across the campus.
The registrar met him in the main corridor.
"What is this I have been reading?" he asked sharply. "This that the
papers are full of? What is it?"
The registrar followed him into his private office where, as the
president unlocked his desk, he explained accurately, tersely, the
frenzy that had seized the University, and the town; the state, the
nation, and the world.
As he spoke he was interrupted again and again by the characteristic
"ah" of the president, who as he listened, toyed with a steel envelope
opener.
"And those are the facts in the case as you--that is to say the
faculty--know them; are they?" he asked, when the other had done.
The registrar nodded.
"Ah, yes," murmured the president--"now let me see if I have them
correct and in their order;" and he recited the story as he had heard it
from the other's lips, accurately, succinctly, with no point missing.
"Those are the facts, doctor," the registrar corroborated.
"Ah yes,--quite simple--yes."
The registrar was about to move away.
"Ah, just a moment," the president called. "You know Mr. Catherwood's
address----"
"One hundred and three, Williams Street----"
"Ah, yes." And he hastily wrote a note which he folded and addressed.
"Have this delivered to Mr. Catherwood at once at his rooms."
The registrar nodded.
"And if he should call here at the office, have him wait, please--have
him wait. I wish a word with professor Lowe."
He vanished into the corridor.
He was absent ten minutes and as he passed through the waiting-room to
the inner private office he glanced into the office of the registrar.
He closed the door noiselessly and seating himself at his desk,
proceeded with slow deliberation to open his accumulated mail.
* * * * *
The bells in the library tower clanged twelve o'clock. As the last
detonation sounded through the high corridors of the main building a
timid knock fell upon the door.
The president glanced up quickly. He drew from an inner pocket of his
coat two envelopes, which he laid on the top of the desk.