Poly game? That’s what brings me up here. I want you on the
_Micrometer_――athletic reporter.”
“But, see here,” Larry objected; “I can’t write for little sour apples!”
“You’ll never learn any younger. Dig in and try it; you can begin right
away and hash up something snappy about basket-ball. You know how the
athletic frenzy dies out after foot-ball, and we want to keep the door
slamming. Go to it; good exercise in English One. If you ball things up
at first, we’ll help you out. That’s all. Good-night!”
Larry turned back to his work with a little prideful glow; added to
that other glow which had come upon Dick’s announcement as to the
intention of the Omegs. It was the first time he had been asked to
take part on any of the extra-curriculum activities, and though he
doubted his ability to write anything that anybody would print, he was
perfectly willing to try.
Consequently, a little later he went over to the gymnasium where
two of the basket-ball teams were practicing, got duly interested,
and sat up until nearly midnight wrestling with his first attempt at
writing for print, grinding out a couple of columns, which, by the way,
Havercamp blue-penciled to a short and snappy stickful in the next
issue of the _Micrometer_.
A couple of evenings after this, Larry found himself holding a
reception――that is, a little bigger reception than usual――in his room
at Mrs. Grant’s. Apart from the lame dogs, who came pretty regularly,
sundry other fellows had discovered that Dick Maxwell’s red-headed
room-mate was what you might call a heaven-born mathematician, that he
was good-natured, and that an evening spent in his company was likely
to result in better Math. markings for the spender.
For that reason the evening in-droppings were growing quite frequent,
and when, on the night in question, the callers included Carey Lansing,
a Senior, and Grand Satrap, or whatever you call it, of the Zeta
Omegas, Larry thought nothing of it.
“Just wanted to see how you looked in action, Donnie,” Lansing said,
explaining his own butt-in. “The fellows tell me you are a whale in
Math. Where did you get it all?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Larry. “I never did have much trouble with
figures.”
“You’re in luck. Freshman Math. is plenty stiff in Sheddon. I fell down
all over it in my first year. I remember there was one problem――old
‘seven-fifty-four,’ we used to call it――that was a regular bear
trap――caught the last man of us in my year.”
“Seven-fifty-four?” Larry queried. “Why, we have that in to-morrow’s
assignment. Here it is,” and from a sheaf of demonstration sheets he
took one covered handsomely with figures and illustrative drawings.
“That’s the old boy,” said Lansing, running his eye over the sheet; and
from that he went on, talking easily of his Freshman days and their
trials and tribulations.
As Lansing talked, Larry was watching the clock rather anxiously,
hoping Dick would come in. In his bones he felt that Lansing was
waiting for a chance to say something about the coming bid for
membership in the Omegs――possibly the bid itself would be made. And
Larry was not yet ready with his answer. Ambition, a keen hunger
and thirst to be one of the particularized, was pulling one way,
and something else――he couldn’t quite give it a definite name――was
nervously putting the brakes on.
As it turned out, the clock-watching wasn’t needed. Dick came in before
the room was cleared, so Larry had the excuse he had been waiting for;
the chance to plead his _Micrometer_ assignment and get away to the
gymnasium without leaving his drop-ins with no host.
During the basket-ball practice games through which he sat making notes
for Havercamp’s blue-pencilings, Problem 754, the one to which Lansing
had called attention, was ambling around in the back part of his brain;
and in the process of recalling it, step by step, it suddenly occurred
to him that in a certain small particular the demonstration he had
shown Lansing was at fault; the result was all right, but in one place
the value of the _x_ plus _y_ had been assumed and not proved.
“Queer how I came to make such a bonehead crack as that,” he muttered,
as he walked back across the campus; and when he reached his room and
found everybody gone, and Dick――for a wonder――in bed and sound asleep,
he looked on the study table for the demonstration sheet, meaning to
correct the slip.
Oddly enough, the sheet wasn’t to be found. He had either misplaced
it, or it had disappeared during his absence. Since it was wrong,
anyhow, he did not search very long or carefully; instead, he sat down
and painstakingly made another sheet, correcting the error that had
appeared in the original; did that, and then went to bed and forgot the
incident.
But the next day in class he was pointedly reminded of it. Blackboard
demonstrations were called for and Problem 754 was given out. Having
the processes at his finger-ends, Larry got through quickly and
returned to his seat. Once there, it was only natural that he should
look on to see how the other members of the section were getting along.
To his astonishment he saw that three of the blackboard workers were
demonstrating the problem exactly as he had done it on the sheet of
paper that had disappeared; copying it precisely, with the _x_ plus _y_
error and all!
On a bit of paper torn from his scratch pad Larry jotted down the
names of the men who were apparently copying from the lost sheet, and
that evening, after supper, he asked Dick if he knew the names of the
Freshmen who had already been pledged to the Zeta Omegas.
“Sure I do,” was the ready reply. “There are seven of us. Got a list
somewhere. Here she is: I’ll call ’em off.”
Without explaining anything, Larry took out the list he had made in
class and checked it silently as Dick read from his list. It came
out exactly as he thought it would; the three men whose names he had
written down were among the pledges to the Omegs. The double mystery
of the disappearance of the faulty demonstration, and its reappearance
in three separate places on the blackboards, was solved. Lansing had
merely pocketed the solution, which he supposed was the correct one,
and had given it to at least three of the Freshman pledges to his own
fraternity.
It was altogether in keeping with Larry’s make-up that he did not
explain his reason for wishing to know the names of the Omeg pledges;
that Dick’s query as to what he was driving at should be given a
“turn-off” answer. But the incident revived all those earlier and
antagonistic questionings about the fraternities. Twist and turn it as
he would, he couldn’t make Lansing’s action square with his own ideas
of fairness.
But he was not quite fair himself in charging the act of one fellow up
to a whole fraternity, or rather to fraternities as a whole――though
this he did not realize. As he summed it up, it amounted to just this:
if any member of a frat was able to “get by,” all the other members
could get good marks without working for them; which, when you come to
look at it, was putting a part for the whole with a vengeance――arguing
a suit of clothes from a small bunch of wool on the sheep’s back, as
you might say.
He did not go so far as to say that the incident would determine his
action when, or if, the bid should be made. Nevertheless, it did set
him balancing again on the fence of indecision. But, after all, it was
little Purdick who gave him the push in the direction in which he was
finally to fall.
It was two evenings later, and Purdick was the only drop-in; with
Dick gone out somewhere, as was coming to be his nightly habit. After
the séance with the trigonometry, which was Purdick’s bugbear, the
handicapped one sat back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his
head.
“I’m making the most of you while I can, Donovan,” he said, with a
tight-lipped smile. “When you hitch up with the Omegs I’ll lose you.”
“Who said I was going to hitch up with the Omegs?” Larry demanded.
“Oh, I don’t know just who said it; such things always get around.”
Then: “I’m sorry.”
“What makes you sorry?”
“A lot of things that I have no right to say to an Omeg pledge.”
“I’m not a pledge――not yet.”
“You mean that I’m free to say what I please?”
“Sure you are. That is one of the privileges of this shop.”
“You’ll say I’m prejudiced, and maybe I am. But you must remember
that I’m a year older in Sheddon than you are. I don’t condemn the
frats as a whole; some fellows are just naturally joiners, and I
suppose they can’t help it. But this particular frat, or at least the
Sheddon chapter of it, stands for everything that I despise, Donovan.
Two-thirds of the men in it are rich men’s sons, and the pace they set
is pretty swift. Last year they lost four of their pledges――canned and
sent home.”
“Why were they canned?”
“The faculty reason was that they fell short of classwork requirements.
But the reason why they fell short can be jammed into one
word――dissipation. Oh, you needn’t look so horrified; it was what they,
and all their world, would call ‘gentlemanly’ dissipation; a little
card-playing for money, a little drinking, occasional midnight suppers
over in town――that sort of thing.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the faculty lets things of that kind go
on, in a frat or out of it?” Larry demanded.
Again little Purdick’s smile was thin-lipped.
“Sheddon isn’t a training school for wayward youth, Donovan; it’s a
college for men. Prexy will tell you that the faculty refuses to assume
responsibility for your morals; that your character is supposed to be
established before you come here. And he’ll probably add that your
behavior off the campus will show up in your class markings, and that
if these fall below the dead line――as they will if you run with the
fast set――you’ll be sent home.”
“Short and sweet,” Larry commented with a grin.
Purdick was silent for a time. Then: “I’m sorry for another reason,
Donovan. I thought you were one of us.”
“How do you mean?”
“You are a workingman, and the son of a workingman. You ought to stand
with your class.”
“But if I don’t believe in ‘classes’?”
“You’ve got to believe in them, because they _are_. You can gloze it
over all you want to, but that doesn’t change the fact. You’ve got to
take sides, whether you want to or not.”
“I don’t see it that way at all,” said Larry stubbornly, meaning that
he was beginning to try mighty hard not to see it that way.
“You’d better see it. You’re here for the same thing I am: that’s to
get an education. If the doing of it is going to make you over into the
kind of fellow that’s ashamed of his folks and the way they live and
have to live――”
“That’ll be about enough of that kind of talk, Purdy,” Larry exploded.
“I’m not built that way.”
Little Purdick closed his eyes.
“All right; we won’t argue about it. But I’ll take you on another
tack. You may not know it, but you’ve already got a following here.
I guess it began when you pulled the ’Varsity out of the hole in the
Rockford Poly game; anyway, you’ve got it. If you really believe what
you say――that there isn’t any such thing as ‘classes,’ or oughtn’t to
be――it’s up to you to do the biggest thing that’s ever been done for
Sheddon. But you’ll lose the chance if you go into a frat.”
Larry shook his head. “You’ve got me a mile over my depth, now, Purdy.
What are you raving about?”
Purdick went on, still with his eyes closed.
“I can see you getting a bunch of the fellows――regular fellows――around
you in a frat that would be a frat in the sure-enough meaning of the
word; a sort of brotherhood that wouldn’t know either rich or poor or
anything else but just the college fellowship. I can see the thing
growing and growing, until after a while even the Greek Letters
themselves would see the beauty of it and help it along. I....” he
stopped suddenly and sat up with a bitter little laugh. “Forget it!”
he broke out harshly. “I take spells like that sometimes when I’m not
responsible for what I say. Good-night,” and he was gone.
For some little time after Purdick went away, Larry sat with his chin
propped in his hands, the good gray eyes staring at the opposite
wall and seeing nothing. Once more he was stumbling around in the
valley of indecision. What Purdick had said about being loyal to his
clan――the work-for-wages clan to which his father and all of his people
belonged――had stirred up all the old questionings. Was it true, what
Purdick had asserted, that college, or the fraternity and social side
of it, would turn a fellow against his own people? Larry couldn’t
believe it; and yet....
That was the moment of all moments when he had to remember Monty Brown,
Montmorency Haliburton Brown――to give him all of his name. Monty was
the son of the Brewster night engine-hostler, and a little money left
by a great-aunt for that particular purpose had taken Monty to an
Eastern college. Larry had a sudden mental flashlight picture of Monty
Brown’s return to the bosom of his family for the long vacation the
summer before; a be-tailored, be-barbered thing, smelling of pomatum,
contemptuous of his good, honest, workaday family, and holding himself
far too dandified to associate with his old school-fellows of the
Brewster High. Was it possible that college could do such a thing as
that for him――Larry Donovan? He set his teeth hard upon a resolve to
turn his back squarely upon every influence that even threatened to
lean that way.
Purdick’s little pipe-dream――about the big frat which shouldn’t be like
the exclusive Greek Letters――he dismissed at once, though not without
seeing what a chance it would offer for some real leader to do a fine
thing for the “left-outs.” But he had the good sense to see that this
was no job for a green Freshman, however popular he might be. It would
need the prestige of an upperclassman――a Junior, at least――and even
then it might have a hard row to hoe.
Notwithstanding the fact that his decision was now finally taken, it
was a good bit of a trial to convince Dick that it was his job to
tell the Zeta Omegas that, for reasons that needn’t be gone into,
Freshman Larry Donovan did not wish to be considered as a candidate
for fraternal honors. Of course Dick argued, painstakingly, almost
pathetically. Being fully committed himself, he could see only one side
of the argument, and he was convinced that Larry was throwing away his
one best college chance. But Larry stood firm.
“It’s your everlasting ‘workingman’ prejudice, Larry!” Dick flamed out
at the last. “You’d rather stand alone than come in with a bunch of
fellows who have nothing against them except that, perhaps, some of
them won’t have to work with their hands for a living when they get out
of college!”
“Call it that if you want to,” said Larry; and he turned to his books
with a frown and a sigh. He knew, of old, that it was no use to argue
with Dick, and it was costing him something to realize that they had
come to a parting of the ways; that the time was at hand when they
would no longer be chums in that intimate chumminess which had held
unbroken from the time when they had sat across the aisle from each
other in the grade school at home.
A few days later the fraternity initiations――postponed that year rather
beyond the usual period――began, and Larry saw numbers of his fellow
classmen, Dick among them, doing all sorts of absurd and ridiculous
“stunts” at all hours of the day and night; saw them and passed by with
a grin in which there was a bit more than a tincture of good-natured
contempt.
Next came the parting, when Dick packed up his belongings and moved
them over to the big frat house opposite the campus portal on the other
street. This was a sort of sorry business, as it was naturally bound to
be, but of the two, Larry carried off his part of it rather better than
Dick did.
“Have you made up your mind yet what you’re going to do?” Dick asked,
as he was jamming the last of his things into his trunk and sitting on
the lid to make the hasps catch.
“About the room, you mean? Mrs. Grant says I can keep it alone, but I
know she can’t afford that.”
“I feel like a yellow dog, dropping out on her this way when it’s
too late in the year for her to make other arrangements,” Dick said,
getting up to stand on the trunk lid.
“It’s all right with her――that part of it,” Larry offered, “though, of
course, she’s sorry to lose you.”
“Not half as sorry as I am to go.”
Larry let out a cheerful bray and called it a laugh.
“Can’t eat your cake and have it too, can you? But I guess you needn’t
worry about Mrs. Grant. I expect she’s used to having the frats swipe
her star boarders, long before this.”
There was the sputtering chuckle of a motor truck in the street below,
a clumping of heavy boots in the hall, and then the voice of Mrs. Grant
telling the expressman which room to go to. Dick knelt before his trunk
to lock it――which gave him a chance to turn his back upon his room-mate.
“I didn’t mean Mrs. Grant, altogether,” he mumbled; then, twisting
about suddenly, with the queerest look on his face that Larry had ever
seen there: “You mustn’t drop me, Larry――just because I’m going into
the Omegs. I-I don’t believe I could stand for anything like that.”
It was just here, with the expressman tramping along the upper hall and
looking for the door to which he had been directed, that the warm Irish
Donovan blood came to the fore.
“Don’t you lose a minute’s sleep about that, Dickus!” he burst out,
dropping into the use of the old school-boy nickname. “They say that
blood’s thicker than water, but there are some other things just about
as thick as blood. We’ve knocked around together too long to let a
little thing like a frat dig a ditch between us now. When you need me
I’ll be right there with both feet. Don’t you forget that.”
V
THE RED-WAGON SCHOLARSHIP
Larry’s parting word to Dick had been altogether hearty and cheerful,
as we have seen; but after the parting had settled down into a fact
accomplished, Larry spent some pretty lonesome evenings. Not because
there wasn’t company enough; there is always plenty of that in any
college boarding-house, to say nothing――in Larry’s case――of the lame
dogs that came straggling in to get a boost over the mathematical hill.
But an evening roomful of more or less hilarious and racketing fellows
isn’t everything; and after the crowd broke up there was always the
empty chair on the opposite side of the study table, and Dick’s bed,
made up and never slept in, to remind Larry of his loss.
Meanwhile, there was Mrs. Grant to be considered. After a week had gone
by without any move having been made to put anybody in with him, Larry
cornered the motherly person one afternoon in the lower hall and asked
her about it.
“If you could find somebody you’d like to room with, of course I’d be
glad,” said the house-mother. “But I don’t like to ask you to put up
with a stranger.”
“You know of somebody?” Larry asked.
“Yes; there is a young man here taking post-graduate work for his
Master’s degree. He’s in the Chemical, and he’d like to come.”
Larry had an instantaneous and rather disquieting picture of himself
rooming with something worse than an upperclassman――a man who had
already been graduated, who was probably working against time, and who
would be likely to object most strenuously to the lame dogs and other
visitors.
“Will you let me look around a little and see if I can find somebody
first?” he asked; and the reply was as kindly as his own mother could
have made it.
“Certainly I will. Mr. Agnew seems to be a very pleasant gentleman, but
he is at least ten years older than you are, and on that account ... as
I say, if you can find somebody you’d like to room with――anybody you’d
pick out would be all right with me.”
Larry fairly ducked at the mention of the “Chemical’s” age. That would
settle it for fair. Why, good goodness――a fellow that old would have
forgotten all about his undergraduate days and what he did himself when
he was in the braying stage.
“I’ll look around,” said Larry hastily, and made his escape.
That evening, when there were half a dozen fellows in the room,
Larry noticed again a thing he had been noticing for a week or more;
which was the fact that little Purdick had stopped coming to the
Man-o’-War――that he hadn’t shown up since that evening when he had
outstayed the others to say his say about the frats and the classes and
masses.
Also, Larry, trying to hammer the proper method of working a trig.
problem into Ollie McKnight’s not any too mathematical head, was
conscious of a duty unfulfilled. He had been meaning to look Purdick
up and had neglected doing it.
“Hey, Belcher!” he called to a fellow stretching himself lazily on the
bed that used to be Dick’s, “have you seen anything of Purdy lately?
He’s in your section.”
“Nary a rag,” said the lazy one. “Dried up and blown away, I guess.”
McKnight looked up from his figuring pad.
“Friend o’ yours, Donnie――this Purdy person?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Larry.
“Ump. He’s having one fine, large, tough time, so the fellows tell
me. Flunked out last year Freshman and had to take the work over.
Nothing much to him but grit, but he’s got a peak load o’ that. Works
in Hassler’s to keep going, but I haven’t seen him there for a week or
so. Darned shame a fellow like that can’t get a little boost over the
humps, I’ll say. If Old Sheddon had any heart she’d have scholarships,
or something, for ’em.”
Larry let Purdick drop for the remainder of the session; but the
under-thought, that he’d been neglecting something, kept trotting along
just the same; that, together with the “flop-around,” as he was calling
it, of one Ollie McKnight. From something that had been mighty nearly
a snob at the beginning of the year, the son of Consolidated Steel was
actually thawing down into a human person with decencies and sympathies
a good bit like those of other fellows. That word about the Purdicks
just now, for example.
At the half-past-nine-o’clock dispersal, when the roomful went
straggling out by ones and twos, McKnight was still working on
his final trig. problem. When he finished it he stretched himself
luxuriously in his chair and stuck his hands into his pockets.
“Once more I can face Old Figures without batting an eye,” he exulted.
Then: “You’re all kinds of a decent chap, Donnie.”
“Don’t I know it?” Larry grinned. “But I’m not as decent as I might
be. If I were, I’d have looked Purdick up before this time. Maybe he’s
sick.”
“Still worrying about that poor little rat, are you? I don’t wonder at
it, if he’s a friend of yours. He needs somebody to worry for him.”
“I wish I could worry to some good purpose, Ollie.”
“Money?” said McKnight.
“If I had it――yes. I’d like to stake him for his course. Some of the
fellows can romp their way through on the work-out track and it doesn’t
hurt ’em. Purdy’s got the nerve for it, but that’s about all he has
got.”
For a long minute McKnight sat trying to balance his pencil, end
up, on one finger and apparently giving his entire attention to the
accomplishment of the impossible feat. When he spoke again it was to
say: “Donnie, once upon a time I was low-down enough to call you a
‘mucker’: you’re not one, but I am.”
“I don’t get you,” said Larry, and he meant it.
“I can mighty nearly put it into words of one syllable. I’m nineteen
years old, Donnie, and up to date I can’t remember that I’ve ever done
one single thing for anybody but Ollie McKnight――that is, nothing that
has cost me anything.”
“Well, perhaps you haven’t had to.”
“That’s it; I haven’t. It’s been Dad’s money, ever since I can
remember. If I wanted to throw a few dollars to the birds, I threw
’em――and got some more where they came from. It didn’t cost me
anything.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” said Larry, meaning only to save
the confider from possible future embarrassment.
“Don’t you go and trig the wheels,” McKnight put in quickly. “I’m not
often taken this way, and it’ll do me good to unload and get it out of
my system. What you said about little Purdy a few minutes ago――that
you’d boost him through if you had the money――snagged me good and hard.”
“How was that?”
McKnight dug into a pocket and fished out a letter. It was typewritten
on a Consolidated Steel letterhead, and he folded it over until he came
to a paragraph near the end.