guess――gave me a hint yesterday. That’s why I went around to Mother
Grant’s last night to try to find you. I got the faculty letter to-day.”
“But, Dick――what on top of earth have you been doing?”
“The letter says it’s something I haven’t been doing――keeping up with
my classroom work. But that’s only a part of it, and not the worst
part, either. You see, Dad’s a Sheddon old-grad., and they’re trying to
let him down easy.”
“What _is_ the worst part of it, Dick?”
“Don’t you know?” the canned one asked, in the same dull monotone.
“No more than the man in the moon.”
“Didn’t you ever hear of ‘The Mixers’?”
“Just the name; that’s all.”
“Well, you might as well know; it’s all out now. There was a bunch of
us, with more money than was good for us, I guess. We’ve been going
over the river to a room in the Brandon House to play cards. Night
before last the town police raided us. The others all skipped through a
window and down the fire-escape, but I was bonehead enough to stand my
ground and try to bully it out. For the sake of the college it was kept
out of the newspapers, and the police contented themselves with handing
me over to the faculty.”
“And you’re the only one to be expelled?”
Dick nodded.
“They gave me a chance that I couldn’t take; said they’d make it
suspension to the end of the semester if I’d tell who the others are.
It’ll just about break Dad’s heart, Larry.”
“Don’t you know it,” said Larry, with a franker emphasis than he meant
to put upon it. Then: “Have you told it all?”
“No; not quite all. I’ve lost money――lots of it. I owe pretty nearly
everybody in sight. Worse than that, I’ve used up all my year’s
allowance and I’m overdrawn at the bank. I’ll have to wire Dad for
money to get home on.”
For a few minutes Larry was just about as badly crushed as Dick seemed
to be. That Dick, the chum he loved almost as a brother of his own
blood, should make such a frightful smash of himself and his prospects
in just a few weeks or months seemed utterly unbelievable. Then there
was Dick’s father.... Just here Dick broke in again.
“You mustn’t charge it up to the Omegs, Larry; that’s one of the things
I got you out here to say to you. I know some of the fellows in my frat
are pretty swift, but I was the only one that was in the ‘Mixers.’ It’s
only fair to say that Carey Lansing and some of the others have done
all they could to hold me down and keep me from getting tangled up with
fellows of the Underhill sort. But it didn’t do any good. I was just an
easy mark, all around the block.”
“_I_ could have held you down,” Larry maintained, with his jaw set.
“Yes, I guess you could have. But I never gave you a chance to try.”
Larry sat quietly for a few minutes, kicking his heels against the
concrete wall. This was the time of day when, ordinarily, nothing
would have kept him from thinking of his supper. But now he was not
remembering that there were any such things as suppers.
“What will you do after you get home, Dick?” he asked, more to be
saying something than for any cogent purpose behind the words.
“I don’t know; get Dad to give me a clerkship or something on the
railroad, so that I can earn money enough to pay my debts. I’ve had my
fling and I’m out of it for the rest of my life.”
If you are a little older than Dick you may smile at this, if you like,
but it was the end of the world for him, or he thought it was――which
amounts to the same thing.
“Does that mean that the fight’s all out of you?” Larry asked.
“Golly, I’d fight if I didn’t have just sense enough left to know that
I’m down and out. I’ve taken the count, all right.”
“Let’s see if you have. What would you do if you had a chance to stay
here and live it down, Dick?”
“What would I do? I’d black the shoes of the fellow who could tell me
how it could be done. But it can’t be done. I’m fired, I tell you.”
“Wait a minute,” Larry put in. “Supposing the faculty could be
persuaded to reconsider. Whereabouts would that leave you?”
Dick gave a wry little laugh.
“It would leave me wondering where I was going to get the next meal.
Didn’t you hear me say that I’m broke, and head over ears in debt
besides?”
“How much are you in debt?”
Dick named a figure which wasn’t so crushingly big, though it doubtless
seemed as big as the National debt to a fellow with only a few silver
coins left in his pocket.
Larry made a swift mental calculation. Without intending to be
especially economical, he had lived well within the amount set apart
for his first-year expenses, and he still had a comfortable balance in
the college bank; in fact, there was something more than enough to pay
Dick’s legitimate debts. But there were three months of the semester
left, with board and lodging for two to be provided for.
“Supposing you didn’t have to quit and run for it, Dick,” he suggested,
“would you stay on in the Omegs?”
“No; I’ve disgraced the fellows good and plenty, and the least I can do
now is to get out.”
“I’ve just been thinking,” Larry went on, unconsciously using a phrase
that he’d copyrighted the summer before on the railroad job in the
Timanyoni Mountains. “I’ve money enough in the bank to pull you out of
the hole, but there’ll be nothing left to live on.”
“Oh, good gorry, Larry――do you think I’d let you do a thing like that?”
Dick burst out. “Besides, can’t you get it into your head that I’m
fired, canned, sent home in disgrace?”
“Oh, yes; I’m remembering all that. But I’m still thinking. You said
this thing would break your father’s heart, and we mustn’t lose sight
of that. Here’s what comes next. Gorman, in Prac. Mechanics, has lost
his assistant, and two weeks ago I was offered the job. So far as I
know, the chance is still open. With that, I could earn enough money
to――”
There was the best reason in the world why the sentence broke itself
short off in the middle of things. Up to that moment Larry had clean
forgotten the great event of the afternoon, when Coach Brock had backed
him into a corner of the locker-room in the gymnasium to tell him that
if he’d promise to work hard on the practice field there would be a
place for him on the next-year ’Varsity. If he should become Gorman’s
shop assistant for the remainder of the semester, that would settle
foot-ball practice, and every other outside activity, for good and all.
There would be time only for work, study, eating and sleeping. If he
didn’t hesitate, it was chiefly because he was afraid to hesitate.
――“Could earn money enough to keep us both,” he finished, with a little
gulp to come between. “We’ll call that part of it settled.”
“Like a fish we will!” Dick rapped out, jumping down from his place
on the wall. “What do you take me for, anyway, you soft-hearted old
geezer? Do you suppose I’d let you mortgage yourself that way when
you’re booked for next year’s ’Varsity? Oh, yes; I knew all about it
before it happened. Not in a month of Sundays, Larry Donovan, and don’t
you forget it! Now then, climb down off that wall and let me walk you
back to your supper. I’ve made my little bleat, and that’s all there is
to it.”
In a silence that was even thicker than the outward-bound one, they
retraced the mile of county road, and at Mrs. Grant’s gate Dick went
straight on down the street with only a brief “Good-night” for his
hike companion. But a little later that same evening a muscular,
square-shouldered fellow with curly red hair might have been seen
pressing the bell-push rather timidly at the door of the President’s
house on the opposite side of the campus; pressing the button gently
and looking a bit shocked or awed or something when the door swung
suddenly open to admit him.
Some half-hour later the red-headed one was thinking most pointedly of
this door again, only this time he was eager to pass through its portal
the other way. A middle-aged, sober-faced gentleman in scholarly black
had risen from behind a huge table littered with books, in a room that
was walled and plastered with more books, to shake hands with him at
parting.
“You’ve made out a strong case, Donovan,” the president was saying. “It
was principally your friend’s stubbornness that made the faculty take
drastic action, but you are quite right in suggesting that we should
recognize a sense of honor, even when we find it in bad company. If
Maxwell is really in earnest――and after what you have told me I can
hardly doubt it――I think I can promise you that we shall be willing to
review his case――with a recommendation to mercy. Come and see me again,
when you have time and opportunity. You will always be welcome.”
So, when Larry left the big house in Chestnut Street, he was walking
upon thin air, and the crisp, starlit, late-in-March night seemed
to sing for him as he strode along. And at the western portal of
the campus he did not go aside to take the short cut across to Mrs.
Grant’s. Instead, he broke another precedent and turned his steps
toward Main Street and the house of the Zeta Omegas.
VIII
HOW LARRY CHANGED HIS MIND
When an “outer barbarian” goes to a college fraternity house the first
time, he is quite likely to be rehashing a lot of weird ideas about
the secrecies, grips, passwords, gauntlets to be run at the door, and
things of that sort. So Larry Donovan, ringing the bell at the door of
the Zeta Omegas, had made up his mind that he wouldn’t try to break in;
he’d just ask whoever might open the door to send Dick out to him.
But things didn’t break that way at all. It was Wally Dixon who did the
door-opening, and when he saw who it was standing on the step he stuck
out a ham-like hand.
“Donnie, you old knock-’em-out, put ’er there!” he bellowed. “Had to
sneak around and get into a little good company, after all, didn’t you?
Tumble in and be at home: fellows’ll all be glad to see you.”
“I want to see Dick Maxwell,” Larry began, when he was once safely
within the sacred precincts.
“Private and personal?” Dixon queried; adding: “I suppose you know poor
old Dickie’s in mourning just now?”
“I know all about it,” said Larry. “That’s why I’m butting in. I’ve
grabbed off a bit of good news for him.”
“What’s it like?” Dixon asked. “The house is all broke up about Dick.”
“I’ve just been to see Prexy. Dick’s going to have another chance.”
“Why, you bully old stick-in-the-mud!” roared Dixon. “We sent a
delegation to Prexy this morning, but it didn’t get anywhere, just
because we’re Dick’s frat brothers, and it was expected that we’d leg
for him as a matter of course. What did Prexy say?”
“Said the faculty would review Dick’s case――with a recommendation to
mercy.”
“Glory be! that means that he won’t have to go home. Come on and I’ll
chase you up to his room. He’s packing up, right now.”
Dixon was right. When Larry was pushed into an upstairs room of the
fine old country-town mansion that had been remodeled into a fraternity
house he found Dick on his knees before an open trunk. Dixon merely
shoved Larry into the room and then backed out and disappeared. Dick
squatted back on his heels and said, “So you broke in, did you? I
thought maybe you’d come around to see me disappear over the horizon.”
“Hold up a minute,” gasped Larry breathlessly. “Have you wired your
father?”
Dick shook his head.
“Not yet; I’ve been putting it off――like a coward. Wally Dixon has
staked me to enough to get home on. I thought I’d rather tell Dad face
to face, but I can’t do that, either. The faculty letter’ll get there
before I do.”
“Dick,” said Larry, and he tried to say it casually, and couldn’t,
“the faculty letter isn’t going to your father. You’re to have another
chance.”
For a time Dick didn’t speak or move; just squatted there on the floor
with his hands locked over his knees and with queer little twitches
coming and going at the corners of his mouth. After a bit he managed to
say: “How do you mean?――another chance.”
Rapidly, because he couldn’t trust himself to go at it deliberately,
Larry told of his interview with the president, and of the president’s
promise to “review” Dick’s case.
“You’ll be conditioned, and you’ll have to make up your classroom
work,” he went on, “but we can pull you over that hill all right. And
he told me that the letter hadn’t been sent to your father. I guess he
was just as sorry about having to send it as you were about having it
sent. They think a lot of your father here in Old Sheddon, Dick.”
Slowly Dick got upon his feet, crossed the room, and sat upon the edge
of his bed.
“For a minute or so you got me all ‘hope up,’ Larry,” he said soberly.
“Goodness knows, I want to stay bad enough, but I can’t. I won’t ask
Dad for any more money, and it’s a cinch that I’m not going to let you
go to work in Prac. Mechan. and lose out on foot-ball, just to put up
for me.”
“Now see here,” Larry was beginning; but just then there was a rap at
the door and half a dozen of Dick’s house brothers, Carey Lansing among
them, came stringing into the room to drape themselves around on the
different pieces of furniture.
“We know all about it, Dick,” said Lansing without preface. “Wally
Dixon has spilled the beans all over the place. Here’s how――with the
Sheddon series for this red-headed pal of yours.”
Dick rose to the occasion manfully.
“You fellows are all right; you always have been, to me. But I’ve
got to go home, just the same.” And then, with his jaw set, he made
a clean breast of everything, telling about his debts and winding up
with Larry’s offer,――which he wasn’t going to accept――and with his own
intention of kicking himself out of the Zeta Omegas.
“Like Zeke you will!” said Lansing. “Also like Zeke you’d let Donnie
side-step his chance on the ’Varsity and take on as an instructor to
split with you. What do you think you’re one of us for, anyhow? The
house will organize a corporation and stake you――you ought to know that
much, little as you know about other things. And next year you can bone
down and save your nickels and pay it back. What’s the matter with
that?”
Dick’s mouth was twitching again.
“There’s nothing the matter with it, except that you’re a lot of
dad-beaned, inforgotten, turkey-trodden easy marks,” he said, hiding
his real feelings under a mask of brotherly abuse. “I’m not worth
saving.”
“Of course you’re not,” said Lansing, retorting in kind. “We all know
that. We’re not doing it for you; we’re doing it for the sake of
getting at least one good man on the ’Varsity next year. See?”
Larry Donovan’s emotions, as he sat by listening to this give-and-take,
and Lansing’s offer, were considerably mixed. At first, you see, he
had been charging Dick’s downfall chiefly to his association with the
Zeta Omegas, and when Dick had wiped that charge off the slate, he
had still managed to hang on to some of his old prejudice against
the fraternities. He had even gone so far as to wonder if the bunch
wouldn’t willingly turn its back upon a member discredited and kicked
out of college in disgrace. But here was a spirit altogether human
and beautiful; good, man-sized loyalty that didn’t seem to care a rap
whether Dick’s father had a million or a mere pittance.
The occasion――and Dick’s evident balance on the raw edge of a
breakdown――seemed to call for a diversion, and Larry made it.
“See here, Lansing――and the rest of you,” he broke in, making himself
the target, instead of Dick, “I’ve been holding a pretty savage grudge
against you Greek-Letter fellows all the way along, and I want to take
it back. You’re just white folks, like the rest of us, after all.”
“Much obliged,” returned Lansing gravely; and then, to Larry’s utter
astonishment: “You can’t put one over on me like that, Donnie, and
get away with it. You know, and I know, why you’re not a member
of the Omegs, right now. The name of the reason is Old Problem
Seven-fifty-four. It was a low-down trick for me to swipe your
demonstration sheet that night back yonder in January, and I’ve been
ashamed of it ever since.”
For a minute Larry was too astounded to answer. That the head of a
fraternity chapter and a Senior should make such open and frank amends
to an outsider and a Freshman was almost incredible. But he contrived
to find his tongue after a bit.
“I guess maybe I stood up so straight that I leaned over backwards,”
he said. “Besides, I _was_ prejudiced, and I never was much of a
‘joiner.’ Let’s call it an even break and let it go at that. I’ve got
to hand it to you fellows for the way you’re standing by Dick, and you
can bet I’ll do my part. Now I must get out; I’ve got a whole descrip.
assignment to work off before I turn in.” And he went while the going
was good.
Partly because he thought Purdick needed it, Larry told the story
of the evening’s happenings, after he got back to the upper room in
the Man-o’-War. But little Purdick’s prejudices in the matter of the
classes and masses were too deeply ingrained to be removed by a single
instance on the other side of the ledger.
“Of course they’d back him to stay,” he offered. “It would give them a
bad black eye if he had to get out in disgrace. What they’re going to
do is only a matter of self-preservation.”
“Purdy,” said Larry, as he got out his drawing-board and settled down
to his descriptive geometry, “there are times when you make my back
ache, and this is one of them. Got your trig.? All right; you go to bed
and get out of my way. I’m due to crowd about two days’ work into the
next hour and a half.”
IX
IN TIME OF FLOOD
The spring which was approaching at the time when Dixie Maxwell
so nearly fell over the edge of things was one which will be long
remembered in the river valleys of the Middle West. During the winter
there had been heavy snows, well distributed over vast areas, and
after the winter was over, the storms continued, only they turned into
soaking rains to patter incessantly upon all roofs and to flood the
ditches on all roads, making each little ravine and hollow in the land
contribute its small torrent to the rising rivers.
It was at the close of the third day of steady rain that Larry came
back from his reportorial trip to the _Micrometer_ office dripping like
a wet umbrella.
“Woosh! some little old spell of wet weather, I’ll say!” he exclaimed,
stripping off his rain coat, and disappearing for a moment while he
hung it over the tub in the bath-room.
“River still rising?” asked Purdick, when Larry came back.
“About a mile a minute, you’d say. It’s up within a few feet of the
bridge deck right now. They’re saying, over town, that the railroad
bridge won’t stand it.”
“The Main Street bridge will go first,” Purdick predicted. “Last year,
one time when the water was low, you could see the bottom of the piers
sticking out like toes out of a broken boot. Looked to me as if they
weren’t founded upon anything but the sand and gravel.”
“If the Main Street bridge goes out it will take the railroad bridge
with it,” said Larry. “In the _Chronicle_ office they told me the wires
are down in every direction and the whole country’s in trouble.”
“We’ll get it here, too,” asserted Purdick, who seemed to be full of
gloomy forebodings. “This town was flooded once before, away back in
the early days. I’ve been listening for the bell ever since you went
away.”
“To call the fellows out? Most of them are out now. Fellows who
own boats are hard at it, dragging them up to higher ground. The
boat-houses are all afloat and some of them have been washed away. I’m
going out again as soon as I get my descrip.”
“I’d go with you if I had a raincoat,” said Purdick.
“I’ve got an old one that’s too small for me. Pile in and get your work
up and we’ll take a whirl at it together.”
Following this there was a silent interval of strenuous study, while
the rain, coming in sheets, hissed upon the windowpanes. At the end of
it, when Purdick was pushing his chair back and Larry was filling in
the last few lines of his demonstration drawings, the big clock bell in
the college tower was booming out its call in the “general alarm.”
“That means us,” said Larry, jumping up and leaving his drawing
unfinished. “Something’s happening.”
A few minutes later they were “afoot and afloat,” as Purdick put it.
The streets were rivers, and in places the sidewalks were under water.
The college buildings and suburb, situated upon a reasonably elevated
level above the river, were out of danger, and so was the greater part
of the town proper on the opposite side of the river. But there were
bottom lands on both banks of the stream――protected in some measure, to
be sure, by old levees――which were pretty sure to go under if the flood
should rise high enough.
As they pushed on toward the river there seemed to be every indication
that the flood had already reached the danger line. In the darkness――and
there were some localities which the street electrics, which were still
going, did not reach――people were abandoning the lowland houses, many of
them hurrying to higher ground with only such of their belongings as
they could carry in their arms. Autos were coming and going in the
downpour, and in the threatened area a little army of Sheddon men was
at work, helping the inhabitants to save what they could.
In the lowest part of the district some of the houses were already
surrounded by water which had seeped in through the old levee; had
seeped in and was now coming in faster than ever as the river rose
on the other side of the embankment. Some of the college men, owning
canoes and row-boats, had dragged them over the levee to launch them in
the flooded bottom, and when Larry and Purdick got on the ground these
makeshift ferries were doing good work.
“Great Jehu!” Purdick gasped; “if that old levee should break through
it would drown everybody!”
“Work’s the word!” Larry shouted, whereupon they jumped in with the
first group of college men they came to and went at it.
That was the beginning of a pretty strenuous night for all concerned.
Fortunately, there was a generous supply of willing workers, and after
getting the people out to a place of safety, the salvagers turned in to
save such of their belongings as could be gotten out of the houses and
carried up to the higher ground. It was along about midnight that the
rising flood put the electric lights out of commission, but after that,
bonfires were built, and by the light of them the salvaging went on as
best it could.
In the confusion Larry soon lost little Purdick, and about the time the
bonfires were getting themselves built, he found himself working with
a gang of the Zeta Omegas captained by Wally Dixon, whose bull-bellow
of a voice could make itself heard in anything short of a boiler-shop.
Dickie Maxwell was also in this gang, and Larry collared him at once
for a team-mate.
“That house down yonder by the lumber pile,” Larry said, pointing; “the
woman that lives in it told me just now that she hadn’t saved anything
but her children and the clothes they stood in. Let’s get one of the
boats and see if we can find something that’s worth carrying out.”
“There wouldn’t be much that we could put into one of these cockleshell
canoes,” Dick returned. “But we can go around on the levee and get to
the house easy by wading a little.”
That seemed perfectly feasible, so long as the levee was still holding,
so they ran stumbling along in the uncertain light of the fires to the
main street, which was on a fill, and thus reached the wide embankment
bordering on the river. Here they had as good a view as the rain and
darkness permitted of the situation, a view which had been hitherto
cut off by the levee. On the “seaward” side of the levee, so to speak,
the river was running bank-full, a muddy, tumultuous flood carrying
wreckage of every description, uprooted trees, rafts of fence posts
still linked together by their barbed wire, the gatherings from
stream-side sawmills and lumber yards, and now and then a chicken coop
or some other out-building bobbing up and down or rolling over as the
strong current laid hold of it.
Near at hand was the main bridge connecting the college suburb with the
town, substantial steel trusses resting upon stone piers. It was still
standing, and was apparently intact, though the water was up to the
level of the floor, and the flood was constantly hurling floating drift
wreckage against it.
“How about it?” said Dick, with awe in his voice. “Think it’ll hold?”
“Don’t seem as if it could,” Larry doubted. Then: “We’ll have to hurry.
If the bridge should go, we’d be cut off. It would take the levee with
it, sure.”