another matter. Of course, Bryant Underhill, Sheddon Freshman, wasn’t
responsible for what his father did; but he was evidently willing to
have sins enough of his own to answer for.
Then, on the other side, here was little Purdick, type of the
down-trodden; spiteful and vindictive; the stuff out of which
anarchists are made. Larry drew a long breath. Even in this early stage
of it, college life was opening up some pretty large fields.
As to the Underhill threat――that he, Larry Donovan, was to be forced to
leave Sheddon――Larry dismissed this promptly. Quite likely Underhill,
helped by his own set, might try to start something; but, if so, he
wouldn’t get anywhere with it.
That was the way Larry left it when he went to bed that night; and by
morning he had forgotten the threat. But the morning ushered in a day
to be marked in the calendar with a letter in charcoal black; a day in
which everything seemed to go wrong end to.
It began in “Practical Mechanics.” In Sheddon three of the engineering
courses――Electrical, Mechanical and Civil――include so many hours a week
of shop work. At that moment Larry’s section was in the blacksmith’s
shop; fifty students at fifty forges doing actual blacksmithing, under
an instructor who was himself a skilled workman.
Having grown up with tools and forges and machinery, Larry thought of
the shop work as an easy walk-over, and so it had been up to this day
of helpless botchings. But now he couldn’t seem to get anything right.
The hour was given to welding, and the metal simply wouldn’t weld.
Larry cleaned his fire again and again; put it out once and built it
over afresh; and still he made nothing but botches.
“You’ll have to do better than this, Donovan,” warned the instructor,
at the close of the futile hour. Then he added something that wasn’t
quite deserved. “You fellows who have had a bit of outside shop
experience mustn’t think you know it all. I can’t give you anything
better than a cipher on this morning’s work.”
With this for a send-off it wasn’t very strange that the entire day
went wrong. Larry blew up in English, went to pieces in Physics, made
a mess of his drawing hour, and even stumbled in Math.――in the very
lesson in which he had successfully coached his “lame dogs.”
“This sure has been one beautiful day!” he growled to Dick, when
they were settled in their room for the evening. “I’ve gone bunk on
everything I’ve touched!”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Dick easily. “Everybody has a day like that
once in a while. You just got up on the wrong side of the bed this
morning; that’s all.”
Very sensibly, Larry tried to let it go at that; but, oddly enough,
it refused to “go.” Day after day the failures continued, usually
beginning with the shop work and then spreading, like a contagious
disease, to everything else. In the foundry his flasks “fell down,”
and the castings came out looking as if a dog had gnawed them. In the
pattern shop, plane-irons that he had whetted to a razor-edge nicked
and spoiled the job. In the machine shop it was even worse; every
machine tool he tried to use bucked on him and ruined something.
Of course, there were consequences――mighty unpleasant ones. With poor
markings, or what you might call no markings, he was called before the
chief of the shop staff, warned once that he would have to pull his
standing up, warned a second time, and then, one morning, a faculty
notice came. He was falling below passing grades in everything but
Mathematics. If he couldn’t do better, the faculty would reluctantly be
obliged to conclude that he hadn’t sufficient preparation for a college
course.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” he confessed to Dick on the
day when the faculty notice came. “I’m just all shot to pieces. Why,
Dick, I don’t know myself any more! Things that used to come as easy as
rolling off a log stump me as if I’d never heard of them before.”
“Not sick, are you?” Dick queried sympathetically.
“Only in my fool head and hands. I break everything I touch; and
when I get a question in class, I simply blow up. I don’t blame the
professors. Anybody would think I was solid ivory from the neck up!”
Dick shook his head. “I can’t understand it any better than you can,
Larry. But there’s a reason, if you could find it. You’re not worrying
about anything, are you?”
“Home matters, you mean? There’s nothing to worry about at home. No; my
grief is right here, with myself.” Then, with a look of wretchedness
that was pretty foreign to the good, wide-set eyes: “It’ll break my
heart, Dick, if I have to flunk out. And I’m headed straight for it
now, sure as a gun!”
Dickie Maxwell got up and began to walk the floor with his hands in
his pockets. Finally he said: “Say, Larry; how much do you know about
Psychology?”
Larry grunted. “Nothing; except that I don’t take much stock in it.
Why?”
“I’ve been messing in it a little lately. There’s a lot of the stuff
that I don’t understand, but there are some things that I do. For
instance, if you get off on the wrong foot in a sprint, the wrongness
is likely to stick to you through the whole race.”
“Everybody knows that much,” Larry admitted. “But what has that got to
do with my ‘busting’?”
“I was just coming to that. If you blow up in something in the morning,
you’re likely to go on blowing up all day.”
“All right; that’s exactly what I do.”
“Your section has shop work in the mornings, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s in the shops that you begin to go bad, isn’t it?”
“For two solid weeks I’ve been breaking or spoiling everything I’ve
touched.”
“There you are. With such a send-off, old Doctor Psychology would say
that, unless you should fetch yourself up with a round turn, you’d be
likely to go on foozling all day. And that’s what you do.”
“You’ve said it. But that doesn’t get me anywhere.”
“Wait: we’ve chased it back to the shop work. Now let’s take another
tack. Have you got any ‘lame dogs’ in the shops――fellows that follow
you around and try to get helped?”
“Yes, one; fellow named Crawford. He is sticking to me yet, though
goodness knows there isn’t any reason why he should.”
“Hah!” said Dick, dropping into a chair. “Snitty Crawford, eh? I don’t
much like that big fumbler, Larry.”
“I don’t either. But he’s such a miserable dub in Prac. Mechan., that I
felt as though somebody ought to give him a boost.”
“Know him any, outside of the class work?”
Larry shook his head, and Dick went on:
“It just so happens that I do. He’s the worst sort that ever gets into
college; a fawner on some fellow with more money than brains. Off the
campus he’s Bry Underhill’s shadow.”
Larry jumped as if some one had slapped him. In a flash little
Purdick’s warning, long since forgotten, came back to him――“a spender
always gets a crowd around him――of the kind that’ll do his dirty work
for him.” Could it be possible――――
“Say, Dick,” he broke out savagely; “do you suppose anybody could have
been framing me up to ‘bust’ on this shop work, right along?”
“Why――if you had an enemy that hated you hard enough: I’ll admit that’s
what I had in mind, Larry; but it can’t be. A fellow who would do such
a thing as that couldn’t stay twenty-four hours in Old Sheddon.”
“Couldn’t he?” Larry said; but that is all he did say. And when Dick
would have gone on to talk more about the present-moment sad state
of affairs, the “shark” stuck his nose in a book and seemed to have
lost all interest in the subject of his critical standing――or his
no-standing――in the Registrar’s records.
But the next morning, in the shop-work period, he was as sharp-eyed as
a cornered rat. His job――“exercise,” they called it――that morning was
to turn a piece of round shafting to fit the hole in a pulley. Lathe
work was one of the things he had learned fairly well in the old home
railroad shop, and he ran the roughing chip in a few minutes. Setting
the tool for the finishing chip, he stopped the lathe and turned to the
bench behind him to try the gauge in the pulley-hole. As he did so,
somebody passed between him and his lathe, and he looked up quickly. It
was Crawford.
That was enough to make him extra cautious. Before starting the lathe
again he examined the reading of the micrometer scale on the tool-rest.
The mischief had been done. The tool had been advanced, just the least
little fraction in the world, but it was enough. If he had let the tool
run without resetting, the piece of work would have been spoiled.
With this for a starter, he not only kept his eye on Crawford during
the entire period; he also put the fellow next to him on the watch.
Three separate times the “lame dog” set traps for him into which he
would have blundered helplessly if he hadn’t been forewarned. Once,
in a screw-cutting exercise, the gears were changed on his lathe, and
it had been done so deftly that he wouldn’t have believed it if the
gears themselves hadn’t proved it. Again, it was a sly loosening of
the tail-stock clamp, which would have let the work fall out when the
lathe was started. Lastly, it was a “cut-in” on the wiring of the lathe
motor, which would probably have burned out the motor if the current
had been switched on.
Larry, seething inwardly like a pot ready to boil over, corrected
the sabotage in each case before any harm was done, held on grimly,
and said nothing. Before the shop period was over, the psychological
reaction had begun to set in. Now that he knew that the fault wasn’t
his own; hadn’t been his own at all; he was able to take a fresh grip
upon himself. Gorman, the shop instructor, gave him the final little
upward boost when he came around to examine and stamp the work of the
period.
“Now, that is something like it, Donovan,” he said, in warm approval.
“Glad to see that you’re getting back to your old form. You get ‘tens’
all around, this time. Keep it up and you’ll work off some of the
discredits you’ve been earning.”
It was on the tip of Larry’s tongue to tell the instructor the real
reason for the discredits, but again he held himself in. The matter, as
it stood, lay between himself and Crawford――and possibly Underhill――and
he set his teeth upon a frowning resolve to make the plotters answer to
him and not to the faculty.
With the mystery of his stumblings thus completely solved, he went to
his other assignments for the day with the handicap lifted. Straight
“A’s” were his grades for that day, and his various instructors
marveled as much over his sudden “come-back” as they had over his
equally sudden slump.
It was at the close of the gymnasium half-hour, late in the afternoon,
that he caught Crawford. The spoiler of records was on his way to his
room, which was in a street reached most easily by cutting across
a field lying back of the campus. Larry tried to keep cool; meant
to keep perfectly cool; but his hand shook a little when he laid it
on Crawford’s shoulder. “I’ll walk a piece with you,” was all he
permitted himself to say; and as if some inner sense was telling him
that something was about to happen, the big-bodied, hulking culprit
kept step in silence.
After they had crossed the stile into the field, and were thus off the
university grounds, Larry wheeled short upon the sham “lame dog.”
“You’ve been doing me dirt, Crawford, and this is payday,” he snapped,
trying to say it calmly. “Will you peel your coat?”
[Illustration: “Will you peel your coat?”]
A frenzied outburst of denial was the answer to this. Like any fellow
who would stoop to the things he had been doing, Crawford was a
shrinking coward at heart; this though he would have tipped the scale
at twelve or fifteen pounds more than Larry.
“Oh, good gosh!――hold on――somebody’s been lying to you!” he protested.
“I――――”
“Cut it out,” said Larry. “I caught you at it in the shop this morning,
and I’ve got Dowling for a witness. You did everything you could think
of to make me get a goose-egg marking, and you’ve been doing it right
along for two weeks. What did you put into my fire in the blacksmith
shop so that I couldn’t make a weld? Tell the truth!”
Crawford hung his head. “It was only a joke,” he mumbled. “I just put a
li’l’ pinch of sulphur in the fire, to see what you’d do.”
“A joke, was it? And I suppose it was a joke to knock my flasks down in
the foundry, and to nick my planes and chisels on the pattern bench.
Now, one question more: who put you up to all this?”
For some little while Crawford wouldn’t answer this direct question,
filling the air with shrill protestations of his innocence of any
malicious motive, and the like. But Larry pinned him down savagely.
“Out with it! I want to know whom you were working for.”
It came out at last――because it had to.
“Bry Underhill――and some of the other fellows――said you were a ‘mucker’
and oughtn’t to be allowed to stay,” was the final hang-dog admission.
“So much for that part of it,” said Larry grittingly. “Now, I’m going
to give you your choice. As I said, I’ve got a witness to what you
did to me in the shop to-day. I can go before the faculty and get you
canned. It’s up to you to say whether you’ll take that, or pull off
your coat right here and stand up to me like the man you’ll never be.”
By this time Crawford was snarling――not like a man, but more like a
trapped fox.
“If you make me fight, I――I’ll kill you!” he stormed; but he did take
his coat off and fling it aside.
Then and there, in the dusk of the evening in Farmer Holdsworth’s
stubble field, was staged the historic battle of the year. It is said
that a cornered coward can always fight if he is driven to it, and
Crawford made the saying good, hurling himself upon Larry in a mad-bull
rush that was meant to end in a clinch in which his superior weight
would give him the advantage. But when the clinch arrived, Larry was
not there; there was nothing there but a stiff forearm with a fist at
the end of it against which Crawford pushed his right eye vigorously.
In the next rush it was his nose with which he endeavored to push the
hard fist aside. Larry hadn’t much “science,” but it doesn’t ask for
any great amount of skill to let a frenzied maniac beat himself silly
if he is sufficiently bent upon doing it. One thorough and rather
prolonged round settled it. At the end of the one-sided boxing match
Crawford was down, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t get up; could――or
would――do nothing but gasp out that he had enough.
Larry did the decent thing――and did it as reluctantly as he ever did
anything in his life――hauled the thrashed coward to his feet, took him
across the field to his boarding-house, helped him get rid of such of
the battle marks as the bath-room appliances could remove. All this
in grimmest silence. But as he was leaving he claimed the victor’s
privilege of having the last word.
“You go to the fellow whose boots you’ve been licking and tell him what
you got from the ‘mucker.’ And when you do it, you may tell him from me
that he can have the same, or a little better, any time he’s man enough
to ask for it. And one other thing, Crawford. You stay out from under
my feet from this time on. If you don’t, you’ll get it again.”
One of the problems that has never been satisfactorily solved, and
perhaps never will be, is how the news of a thing done in privacy gets
wings of the wind to scatter it abroad. Larry thought that the brief
and brittle mix-up, staged in the growing dusk in Farmer Holdsworth’s
wheat field, had been wholly without witnesses. But that same evening,
after supper, Dickie Maxwell leered knowingly at him across the study
table.
“So you chased up my little hint and whaled the daylights out of Snitty
Crawford, did you?” he laughed.
Larry glanced up frowning.
“Who told you anything about that?” he demanded.
“Gee! everybody knows,” Dick crowed. “I don’t know who started the
little news item on its rounds. But you ought to have the thanks of
every decent fellow in Sheddon. Crumb-catchers like Snitty make me
sick.”
Larry nodded soberly.
“Yes, Crawford got his; but, after all, he was only a poor tool in
Underhill’s hands. It runs in my mind, Dick, that I’m still in debt――to
Underhill and the whole money-rotten gang that he runs with. After
the foot-ball game I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to draw any
more rich-and-poor lines, or let them be drawn against me; that I’d
stand for Old Sheddon as a whole. But if these gambling, betting,
money-spenders want a fight, they can have it. It’s the old battle, and
I guess it’s got to be fought out――here and everywhere else.”
For a little while Dick was silent. When he spoke again it was to say:
“I suppose my father is what you’d call a rich man. Does that mean that
you’re against us all, Larry?”
“Not against you, Dick; but I’ve got to stand with my kind. And that
brings on more talk. In a way, I’m little better than Crawford; he’s
a hanger-on of the rich fellows, and I’m a pensioner on your father.
I know he has consented to call the money he is advancing me a loan,
but after what’s happened I can’t take it any more. I’ve got to be
consistent. I can’t fight on both sides of the fence at the same time.”
“_Larry!_” Dick exclaimed.
“I know. It sounds ungrateful, and all that; but I’ve made up my
mind――made it up this morning. Prof. Zippert will get me odd jobs of
tutoring in Math. if I want them, and will put in a good word for me
with Waddell and Gorman, so I can help out in the shops. I may have to
live cheaper than I can here at Mrs. Grant’s; but that’s all right.”
“You――you’d break with me, Larry?”
Larry Donovan looked straight into his room-mate’s eyes.
“Never, Dick; not until you want me to. But I can’t hold with the hare
and run with the hounds. You’ll have your friends, and maybe I’ll have
mine. And they won’t be the same.”
Dickie Maxwell threw his head back and laughed――because it was the
saving thing for him to do, just then.
“You’re crazy, Larry; as crazy as a loon! But I’ll not lay it up
against you. To-morrow, after you’ve cooled down a bit from this run-in
with Snitty Crawford, you’ll see things in a better light. You see, I
know you of old.”
But college brings out a good many things that don’t envision
themselves in a High School course; and Dick Maxwell had yet to learn
how stubborn a mule――and how loyal a friend――Larry Donovan could be in
a time of trial.
IV
DICK’S DROP-OUT
“You’ve made up your mind then, have you, Dick?”
Larry Donovan had his small drawing-board on the study table and was
working out a tangled problem in “projections.” Dick Maxwell had just
tossed his books aside and was walking the floor, hands in pockets; his
habit when there was anything to be argued about.
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t fall all over myself to jump at the
chance,” he returned. “Dad was a member of the Omegs, right here in Old
Sheddon, and, as I’ve said, they’ve given me a bid. I think it’s mighty
nice of the fellows.” Then: “I didn’t expect you’d give me the glad
hand. You’ve been sort of prejudiced against the frats from the first,
haven’t you?”
“Maybe some of it _is_ prejudice,” Larry admitted, wanting to be
perfectly fair; “but to me the whole fraternity idea seems to take a
wrong shoot. If any place in the world ought to be democratic it’s a
college. When little bunches of the fellows pull off to one side and
shut out the rest ... well, that’s bad enough; but when, on top of
that, they try to run things――――”
“The fraternities don’t try to run anything but themselves,” Dick
defended. “That’s only your idea, Larry.”
This was entirely true. When we look through the battered old telescope
called Life, we see mostly what we are expecting to see; and with his
workingman’s eye Larry wasn’t expecting to see much good in anything as
exclusive as a fraternity.
“Maybe they don’t openly try to run things,” he countered. “But they
stand together and hold themselves as being a lot better than us
fellows on the outside. You know they do.”
“Well,” said Dick, grinning, “they get the pick of the fellows from
each incoming class, or try to: why shouldn’t they be better than the
leavings?”
Larry’s answering grin was perfectly good-tempered. They had threshed
this matter out a good many times in the past.
“Present company excepted, I take it,” he put in, adding: “I’m one of
the ‘leavings,’ you know.”
Dick sat down, chuckling delightedly.
“I just wanted to see how you’d take that,” he explained. “You have
the one big necessary qualification――angelic humility. You’ll do, all
right.”
“Do for what?”
Dick got up and put an arm across Larry’s shoulders.
“You hump-backed old greasy grind!” he chanted; “did you swallow the
notion that I was going to duck out and leave you to wallow all alone
in the mire of your own splendiferous conceit? It’s a dead secret yet,
but I’m allowed to whisper it to you. You’re due to get a bid to the
Omegs yourself!”
For a little time Larry merely stared down at the demonstration
drawing he was making and said nothing. For a fellow with a good
bit of Celtic blood in his veins, he was a trifle slow in grasping
the full significance of a thing. As we have seen, Dick’s charge
that he was prejudiced against the Greek-Letter fraternities was
quite true. Moreover, he believed that his argument against them was
sound: that they did make for a drawing apart and the formation of
small cliques. And beyond this, there was that workingman’s grudge.
If the fraternities were not all made up of the sons of rich men and
money-spenders, the one or two that he knew most about seemed to lean
that way; and, quite as certainly, some of their members looked down
as “riff-raff” upon the “leavings,” which, in Old Sheddon, as in many
other universities and colleges, comprised a good half or more of the
student body.
On the other hand ... well, up to that moment Larry hadn’t been
admitting that there was any “other hand” worth mentioning; had fully
and firmly decided that there couldn’t be――for him. Yet it takes a
pretty strong resolution to be able to hold out when common old human
vanity is appealed to. In a sort of flashlight picture Larry saw
himself as one of the chosen ones, ensconced in the big, comfortable,
not to say luxurious, frat house just across the street from the main
entrance to the campus; still Dick’s loyal running mate and chum, and
making good his standing with the other fellows in the house by winning
an “S” for himself and the brotherhood in athletics.
What if, after all, his ideas about the rich and poor distinctions were
all wrong? It certainly looked that way when the exclusive Omegs were
intending to give _him_ a bid. So his protest, when he made it, was
really no protest at all.
“If they should take me in, it would be entirely on your account, Dick;
and I couldn’t stand for that.”
“Not by a thousand parasangs! Those things go by secret ballot; Carey
Lansing explained all that. I had nothing to do with it――couldn’t have,
because I’m only a ‘pledge’ myself.”
“Well, then, there’s the money. I’m a lot too poor to hold up my end
with that bunch.”
Dick sat down and squared himself aggressively.
“Now, see here; let’s fight that out, once for all,” he argued. “Before
we left home, my father, acting for the railroad company, offered to
pay your way through college as a sort of prize for the good work you
did last summer on the Little Ophir Extension. A week ago you told me
you were sore at all the rich people, and were going to fling the money
back in their faces and earn your own way.
“I hope you’ve thought better of that by this time; and if you have,
I’ve only this to say: Dad expects you to have all the advantages
here that I shall have; he told me so. He――or the company――will pay
your frat dues just as cheerfully as they will your tuition and board
bills――you know they will.”
Truly, Larry did know it; hence the knees of his continued protest grew
weaker still.
“It’s kind of an honor, I guess,” he admitted soberly. “Yet I can’t
change over all at once. I’m slow; slower than Christmas, Dick. You
know that. I’ll have to have time to think it out.”
“Sure you will!” Dick agreed, reaching for his cap. And a moment later
he was gone; to one of those social doings which were by this time
cutting pretty deeply into his evening study hours.
Larry had been alone for some little time when his door opened to admit
Havercamp, a Junior and the editor of the college paper.
“Hello, Donovan!” he boomed; and as Larry reached for a chair: “No, I
can’t stop――just on my way over town to put the _Micrometer_ to bed.
What college activities are you in?”
Larry shook his head. “Trying to break into athletics a little, as you
know.”