DICK AND LARRY
FRESHMEN
[Illustration: Eight straight times he carried it toward Rockford’s
goal]
DICK AND LARRY
FRESHMEN
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
_Author of_ THE DONOVAN CHANCE
ILLUSTRATED BY
GEORGE AVISON
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY BOYS’ LIFE
Printed in the United States of America
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BRIDGE SCRAP 1
II. THE OFFISH WORM 22
III. THE LAME DOGS 43
IV. DICK’S DROP-OUT 62
V. THE RED-WAGON SCHOLARSHIP 78
VI. A NEW ROOM-MATE 85
VII. IN WHICH DICK MIXES IT 97
VIII. HOW LARRY CHANGED HIS MIND 107
IX. IN TIME OF FLOOD 113
X. AT THE SIGN OF THE SAMOVAR 126
XI. IN WHICH LARRY HAS A HEADACHE 141
XII. FRIENDS IN NEED 156
XIII. THE GREEN CAP BONFIRE 170
XIV. “WESTWARD HO!” 185
ILLUSTRATIONS
Eight straight times he carried it toward Rockford’s
goal _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Sophomore front line was buckling for the second
time 18
“Will you peel your coat?” 58
Dazed and bewildered, he sat up and tried to make out
where he was 152
DICK AND LARRY: FRESHMEN
I
THE BRIDGE SCRAP
They were not twins; they were not brothers or even relatives. For that
matter, at the moment when their train was clattering over the last few
miles of the long journey from the far-western home-land to the college
town where they expected to spend the next four years, the joint name
by which they were to be known at the take-off had not yet been coined.
But, as everybody knows, there is no accounting for college nicknames.
They are handed you right off the bat, and that’s all there is to it.
To make the “twin” thing still more of a joke, they didn’t look much
more alike than Little Lord Fauntleroy and Huck Finn. About the only
feature they had in common was a rich stain of brown sunburn, acquired
in a summer of railroad building in the Timanyoni Mountains of western
Colorado. Dick Maxwell, son of the general manager of the Nevada Short
Line, was possibly twenty pounds the lighter of the two, and he had the
fine-lined face and easy manner of a fellow who has never had to think
of how his clothes fitted, or what to do with his hands; while Larry
Donovan――but Larry deserves a paragraph to himself.
He had the window seat in the Pullman section, and was staring out
at the rather monotonous Middle-Western farmstead landscape hurtling
past with that sort of half-shy look in his good, wide-set eyes which
is the first symptom of homesickness. The big-framed, curly-headed
fellow, who had been Dick’s partner on the summer job, was the son of
an ex-locomotive engineer on the Short Line, and he owed his college
chance partly to the good work he had done on the railroad-building
job, and partly to the generosity of Dick’s father. In a grim,
workmanlike way, he was determined to make the utmost of the chance;
but that fact didn’t say anything whatever to the other fact that this
was his first long-distance jump from the home circle.
“Why the wan look to starboard, Larry?” Dick asked with the grin which,
on his face, was never more than a good-natured, quizzical smile.
“Thinking about the little old home shack back in Brewster, and how far
away it has gone?”
Larry turned slow eyes upon his companion.
“Don’t see how you can take it so easy,” he grumbled back; and then,
after a moment’s thought: “Maybe I can, too. You’re used to being away
from home and mixing and mingling with people. I’m not.”
Dick smiled again.
“Not getting scared out already, are you?”
“No; it isn’t scare; it’s――well, I don’t know just what you’d call it.
But I’d give a lot if we were settled down, and I knew what to-morrow’s
job was going to be, and was boning for it out of a book.”
Dick turned short upon the wisher.
“See here, Larry,” he said; “don’t you go starting in at Old Sheddon
on the wrong slant. You did it in Brewster High――you know you did;
never came out to class doings, or anything. I remember you told me
once that the fellows and girls didn’t need a ‘greasy mechanic’ to fill
out the list. Dad says there’s a lot more to college than just sticking
your nose in a book, and I believe it. You’re going to miss it by a
long mile if you do the turtle-in-a-shell act.”
What Larry Donovan might have replied to this little lecture on turtles
and their habits was forestalled by a panorama of suburban homes
flitting past the car windows, a grinding of the brakes, the rumbling
of the train across a bridge, and the long jump was fully taken.
Being strangers from afar, the two Freshmen did not expect to be met at
the station, and they were not. But Dick knew what to do and where to
go.
“A ‘Sheddon’ street-car is what we want, and there’s one coming, right
now,” he said; then: “Hoo-e-e-e! Look at the green caps on it. I
thought we’d be the only early birds, but it seems we’re not.”
They didn’t get seats in the small trolley car, because the seats were
all packed and jammed, and so was the aisle; but they crowded in, some
way. While they were stowing their grips, a thick-bodied fellow, with
a wide mouth and a voice like that of a megaphoning yell leader, asked
Dick where they were from.
“Brewster,” said Dick, as if the name of the small home city were
enough to identify it anywhere.
“And where in the cat’s name is Brewster?” boomed the big voice.
“I’ll tell you――strictly in confidence,” Dick replied, wrinkling his
nose. “It’s in Timanyoni Park.”
Right then and there the nickname was born.
“Ho, fellows!” roared the megaphonic chap, commanding the instant
attention of the packed carful, “we’ve got ’em, right here; the only
original stem-winding, stem-setting doodle-bugs from the wild and
woozy――the Timanyoni Twins!”
Dick laughed with the rest of the carful, and Larry felt himself
blushing a dark, dark red under his masking coat of sunburn――which
is as good a way as any of telling how this sudden thrust into the
limelight affected each. Beyond the christening, Dick fell easily into
talk with the megaphonist――Wally Dixon, by name, and hailing from
somewhere in Missouri. But Larry was soberly uncomfortable until they
left the car to lug their grips down a cross street which skirted the
Sheddon campus.
The “Man-o’-War” was the house they were looking for, and they found
it――a respectable two-storied dwelling, as little like a ship as
might be――on a corner facing the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory.
Dick’s father had written ahead to engage their room, and it was good,
motherly Mrs. Grant herself who opened the door for them.
Mrs. Grant proved to be as hospitable as she looked. There were to be
six fellows in the house, she explained; two Juniors who had been there
the year before, and four Freshmen. One of the Juniors had arrived,
but the other and the two additional Freshmen were yet to come. Dick
and Larry were to make themselves at home, and the arrived Junior, a
husky-looking chap named Merkle, would show them their room.
Merkle did the showing――to a large, plainly furnished room on the
second floor――and took an upperclassman’s privilege of casting himself
into the one easy-chair while the newcomers unpacked their grips.
“Where are you fellows from?” he asked.
This time Dick did not try to be funny. “Brewster――western Colorado,”
he replied.
“Some little jump, I’ll say,” Merkle commented. “Ever here before?”
“Nope.”
“Then you’ll want to know some of the Sheddon traditions; every college
has ’em. If you know ’em beforehand, it’s easier.”
“Shoot,” said Dick; “we’re here to learn.” Then, with a fine assumption
of uninformed innocence: “Where can I get one of those sweaters with an
‘S’ on it, like the one you’re wearing?”
“That’s the first of the traditions,” returned the big Junior, with a
little frown; “not to be fresh with your elders.”
Dick apologized handsomely.
“That _was_ fresh,” he admitted. “I can see that the green cap is going
to fit me like a tailor-made suit of tights. Please forget it, and tell
us some of the traditions.”
Merkle briefed them. No smoking on the campus――which didn’t hit either
of the “twins” because as yet they didn’t smoke anywhere――no cutting
of class or college celebrations; no backing down when they were asked
to take part in any of the college activities; no shirking of the
“try-outs” for the various athletic teams.
“Lots of other little stunts that you’ll absorb as you come to ’em,”
Merkle concluded; adding: “Of course, you’ll both be in the bridge
scrap. _You_ can’t do much but make a loud noise on the side-lines,
because you’re not beefy enough”――meaning Dick; “but you”――with a nod
for Larry――“you look fit enough to heave a locomotive off the track.
Played on your High School eleven, didn’t you?”
Larry nodded, and Dick explained: “Half-back; he’s too modest to tell
you so himself. But what about this bridge scrap?”
“It’s the pure quill,” said Merkle. “Dark night; single-span concrete
bridge about a mile back in the country. Sophomores defend it; Freshies
try to rush it. Two upper classes on hand to keep the murder list as
low as possible. You’ll like it.”
“What do we get out of it if we win?” Dick demanded.
“Undying fame――and the right to paint the numerals of your class on the
portal arch. It’s been eight years since a Freshman class did it.”
Dick nodded.
“Sounds pretty all right to me.”
“And how about you, Curlyhead?” Merkle turned to Larry.
At this, the Donovan downrightness came to the fore.
“I’m not aiming to play horse,” he said, speaking slowly, as his habit
was when he was appealed to. “I came here to study.”
The upperclassman’s frown was portentous, as became his dignity.
“See here, Donovan,” he returned; “I can tell you one thing: you won’t
get very far if you begin by knocking the college spirit. You’ll not
be urged, or even asked, personally, to go with your class into the
bridge scrap. But unless you can flash up a doctor’s certificate to
show that you’re physically unfit――well, I wouldn’t want to be in your
shoes after the fact; that’s all.”
“Larry’s all right,” said Dick, hastening to make peace. “He’s just too
modest to brag. When does this bloody event eventuate?”
“Pretty early in the game: fellows don’t get down to brass tacks in
their college work until after it’s come and gone. You’ll have all the
notice you’ll need. What schools do you enter?”
“Civil for me; Mechanical for Larry.”
“Good on the Civil end; I’m one of ’em myself,” said Merkle, extending
a ham-like hand. “You’ll like the Dean. He’s some Ranahan on field
work.” Then, heaving himself up out of his chair: “There goes Mother
Grant’s little supper tinkle bell. You’ll register in, Wednesday, and
then you’ll have a day or so to shake yourselves into place. Sheddon’s
a good old dump, but if you’ve been brought up by hand, you may find
her a little raspy on the nerves, as all engineering schools are likely
to be. But she’s fair and square and just. You get about what you go
out after. Let’s jump down and bite a piece o’ pie.”
With two days to spare before the Registrar’s office would open, the
“twins” had time to look about a bit. Finding that they had the freedom
of the campus and its buildings, they made a round of the different
schools, “rubber-necking,” as Dick put it.
In addition to being the technical end of a State University, Sheddon
was――and is――a considerable university in itself. The “rubber-neckers”
wandered through building after building; Agriculture, with its
up-to-date farm machinery, spotless dairy, and model farm; Chemistry
and Pure Science, with their splendidly equipped laboratories;
Electricity, with wonders to which their High School course had barely
introduced them; Civil Engineering, with its museum of surveying
instruments; and Mechanical, with its laboratory, big lecture-rooms,
testing lab., foundry, blacksmith-shop, pattern-shop and machine-shop
complete to the smallest practical detail.
Larry Donovan warmed up with his first touch of real enthusiasm as they
were inspecting the shops. He had worked in the home railroad shop to
earn money for his High School course.
“This is something like!” he exclaimed. “Let me get into my overalls
and jumper, and I’ll be right at home here. Just look at those
lathes――motor-driven and up-to-date to the last bit of polish on the
face-plates.”
With his customary ease of fitting himself into whatever niche he
happened to drop into, Dick made a good many acquaintances during those
preliminary days, and was hail-fellow-well-met with a score and more of
his classmates by the time the registration was over and the student
body was getting its assignment cards filled out.
But with Larry it was altogether different. While Dick made friends
who told him what to do and how to do it, Larry plugged along on his
own――and made hard work of it. Of course, this was strictly his own
fault; but even at this early date in his college career he was
beginning to draw a line which was later to give him no end of trouble
and heartburnings.
As well as he knew Dick――and they had been the closest of friends
in the home High School――he was already asking himself if Dick’s
ready acceptance by everybody wasn’t due to the fact that Dick’s
father was general manager of a good-sized railroad. Admitting that
accusation――and he was admitting it almost before he knew it――it was
only a step over to the other side of the misleading equation: if a
fellow’s ranking in Sheddon was going to be based upon the social or
financial prominence of his family, what sort of a show did the son of
a crippled ex-locomotive engineer stand?
It was after supper on the day when they got their assignments, and
the two had gone to their room to “chop the first air-hole in the
study ice,” as Dick put it, that Larry’s attitude got its first public
airing, so to speak. And some mention of the impending bridge scrap was
what opened the door.
“No,” said Larry, frowning, “I’m not in on that, or any other side-line
foolishness, Dick. As I told Merkle that first evening, I’m not here
to play horse. My assignment card is full enough to keep me good and
busy, and if I can claw through this first semester without flunking
something, I’ll be lucky.”
Dick squared himself behind the study table and looked his room-mate in
the eye.
“You’re side-stepping, Larry,” he broke out accusingly. “It isn’t the
work that makes you say that. You know perfectly well that you can run
rings all around me, with your little ‘it’s dogged as does it,’ when it
comes to the study part. You’ve got some other reason up your sleeve.
What is it?”
Larry tried to set the real reason in presentable shape. But, after
all, it didn’t sound so very good when he voiced it.
“I was a workingman before I came here, and I’m a workingman yet.”
“Granny!” Dick scoffed. “We’re all workingmen――or, if we’re not, we’d
better be.”
“You know what I mean,” Larry insisted; adding: “I’m not kicking. It’s
the way it is out in the world, and I suppose there is no reason why
it shouldn’t be that way in college. You’ve made an armful of friends
already, while I know maybe half a dozen fellows well enough to nod at
’em. Sometimes they nod back, and sometimes they don’t.”
“Fiddle!”――Dick seemed to be carrying an overload of derisive
ejaculations. “You’ve simply got the bug, Larry! If you let it keep you
from being a real Sheddonian――pep, college spirit and all――it’ll bust
you, world without end.”
“I can’t help it,” said the workingman glumly. “I didn’t make things
the way they are made. Here’s a sample of it: You’ve met Eggleston――the
dandified chap that rooms two doors down the street. I happened to butt
up against him to-day, and he introduced himself and asked if I were
the son of Mr. Herbert Donovan, the big consulting engineer, of St.
Louis. When I said No; that my father was a locomotive engineer; he
froze up until you could hear his skin crack.”
“Bosh!” snorted Dick, trotting out another of the derisives. “If
you’re going to let a snob like Harry Eggleston set the pace for you――”
The interruption was a hoarse cry from the street: “Freshmen out! All
Freshmen out!” Dick opened the window and stuck his head out.
“What’s broke loose?” he asked.
“Turn out! The Sophs are paintin’ one of our fellows green down in
Adams’s field barn! Turn out!”
Dick shut the window and went to get his cap.
“You’re coming, aren’t you, Larry?” he said; adding: “This is a class
job, you know.”
Larry shook his head.
“Might as well begin in one place as another, Dick: I’m not in on the
rah-rah stuff.”
Dick Maxwell’s temper was easy-going, but about once in a blue moon it
got away from him.
“That’s yellow, and you know it!” he flamed out; and with that he was
gone. But he had scarcely reached the sidewalk before Larry was at his
elbow.
“I can’t stand for that――from you, Dick,” was all the explanation that
was offered; and, of course, Dick was instantly penitent.
“I’m a liar!” he blurted out contritely. “Nobody knows better than I
do that there isn’t a single yellow drop of blood in you, Larry. There
goes a bunch of our fellows now――let’s run.”
The hazing episode proved to be merely an incident. Enough Freshmen
were rallied to rush the field barn in Adams’s back forty; the artistic
Sophomores were scattered; and the victim, who proved to be the big,
husky “Aggie,” Welborn, who roomed at Mrs. Grant’s, was rescued. Of
course, Welborn was a sad sight. The artists had stripped him and he
was well daubed with green paint. Nevertheless, he was cheerfully
triumphant. “I got five of ’em, b’jing! before they got me,” he
gloated, with a grin that the green paint made peculiarly hideous.
“Whadda you reckon’ll take it off?”
“Turpentine,” suggested somebody in the mob of rescuers; and two of the
light-footed ones ran for a drug store.
With the worst of the paint removed, Larry and Dick took Welborn home,
where they commandeered the bath-room and worked over him until he was
well-nigh blistered but clean.
“Gosh! talk about Turkish baths!” gurgled the big victim, as they were
sousing him for the final time in the tub of hot soap-suds. “I’ll say
this beats ’em a mile high! Wait till we got those Soffies at the
bridge! I’m goin’ to take a stick along and notch it every time I put
one of ’em to sleep.”
“Well?” said Dick to Larry, after they had tucked the cheerful victim
into his bed, and were once more in their own room, “changed your mind
any?”
“Not a minute’s worth!” was the gruff reply. “It’s all tom-foolishness,
and I don’t want any of it in mine.”
“But you’ll turn out for the bridge scrap, won’t you?――for the honor of
the class?”
“Not so you could notice it,” Larry refused; and with that he stuck his
face into a book.
For some days the “shaking-down” process which every college has to go
through at the beginning of the scholastic year went on――with small
satisfaction to any sober-minded member of the faculty, or to fellows
who, like Larry Donovan, were not yet imbued with that elusive thing
called “college spirit.” Hazings, some of them mild, and some not so
mild, went on nightly. Freshmen, unwarily out after dark in numbers
too small for defense, were paddled, painted, and made to do stunts
ridiculous, and sometimes rather harrowing.
After the Welborn incident, Larry refused to pay any heed to the
nightly call of “Freshmen out” and Dick forbore to urge him. But at
last a night came when the call――unheeded when it was raised from the
sidewalk――was hurled in at short range by Welborn himself. He found
Larry alone, poring over his mathematics, as was his usual custom.
“Hey! what the dickens are you hived up here for, when the Soffies are
out in force and murderin’ us?” he roared. “You’d sit here with your
nose in a book while they’ve got your side-partner, Dick Maxwell, half
naked and chased up a tree back of the athletic field? You haven’t any
red blood in you, Donovan; that’s what’s the matter with you!”
Larry jumped up so suddenly that his chair went over with a crash.
“Show me!” was all he said; and a minute later he was racing at
Welborn’s heels, down the street and across an open lot to where half
a dozen yelling Sophomores were doing a scalp dance around a big
black-walnut tree. In the higher branches of the tree to which they had
driven him by throwing clods at him a slender figure in a close-fitting
suit of underwear was picked out by a light of a small bonfire. And
the autumn night was cold.
Welborn spoke for the first time as he and Larry were hurling
themselves over the fence. “B-better get some more of the fe-fellows!”
he gasped. “There are too many of ’m for just us two!” But Larry acted
as if he hadn’t heard. “Come on!” he said; and, two to six, they went
in.
It was a warm little tussle for a few minutes, with most of the rules
eliminated. Like Larry, Welborn had played foot-ball; and, again like
Larry, he had the weight. Bucking the dancing ring as one man, they
broke the line; and another tackling rush dissipated it.
Back in their room, Larry once more planted himself before his book,
but as he opened it, he said to Dick, without looking up: “You may
count me in on that bridge business, if you like. I don’t ‘savvy’
that sort of thing, as you know; but those fellows need a lesson――and
they’re going to get it. No; don’t make any mistake,” he went on, as
Dick was about to offer congratulations. “I haven’t any ‘class spirit’
or ‘college spirit,’ or whatever you call it. But when they hit you,
they hit me; that’s all.”
The night of the bridge scrap――which, by Sheddon tradition, was to
end all hazing――came in due course; a night a bit cloudy, and, by
consequence, as dark as Erebus. Quite early in the evening the class
began to gather, and the cries of “Freshmen out!” “All Sophomores out!”
began to be lifted in the college suburb streets very shortly after
supper.
True to his own traditions, Larry sat down at the study table and boned
his Math. for the next day, resolutely shutting his ears to Dick’s
agonized protests to the effect that all the fun would be over before
they could get in on it. It was half-past eight before the boner shut
his book and announced his readiness. But while he was getting into his
oldest clothes and overalls, he once more defined his position.
“Don’t you get ‘hope up’ about me, Dick. I’m going in on this because
it seems to be a job that has to be done before the Soffies will mind
their own business and let us alone. That’s all there is to it, so far
as I’m concerned.”
“Maybe you’ll have another angle on it before we get through,” was all
that Dick said in reply; and they set out.
As Dick had predicted, they were a little late; when they reached
the streets they found them deserted. But they knew the location of
the bridge, a mile back of the campus; and the mile was covered at a
dog-trot.
Though they had been tardy for the assembling, they were in time for
everything else. While the night was dark, the battlefield was luridly
illuminated by flaring gasoline torches. The bridge was a modern
concrete structure of a single long span over the small river; broad,
and with footways at the sides protected by parapets breast-high. At
either end was an ornamental portal arch, and it was upon this that the
winning class was permitted to paint its year numerals.
When Larry and Dick arrived upon the scene, the Sophomores had
taken possession of the bridge, and the Freshmen were massed in the
road. Upperclassmen――Seniors for the Sophomores and Juniors for the
Freshmen――were “frisking” the combatants for weapons. No fellow with
good red blood in him would go into such a conflict armed; but in a
bunch of six or eight hundred undergraduates there are always a few
“yellows,” and they had to be searched.
As the Juniors in pairs searched the green caps, others followed with
strips of white cloth to be worn on the arm as a distinguishing mark
by the attackers. “Fair play!” was the oft-repeated caution of the
upperclassmen; and dire punishment was promised to the fellows who
should break this tradition.
Dick plunged into the thick of things as soon as he had been searched
and marked; but Larry stood aside, grimly sizing up the situation.
The first thing he remarked was the time-immemorial handicap of
Freshman classes, namely, the lack of leadership which is the natural
consequence in a body of fellows getting together for their first
united effort. Wally Dixon, the big-voiced young Mechanical who had
given Larry and Dick their joint nickname on the day of their arrival,
was commanding and shouting and trying to bring some sort of order out
of the chaos; but he was not making much headway.
The searching and marking finished, the upperclassmen laid down the
iron-clad rules of the game. Slugging was prohibited, but anything less
than a knock-out went. Prisoners could be taken by either side, but
they had the privilege of escaping and rejoining their own side if they
could. Time would not be called until one side or the other was clearly
victorious.
When all was ready, the Freshmen made their first charge, with Dixon
trying to get team play by forming his men into a flying wedge. Larry,
from the half-back position into which he had mechanically dropped, saw
at once that it was going to fail. The Sophomores were massed solidly
all the way across the bridge, and the loosely-formed wedge doubled up
like a handful of sand and went to pieces when it struck the obstacle.
For a shouting, ear-splitting five minutes there was a hilarious
free-for-all, in which a dozen or more of the attackers were taken
prisoner and shoved to the rear under guard. Then the defenders charged
in their turn――good, old-fashioned mass play, this was――and drove the
disorganized mob of Freshies off the bridge and a hundred yards or so
up the road.
In the little lull which followed the return of the Sophomores to their
stronghold, there was dazed confusion in the ranks of the defeated,
with Dixon trying in vain to rally them into fighting shape again. Into
the midst of things Dick Maxwell hurled himself like a human bombshell.
“Fellows!” he yelled, “what we’re needing is a leader! Dixie,
here, is doing his best, but it isn’t good enough. Isn’t that so,
Wally?”――appealing to the big voice.
“You said a whole mouthful,” Dixon admitted, with splendid class
spirit. “I’m only pinch-hittin’ for the right man. Who is he, Maxie?”
“I’ve got him right here!” Dick shouted, dragging Larry forcibly into
the inner circle. “Here’s an old codger that’s handled grown men on a
railroad job! Climb in, Larry, and tell us what to do!”
Of course, Larry would have backed straight out if he had been allowed
to. But even at this early period a lot of the men knew Dickie Maxwell,
and were perfectly willing to take his word. “Donovan! Donovan! What’s
the matter with Donovan? There’s nothing the matter with Donovan! He’s
all right, you BET!” the shout went up; and Larry found himself elected.
“If you will have it that way,” he yielded gruffly. “What I don’t know
about such foolishness as this would fill a rain-water hogshead. But if
the job’s got to be done, we’ll do it: just get that rubbed into your
hides――every last one of you. We’re going to do it!”
“Bully for the Timanyoni Twin! Tell us how!” yelled the mob.
“Listen, then: we can’t buck that line solid, and get anywhere. Those
fellows have been together long enough to know team play, and we
haven’t. I want twenty men who can swim, and who aren’t afraid of
getting wet. Volunteers come over to this side of the road. You other
fellows mass across so they can’t see what we’re doing.”
He had his twenty in a half-second――and forty more on top of them.
Rapidly he made his selection, with Wally Dixon for a captain. Not
knowing more than a handful of the men, individually, he picked chiefly
for size. Since his plan bulked large on the side of secrecy, he took
the twenty apart and gave them their instructions. After which, they
vanished in the darkness――not in the direction of the bridge.
“Now for a little drill work!” Larry called out, going back to the army
proper. “Let me show you what a flying wedge really ought to be,” and
for as much as fifteen minutes he kept them forming and re-forming in
the road, the only shirker being Dickie Maxwell, who stood aside with
his eyes fixed upon a certain point in the woods backgrounding the
farther end of the bridge. And in the meantime, most naturally, the
thus-far-victorious Sophomores were hurling all sorts of epithets
across the dead-line, singing and shouting like the pack of young
barbarians which, for the moment, they were.
Larry was forming his charging wedge for about the twentieth time
when Dick, straining his eyes, saw a tiny match-light flare, lasting
no longer than an eye-wink, on the farther bank of the river a few
yards above the bridge approach. Instantly he darted across to Larry.
“Six――fourteen――five!” he yelled, giving the old foot-ball signal; and
Larry leaped to his place at the cutting edge of the wedge. “This time
we GO!” he bellowed: “_Now, then_――for all you’re worth, and hang on
till the last man of you is dead!”
Once more the defenders of the bridge met the charge gamely. Their
front line bent, buckled, straightened itself again, and flying
detachments from either flank tried to cut the splitting point of
the wedge off from the tremendous shoving force behind it. Larry,
head down like that of a butting ram, and his racking elbows boring a
path straight into the crowding mass, seemed to bear a charmed life.
Dragging hands clawed at him, fists beat upon him. Once a slugger,
meanly taking advantage of the turmoil, kneed him in the stomach; but
still he kept his feet and held on.
It was only a matter of minutes. While the Sophomore front line was
buckling for the second time a wild yell went up from their rear. The
small guard they had left to hold the northern end of the bridge had
given way at the charge of the twenty huskies Larry had sent to swim
the river, and in another half-minute the yearly class struggle had
passed into history. Larry’s ruse had been the simplest of tricks,
but even a simple trap works if it has never been tried before. Caught
between two fires, the bridge defenders broke in confusion, and after
that, it was every man for himself and a get-away.
[Illustration: The Sophomore front line was buckling for the second
time]
Of course, Larry had his reward――and Dick, too, for that matter. For
an uproarious half-hour the victorious Freshmen marched back and forth
over the bridge, carrying the “twins” shoulder-high and shouting
themselves hoarse for Donovan and Maxwell, the class, Old Sheddon, and
the epoch-marking scrap which would put Freshmen numerals on the portal
arch for the first time in eight years.
But after it was all over; after the shouting, singing mob had
made its way back to the college suburb and dispersed, and Dick,
hero-worshipping in proper fashion by applying the contents of Mother
Grant’s arnica bottle to the handsome array of bruises Larry had
acquired in the battle, ventured to add a little adulation of his own
to the class leader’s triumph, Larry cut him off morosely.
“None of that from you, Dick!” he growled. “I know just how much and
how little all this shouting and yelling is worth, and so do you.
To-morrow morning nine-tenths of those fellows won’t know me when they
meet me on the campus. For just about that percentage of them I’ll drop
back and be just what I am――a workingman and the son of a workingman.
They wanted a hard-hitter to-night, and I happened to be it. But that’s
all there is to it. No more rah-rah stuff for me.”
“But you can’t――you simply _can’t_ go through college with that sort of
a slant on things!” Dick protested, almost tearfully. “It isn’t human!
You’re simply batty on that ‘workingman’ stunt. Why, those fellows you
captained to-night will black your shoes――do anything on top of earth
for you, if you’ll only let ’em!”
But “letting them” was the hitch that Larry Donovan, in the very
beginning of his college career, was allowing the stubborn part of his
own character to knot around him. There is no variety of pride quite so
unreasoning as poverty-pride; and when Larry tumbled into bed a little
later, it was with the fixed idea that he was going to be _in_ college
without being _of_ it; that he would hoe his own row and let others do
the same; a determination which, farther along, was to lead to――but of
that more in its proper place.
II
THE OFFISH WORM
“Say, Maxie; what the di――hinkle is the matter with that red-headed
room-mate of yours, I’d like to know?”
It was the beginning of the college year, and Old Sheddon was settling
into its stride. On the campus, between classes, two first-year men
were heading for their rooms and a study period. Wally Dixon, the
bigger of the two, was the one who asked the disgusted question about
Larry Donovan.
“Larry’s a good old scout,” said Dick Maxwell, dodging a small problem
that he himself was unable to answer. “He’s a regular fellow, all
right, when you come to know him.”
“Know him?” roared Dixon; “I’d like for you to tell me how anybody ever
gets to know him! Look at the way he acted after you, or somebody, got
him out for the class scrap at the bridge. He was a pink winner that
night, with the neat little Indian-fighter trick that he pulled, and
everybody on the job knew it. But when some of us went to him the next
day to find out which of the class offices he’d like to have handed
him, he bluffed us cold!”
“Don’t you go and lay that up against him,” Dick urged. “It’s――it’s
just his way, you know.”
“Well, if anybody should ask me often enough, I’d say it’s a mighty
queer way. Acts as if he had a grouch against the world.”
Dickie Maxwell, loyalest of chums, hardly knew what to say. Dixon
was the son of a wealthy Kansas City packer, and Dick felt that it
would be next to impossible to make him understand Larry’s attitude.
For that matter, he, Dick, couldn’t understand it himself. Beginning
with workmanlike contempt for what he called the “boys’-play” side of
college life, Larry’s grouch, or indifference, or whatever it was, was
developing into something a good bit like antagonism toward everything
but the daily study grind, and what he could get out of that.
“I’ll say he’s heading in to be a worm,” Dixon went on; “worm” being
Sheddon slang for a fellow who scamps the college “activities” and
lives and moves and has his being in the classrooms and study periods.
“He’s ripping material for the athletic squad, and if he had even a
whiff of college spirit he’d be showing up in the try-outs. You ought
to labor with him, Maxie; he’s needing it.”
The two parted at the campus gate, and when Dick reached his room
at Mrs. Grant’s, he found Larry scowling over a problem in his
trigonometry.
“Chuck the grind and talk to me a few minutes,” was Dick’s greeting as
he came in. Then: “You’re cutting all the athletic try-outs, Larry.
What for?”
Larry’s frown deepened. “I don’t see why I can’t make you understand,”
he broke out half impatiently. “You, and most of the other fellows, I’d
say, are here mostly to have a good time――or that’s the way it looks to
me. I’m not. I’m here on borrowed money――no, hold on,” he protested,
when Dick would have interrupted, “I know your father doesn’t look at
it that way, but I do. And because it is borrowed money, I want to get
the worth of it.”
“Well,” Dick retorted, “that’s just what I’m scrapping about. You
won’t get the worth of it if you go on cutting out a good half of what
college ought to mean to a fellow. I’ll bet you fairly ache to go on
the field every time the bunch takes a try-out.”
“If I do, I take it out in aching,”――glumly.
It was the same old thing. As the son of a workingman, Larry, as we
have seen, had early drawn a line upon the off side of which he had
taken his stand stubbornly. College, as it appeared to him, was a place
where rich men’s sons came to study as little as possible, and where a
workingman was admitted only upon sufferance, as you might say.
Now when a fellow goes about with a chip on his shoulder there are
plenty of people who will oblige him by knocking it off. Larry had
already had kindnesses not a few shown him, and even hilarious
adulation when――dragged into it bodily by Dick――he had taken part in
the class “scrap,” and had led the green-caps to the first Freshman
victory won in eight years. But, on the other hand, a few snobbish
fellows had “shown him his place,” as he put it, and it is human nature
to see the thing you are looking for, and to miss the things you’ve
already made up your mind don’t exist.
“I don’t think you’re doing yourself, or Old Sheddon, fair justice,”
Dick said at length. “If you were thick-headed and had to bone hard to
keep up, it would be different. But you’re not――and you don’t.”
“Listen,” said Larry; “those fellows in the athletic bunch are out
after ‘material,’ but that is just as far as it goes, Dick. They’d take
me on as a sort of promising chunk of bone and muscle――and that’s all.
I’m not in their class.”
Dick flapped his hands in despair.
“You’re the limit, Larry! That ‘class’ notion of yours, in free-for-all
America, is simply bunk!”
“Is it?” Larry queried sharply. “I can prove what I say. Look at little
Purdick――waiting on table in Hassler’s restaurant to earn his way: does
anybody ask him to get in on any of the try-outs? Not so you could
notice it. Look at Jungman, tending furnaces and wheelbarrowing ashes:
Saturday, when some of the fellows were going for a hike, one of ’em
said: ‘Let’s make Jungman take time off and go with us.’ Were there any
frantic shouts of approval? Not on your life. Instead, Banker Waldrich
said, ‘Oh, nit! he isn’t our sort.’”
Again Dick made the gesture of despair.
“I guess you’re hopeless!” he gave up; and with that he went to get his
own book.
Though he said this――meaning it at the moment――Dick didn’t let up on
the athletic urgencies; and faithfully, in season and out of season,
he labored with Larry. As sometimes happens, even in an engineering
college, a Freshman class had entered with rather scanty material in
it for the class teams. And, since the ’Varsity teams have to grow up
out of incoming material, the athletic “scouts” were digging hard for
Freshman candidates. Unhappily, however, the fellows who approached
Larry always seemed to rub him the wrong way of the grain; or he
thought they did, which amounted to the same thing.
After all, it was less Dick’s urgings than a word spoken by Mr.
Waddell, the pattern-shop instructor, that turned the tide. It was on
an afternoon while the try-outs were still going on, and Larry was
doing a little extra work in the shop. Passing through, the instructor
stopped at Larry’s lathe, and there was a little talk turning upon
Larry’s absence from the athletic field when everybody else was there.
Much to Larry’s surprise, the instructor took sides with Dick and the
other urgers: it was a student’s duty to uphold, not only the honor
of his college in class work, but in the “activities” as well. Larry
thought it all over soberly, and that evening made a large and generous
concession to Dick.
“This athletic business,” he began, without preface; “I’ve about made
up my mind to try out for the foot-ball squad.”
The sudden shift nearly knocked Dick speechless, but he caught his
breath and pounded the shifter on the back.
“That’s the right old stuff!” he exulted; “Gee-gosh! but you make me
glad all around the block!”
“Hold up,” Larry amended; “I don’t want any more credit than belongs
to me. I’m going in because I guess I owe it to Old Sheddon. But I’m
not kidding myself any, whatever. If I get in and play a good game, the
bleachers’ll give me the glad hand. But off the field I’ll still be
Larry Donovan, mechanic, and the son of a mechanic.”
“Confound your picture!” said Dick, half laughing and half provoked,
“you ought to have a licking, and if I were big enough I’d give
you one! Why, you poor fish, don’t you know that your good, sane,
‘workingman’ ancestry is the thing you ought to be most thankful for?
It is the foundation upon which the real America is built!”
Larry grunted and looked up suspiciously.
“Where’d you get all that flowery stuff?” he demanded.
“I read it in a book,” Dick confessed brazenly. “Just the same, it’s
so.”
The next afternoon Larry reported to Brock, the head coach, at the
gymnasium, offering himself for the try-outs.
“What have you done?” snapped the square-faced, broad-shouldered
man-picker who was filling the Sheddon teams.
“Little High School baseball and foot-ball.”
“What place in foot-ball?”
“End one year; right half the next two.”
The shrewd gray eyes of the coach swept him up and down.
“H’m; you were the bridge-scrap leader, weren’t you? Come in here and
strip and let’s have a look at you.”
Larry took his “physical” without a flaw; heart action perfectly
normal, weight within a pound and three ounces of what his age and
height called for, chest expansion well above normal. In addition, his
summer’s work on the railroad-building job in the Colorado mountains
had made him as hard as nails.
“You’ll do,” said the coach, and sent him to the field.
If he had been twice as finical as he was, he couldn’t have found any
fault with his reception. The memorable bridge scrap was still fresh
in mind, and his subsequent refusal to turn out for athletics seemed to
be forgotten on the spot. Naturally, he was cast at once for Freshman
foot-ball; and after a hard-working hour in the field he went to the
showers with his blood dancing and with the feeling that perhaps,
after all, he had been overhasty in jumping to the conclusion that his
family’s station in life had anything to do with the way the fellows
were regarding him.
But the good effect of this first little dip into the bigger pool was
all spoiled while he was dressing in the locker-room. The steel lockers
were arranged in double rows, with dressing alleys between; and in the
next row two of his fellow classmen, McKnight and Rogers, out of sight
but, unhappily, not out of hearing, were discussing him.
“Well, the offish worm turned out, at last, didn’t he?” McKnight was
saying. “That’s Dickie Maxwell’s doing, I’ll bet. Don’t see how Maxwell
can room with a fellow like him.”
“He may be a grouch, but he certainly can play ‘feet-ball,’” Rogers
replied. “I’d hate to have him on a team against me.”
“He’s the rough stuff”――this was McKnight again――“but that’s about what
you’d expect. They say his dad’s a section-man, or something, on a
railroad. Queer how such fellows break in.”
“Oh, cut that!” said the other voice, in a tone of marked disapproval.
“Can’t you ever forget that you were born with gold fillings in your
teeth, Knighty? My father was a house carpenter, if it comes to that.”
“But he didn’t stay a house carpenter,” was the quick retort. “Just
now he’s the head of the biggest contracting firm in the State of Iowa.”
“That doesn’t cut any ice, Knighty. You’ve got to take a fellow for
what he is; not for what his father is or was.”
“That is exactly what I’m doing with the ‘worm.’ Donovan may be all
right on the team, but I’d hate to see myself rooming with him.”
Larry was fully dressed by now, and he didn’t wait to hear any more.
And it was only human nature again that made him remember bitterly what
McKnight had said, and forget the sensible and ameliorating Rogers’
replies.
“Things break all right for you this afternoon?” Dick asked that
evening after he and Larry were hived in their room.
“Oh, good enough, I guess,” was the morose reply.
“Coachie didn’t turn you down, I don’t think!” chucked the class
recruiter. “Foot-ball squad, of course?”
“Freshman team,” said Larry, without looking up.
“Good! You’ll get inoculated with the real, old, simon-pure college
spirit, after a bit, Larry.”
“Don’t you believe it for one single minute!” Larry flamed out hotly,
in the remembrance of his wrongs. “I’m in, and I’ll stay in because
I’m not a quitter. But I haven’t changed my mind a single atom!” And
he repeated, for Dick’s benefit, the talk he had overheard in the
locker-room; or rather, to be strictly accurate, he repeated McKnight’s
part of it.
“You see, it’s just as I’ve been telling you,” he wound up in a burst
of contemptuous passion. “They’re glad enough to use me as a promising
bunch of bone and muscle, and that’s all. I’ll stick, for the sake
of what Sheddon’s going to give me. But when it’s over, I’ll still be
fighting on my side of the fence――which isn’t Ollie McKnight’s side by
a thousand miles!”
True to his determination, Larry “stuck,” and after a few days of
practice the Freshman team found that it had acquired a prize. Larry
played with the same grim resolution that he put into his classroom
work. Playing first at end, he was presently given his old High School
position at half-back. For this position he was well qualified, having
weight enough to buck the opposing line, combined with the speed
necessary to circle the ends and slip through tackle.
It was in one of the preliminary practice games with the ’Varsity that
he made his mark. As usually happens, the big fellows ran away with
everything in sight, but after the game, just as Larry was leaving the
locker-room, Brock, the head coach, stopped him.
“I’ve been watching your play this afternoon, Donovan,” he said
brusquely. “You have the makings of a good half-back in you. How do you
stand in your classroom work?”
“All right, so far, I guess,” Larry replied.
“We begin playing the schedule next week,” Brock went on. “How would
you like to go along as a sub? Of course, I couldn’t put you in the
Conference games, but there’ll be others.”
You’d have to be a college Freshman yourself to know how this hit
Larry. It is only about once in an elephant’s age that a raw Freshie
is ever singled out as even a remotely possible substitute on the big
team. But right there the growing bitterness got in its work. Once
more he was being taken up for his brawn, and maybe a little for his
brain, but not for anything else.
“I guess I’m not available,” he said, and it came out a lot more
bluntly than he had meant to make it.
“All right,” returned the coach. “It’s up to you, of course.” And that
ended it.
After this little talk with Brock, Larry played all the harder in the
practice games――which was the way he was built. Back in the old life,
which now seemed so far away, he had wiped engines in a locomotive
roundhouse; and because it was a disagreeable, dirty job, he always did
it just a little more than thoroughly. Here was another engine-wiping
job, he told himself; and, since he had undertaken it, he would go
through with it.
Matters and things ran along this way until the foot-ball season was
well started. There were class games on the home field, in one of which
the Freshmen, clinching their success in the bridge scrap, literally
wiped the earth with the Sophomores in a score of 47 to nothing, and
public acclaim――what there was of it――gave the credit, or a good share
of it, to a certain red-headed, big-boned half-back, whom nothing
seemed to be able to stop.
Meanwhile the ’Varsity was playing around the circle, and having hard
luck. Not once, as yet, had there been occasion to call out the “snake
dance” and “night-shirt parade” with which Sheddon victories were
celebrated. Through all this, Larry seemed to be the only member of
the student body who remained unmoved. Day after day he plugged along,
religiously giving his afternoons when his team was called out; but
that was all.
“Larry, you’re a fright――simply a fright!” Dick stormed, one evening
when the news had come of another defeat for the “Blacksmiths.” “How
you can go on, just as if nothing was happening, when――――”
“Might say nothing _is_ happening――to me,” put in the offish one
grumpily.
“Of course it’s happening to you!” Dick yelped. “Aren’t you a part of
Old Sheddon, I’d like to know? Haven’t you any heart at all?”
Larry jumped up and tramped across to the window which, in daylight,
looked out upon Engineering Lab., and gave a cornerwise glimpse at the
athletic field. When he turned back to face Dick his lip was shaking.
“It _does_ get me, Dick! I’ve fought it――fought it just as hard as I
could. I know the fellows don’t like me, and a lot of ’em are calling
me a ‘worm.’ Just the same, it’s breaking my heart to see Sheddon
losing this way! I――――” and he turned to the window again, quickly,
this time, as if to hide something that he was ashamed to let Dick see.
In a second Dick was beside him.
“Larry, you old sorehead――you don’t know how much good it does me to
hear you s-say that!” he stammered. And then, in a steadier voice:
“You’re all wrong about the fellows not liking you: _they’ll like you
just as much as you’ll let them_. There isn’t a worth-while fellow in
Old Sheddon that cares a hoot whether you’re rich or poor. If you’d
only loosen up――――”