of a trifling property salvage, but in such times of excitement even a
pretty level-headed person is likely to do things that wouldn’t stand
the test of a little cool reasoning and good judgment. Hurrying along
on the inner edge of the wide embankment, they soon came opposite the
house they had marked from the other side, but it was only to find that
the seepage lake was already lapping half-way up the window openings,
and that there was no possible chance of saving anything.
“Hard luck for the poor woman,” said Dick, and then, at a great splash
and a shudder that set the solid embankment trembling under their
feet: “Look at that, will you?”
“That” was a huge landslide on the river side of the levee; a gigantic
bite taken out of the solid earth a short distance from where they
were standing. What it meant became instantly apparent. With the flood
gnawing hungrily in the gap it would be but a short time until the
levee must be breached and the river would pour through.
It was a trying moment for the two who stood alone on the threatened
barrier. True enough, their way of escape was still open. All they had
to do was to run back to the Main Street bridge and so gain the street
and sprint to safety up the hill to higher ground. But, on the other
hand, there were people on the lower ground, drenched groups lingering
in the hope of still being able to save something from their dwellings.
And on the rising lake, paddling to and fro among the slowly submerging
houses, were a number of the Sheddon rescuers, all unconscious of the
fate that was reaching for them.
“Hi, there, you fellows!” shouted Dick, being the first to find his
tongue, “paddle for it and drive those people up the hill!――the levee’s
breaking!”
The shouted-out warning didn’t do a bit of good. What with the
crackling roar of the bonfires, the shouts of the rescuers, and the
growling thunder of the flood, nothing short of a steam siren could
have made itself heard from the top of the embankment.
“It’s no use!” Larry bawled in Dick’s ear. “They can’t hear, and we’ve
got to get ’em out of there quick. Come on!”
Running quickly down the inner slope of the levee, they yelled the
warning to the nearest boat-load. “Levee’s going! Get out――get out and
warn the others!” they shouted, running along close to the water’s
edge, and as they ran they saw the warned ones turning tail and
paddling like mad for the landward shore, spreading the warning as they
went. But even so, the pair who had started the thing could not have
covered the entire area if they hadn’t had the good luck to find a
stranded canoe that had gotten away from its owner and drifted over to
the levee shore of the flooded district.
“Here’s what we need!” gasped Larry, fairly falling into the
treasure-trove canoe. “Grab that paddle and dig for it! There are more
of the fellows up there among those shacks just ahead!”
As he spoke, a row-boat, loaded to the gunwales with refugees and their
dunnage and pulled by Welborn and another of the Aggies, came through
an opening between two of the houses. Welborn and his partner had
already got the warning and were hurrying for all they were worth, but
they backed water long enough to shout to the two in the canoe.
“All out but a couple o’ the fellows over in that farther house. Their
canoe’s stove. We hadn’t room for ’em: go get ’em!”
At the word, Larry and Dick dipped the paddles and sent their light
craft spinning toward the outlying house, a story-and-a-half frame with
the water already lapping over the window sills on the main floor.
Approaching it from the rear, they saw no signs of the marooned ones.
As they backed water at the kitchen door another rumbling slump and a
splash told them that more of the levee had been carried away by the
river. Their time was frightfully short, and they knew it.
“I don’t hear ’em――they must be around in front,” Dick jerked out; but
when they essayed to paddle around the house they found the way blocked
by a chicken-wire fence. And the precious seconds of time were racing.
Balked by the fence, they quickly handed the canoe back to the rear
entrance, and tying it to a porch post, jumped out to wade through
the open door into the kitchen. There was no light save that which
came from the distant bonfires, and this was partly cut off by the
half-drawn window shades. The water was over knee-deep on the house
floor, and Dick stumbled over a floating chair.
“Queer we don’t see or hear anything of ’em,” he said. Then: “Maybe
they’re up-stairs――sure, that’s where they’d be, trying to flag
somebody from the windows on the street. I believe that’s them you can
hear yelling right now.”
The answer to that suggestion, of course, was to try to find the way to
the upper story, and to do it swiftly. Larry laid hold of the knob of
the first door that he came to, hauled it open against the impending
drag of the flood, and plunged blindly ahead, with Dick at his heels.
At the first step both of them lost their footing and found themselves
floundering in utter darkness and in water over their heads. In his
haste and excitement Larry had opened the door leading to the cellar.
Since both were good swimmers there was nothing much to the plunge but
a sudden ducking, and as they were both soaked to the skin anyway,
this didn’t matter. But when they groped around and got the cellar
stair under their feet, old Brother Calamity reached out and grabbed
them. By some twist of the rising flood the cellar door had been swung
to, and there must have been a spring catch on it. For when they braced
themselves as best they could on the steps and tried to open it, it
wouldn’t move.
“Gee!” said Dick, with his teeth chattering, “we’re trapped right, this
time. When the water fills this stairwell we’ll drown!”
Almost as he spoke they heard thumping footsteps on the house stair
over their heads, followed by a great splashing in the room beyond
the trapping door. Then, quite distinctly, a voice which they both
recognized as that of the sham “lame dog” who had once taken a
thrashing at Larry’s hands in Farmer Holdsworth’s stubble field,
shouted: “Come on, Bry!――here’s a canoe tied to the back porch. Bring
that sack of swag and hop in.” And the splashing stopped abruptly with
a double tumble into the boat and a quick dipping of paddles.
“Huh!” Dick shivered; “Bry Underhill and Snitty Crawford. And neither
one of them stopped to think that there might be somebody else needing
that canoe. Besides that, they were _looting_!”
“Never mind them,” Larry put in. “We’ve got to get out of this trap
someway. Brace your feet against the wall and hold me while I shove.”
Dick braced and Larry shoved. There was a tearing of screws from their
holdings and the door swung open. Wading into the kitchen they made
their way to the front of the house and got to the porch in time to
see their canoe, with two swaying figures in it paddling for dear life,
disappear among the half-submerged houses.
Larry slipped out of his rain coat and began to get rid of everything
down to shirt and trousers, and Dick quickly followed his example. The
flooded area behind the levee was now completely deserted, and there
was little hope that they would be missed and sought for in time to do
any good.
“What’d we better do?” Dick asked. “Shall we swim for it? Or would
it be safer to take a chance with the house when it floats off its
foundations?”
They were saved the trouble of making the decision. While they were
still stripping to be prepared for the worst there was an earthquake
upheaval somewhere in the background, followed instantly by the
onsweep of a wall of water that toppled the house sidewise from its
underpinning and heaved it over into a street which had suddenly become
a seething millrace of mud, water and wreckage, and the catastrophe had
climaxed.
Going over it afterward, neither one of them could give any connected
account of the battle for life into which the breaking of the levee
had flung them. With a thousand chances to one of being overwhelmed in
the watery avalanche, they clung to one of the porch pillars of the
overturned house; choked, climbed and clung again when the house was
dashed against an embankment which they took to be the Main Street
fill at the bridge end; had a passing glimpse of the bridge itself
shuddering to its fall; were buried and half-drowned once more when
the approach fill gave way before the onrushing flood; and finally
emerged, gasping, in a tangle of trees, broken buildings and floating
débris of all sorts caught against a barrier which they presently
realized was the lower railroad bridge.
Cautiously, and in darkness that was almost thick enough to be felt,
and also in momentary fear that this second bridge would go out and
leave them struggling again, they clambered over the floating islands
of wreckage, pulled themselves up to the almost submerged railroad
structure, and groped their way on hands and knees over the cross-ties
until they found that they were crawling in the mud of the mainland.
Here Dick dropped like a stone, and Larry had to work over him for
quite a little while before he was able to get up and stumble on.
Luckily, they found themselves on their own side of the river, and by
making a long circuit over the railroad track, they got back to the
college suburb.
Soaked, bedraggled and thinly clothed as they were, they were still
unwilling to quit before they had learned what the broken levee had
done to things. Upon reaching the streets of the devastated area;
streets now crowded with anxious and curious spectators; they found
that while the levee was gone, the big bridge wrecked, and the property
damage was immense, there were no lives lost, so far as anybody could
tell, though there was a spreading rumor that two of the college men
had been last seen going to a house which had been swept away when the
levee broke.
“That will b-be us,” shivered Dick, who was too cold and tired to be
careful of his English. “They’ll find out by to-morrow or next week
that we didn’t get drowned after all. Let’s go hunt us a place where
there is a fire and something hot to drink. I’m frozen just about
solid.”
That was the wind-up of the night of catastrophes for the “Timanyoni
Twins.” But there were consequences which were to bear fruit a little
farther along. A grateful citizenry, appreciative of the good work
done in the night of peril by the student body of Old Sheddon, held a
town meeting and voted to erect a much-needed addition to the college
gymnasium as a sort of memorial. On a bronze plate set in the wall were
to be inscribed the names of the students who had rendered the most
signal service, and Larry, looking over the blue-prints some week or
so later with a bunch of the men of his own section in the Mechanical,
flamed out wrathfully when he saw the names of Underhill and Crawford
included in the list.
Neither he nor Dick had said anything about the discovery they had made
in the last of the deserted houses, but this inclusion of the two who
had taken the canoe without a thought for what had become of the man or
men who had tied it to the porch was the back-breaking straw.
“Fellows,” he broke out hotly, “it’s up to us to see to it that two
names are taken off of this thing. Underhill and Crawford were not
helping; they were simply looting!”
If things were always done right end to in this world, a charge thus
openly made would have been investigated, and the guilty ones, if
proved guilty, would have been punished. But, undergraduate human
nature being what it is, the charge never got itself formally before
the faculty or the student council. What did happen was only a sort
of half-measure. A couple of the fellows who had heard Larry’s angry
accusation were curious enough to look for evidences of looting in
Crawford’s and Underhill’s rooms.
The evidences were not lacking. Since the dwellings in the flooded
area were those of the poor, there was little in them to tempt a thief
who would steal for the intrinsic value of the things stolen. But both
Underhill and Crawford had that distorted sense of humor which is
sometimes found in fellows who decorate their rooms with sign-boards
and other property stolen from their rightful owners, and among the
ornaments in Underhill’s room were several framed mottoes in cheap
frames, “God Bless Our Home,” “What Is Home Without a Mother,” things
like that, the very nature of which in such surroundings sufficiently
betrayed their origin.
So Larry’s indignant charge got itself corroborated in the gossip
of the campus, and Merkle and two or three other sober-minded
upperclassmen took it up, with the result that the names of the two
looters disappeared from the drawings of the proposed memorial bronze.
But there was also another result. Since the truth can sometimes bite
through the thickest hide, Larry Donovan was soon to find that he had
made an implacable enemy in Old Sheddon. But of that, however, he
remained happily ignorant for the time being.
X
AT THE SIGN OF THE SAMOVAR
As the season advanced, Larry found that he had his hands full, and
then some. Havercamp was unwilling to let him off from his _Micrometer_
assignment, and what with that and his studies, and boosting Dick to
make up the lost standing, and going out with the team every time Coach
Brock gave it a work-out, there was little chance for him to get rusty
for the want of something to do.
It was along in these early spring days that Dick had to pay for his
foolishness――not to call it by any harder name. True, Uncle Billy
Starbuck, his father’s partner in the “Little Alice” mine, and his
uncle only because his father and Uncle Billy had married sisters,
sent him a birthday check along in April that enabled him to square
things with his frat brothers who were carrying him along financially,
but no check, however generous, could buy him off on the score of the
neglected studies.
So, at a time when every fellow in Old Sheddon who had a drop of good
red blood in him was turning out for some kind of outdoor activity,
and soft skies and budding trees and greening meadows were calling so
that you could almost hear them in your sleep, Dick was boning away for
dear life, scared stiff more than half of the time for fear he wouldn’t
be able to make his final passing grades, and learning, incidentally,
we may suppose, the hard lesson that we all have to learn sooner or
later, that he who plays must pay.
“Gosh!” he lamented, one night after Larry had been putting him through
a regular course of sprouts on some of the back work in Math., “I’d
been meaning to try out for one of the track teams this spring, and now
look at me――handcuffed to a pencil and a pad, and with my nose glued
into a book! Makes me think of old Johnnie Mawker oiling the train
trucks in the Brewster station. Recollect how he used to grin and show
his bad teeth when he’d jerk open a housing and prod in it with his
hook, and say: ‘Shore enough, b’ys, the way of the train’s greaser is
hard’? How’s the practice coming along? I haven’t so much as looked
over the fence of the field this year.”
“We’re doing fairly well. If there’s anything in hard work, Brock means
to put a good team into the fight next fall. Wally Dixon’s coming out
fine. I’m mighty glad Brock picked him. He’s got all-star stuff in him
if he can take on a little more swiftness.”
“Wally’s all sorts of a good fellow,” said Dick, half musingly. “We
call him ‘The Butcher’ in the house――I suppose because his Dad’s in the
packing business, but that, or his Dad’s money, doesn’t hurt him any.”
“No,” Larry agreed. “‘Dad’s money’ doesn’t always spoil a fellow.
There’s Ollie McKnight, for example.”
Dick smiled.
“Getting rid of a few of the old grouches, aren’t you?”
“Trying to,” Larry confessed. “But when I run up against a fellow like
Bryant Underhill it comes pretty hard.”
“Yes, Underhill,” said Dick, and his eyes darkened. “He and his bunch
of Snitty-Crawford boot-lickers! You give that gang a wide berth,
Larry. They’re all bad medicine, as you and I both have reason to know.”
Larry sat back in his chair, and the wide-set eyes were half-closed.
“Do you remember, one time last summer when we were on the railroad
job, I told you I had a bad temper, Dick? Well, I’ve got it yet, and a
sore of the Underhill sort comes as near to getting my goat as anything
can. You know how he tried to make me ‘bust’ last winter?”
“Sure I do.”
“Well, he’s at it again, in another way. He’s trying now to get me
shoved off the team.”
Dick straightened up hot-eyed.
“That’s because you told the fellows what he and Crawford were doing
the night of the flood,” he snapped. “But he’d better keep his mouth
shut! I could tell things about him that would get him fired out of
college so quick it’d make his head swim!”
“Easy, you old firebrand,” said Larry; “you’ve got your own quarrel
with Underhill on that ‘Mixer’ business, but this one is mine, and I’m
big enough to fight my own battles.”
“What’s he doing now?” Dick demanded.
“Telling lies about me, chiefly. Purdy gets onto everything of that
sort”――little Purdick was out somewhere, and the two had the big room
in the Man-o’-War to themselves.
“What sort of lies?”
“Dirty ones. You remember when the Underhill Contracting Company had a
job on the Short Line a couple of years ago? Underhill was out there a
while that summer, stopping at the hotel in Brewster most of the time,
I guess, and he claims that he found out a lot about me and my people.
Shubrick had his mother and sister down here last week on a visit, and
Underhill told Shuby he’d better not introduce me; that I wasn’t the
kind of fellow he’d want his folks to meet.”
Dick got up, and his eyes were blazing out of a face that was as white
as a sheet of paper.
“There’s a limit to all things, Larry!” he broke out furiously. “Do you
suppose I could break into Prexy’s house at this time of night?”
“Of course you couldn’t,” said Larry calmly. “Why should you want to?”
“You know good and well why I want to. Underhill’s smashed every rule
and every tradition of Old Sheddon ever since he first hit the campus
last fall. He’s not only a boozer and a gambler――he’s a cheat. I stood
in for him and his crowd that time when the police caught us, and
mighty nearly got canned for it. But now I’m going to tell everything I
know!”
“You’re not going to do anything you say you will,” Larry put in,
decisively. “As I told you a minute or so ago, I can fight my own
battles.”
“Not with that kind of carrion, you can’t,” Dick denied; “you’re too
open and aboveboard. He’ll do you up if you don’t let me kill him off.”
Any further talk about the Underhill come-back had to stop just here,
because Welborn came in, wishful to know at what place in the book the
English assignment for the next day paused; and shortly afterward Dick
took his leave.
Like a regular fellow, Larry tried to forget the Underhill-Shubrick
incident; tried, also, to keep from watching his team-mates to see if
the lies had spread to the extent of making any difference, so far
as he could determine, but he was wise enough to understand that a
practice field would be exactly the place in which a bunch of fellows
wouldn’t draw any hard-and-fast social lines.
But the dirt-throwing bobbed up again early in May on a Saturday when
the newly organized ’Varsity was to put on a practice game with the
Sophomores, and this was the way of it.
As everybody knows, visitors are not usually invited to witness the
spring training games, but on this particular day there were two
outsiders, a middle-aged gentleman and a girl, in the grand stand,
guests of a Senior named MacClay, and at sight of the girl Larry was
carried swiftly back to a day in the year-before summer; to a mountain
canyon scarred and shattered in spots by the ripping of dynamite
blasts, and to the foot-board of a big locomotive gingerly towing two
Pullmans up the heavy grade.
“Remember ’em?” asked Dick, who was by this time far enough along in
his make-up work to take an occasional Saturday afternoon off on the
field.
“Sure,” Larry nodded. “Vice-president Holcombe of our line and his
daughter――the girl who wanted to know if my last name wasn’t German.”
Dick grinned.
“You’ve got a long memory――for little pin-pricks,” he laughed. “Mr.
Holcombe is MacClay’s uncle. He and Bess were passing through in the
V-P’s private car, and Mac got ’em to stop over. You haven’t met ’em
yet, I take it?”
Larry shook his head. “No; and I’m not likely to. I’m out here to
play foot-ball.” And, as Coach Brock put him in just here, he did
play foot-ball; played it so well that the scattering of more or less
enthusiastic student spectators in the stands gave him ear-splitting
credit by name every time he scored.
It was after the practice game that MacClay invited some of his friends
and the members of the ’Varsity to come around to the little college
inn, “At the Sign of the Samovar,” to meet his uncle and cousin; and
Dick, who was watching things like a hawk hovering over a chicken yard,
noticed that the team invitation was given to the various members
individually, and that MacClay dodged Larry. Dick’s suspicions were
aroused at once, but all he did at the time was to ask Larry to come
over to the Samovar later in the afternoon; did this without saying
anything about the impromptu reception for MacClay’s guests――and
without saying anything to MacClay.
At the appointed time there was a gathering of the invited ones in
the club room of the little inn, with Dick――who had naturally been
included in the bidding, since his father was the general manager of
the railroad of which Mr. Holcombe was the vice-president――among them.
Apart from this, however, Dick knew the Holcombes well from having
spent part of a summer with them at a mountain resort in Colorado.
It was rather early in the reception affair that Bess Holcombe got Dick
aside to ask him a question.
“Tell me, Dickie,” she said; “who was the ‘Donovan’ who was playing at
right half and scored so many times. Surely he isn’t our Donovan, is
he?”
Dick knew quite well what she meant by the personal pronoun possessive.
On that never-to-be-forgotten day in the mountain canyon less than a
year before, the Pullman car, holding only Miss Holcombe, four women
and the porter, had slipped its brakes for a runaway down the grade,
and it was Larry’s quick wit and cool courage in chasing it with one
of the construction engines that had saved the lives of the imperilled
ones.
“He is our Larry, all right,” Dick replied. “Didn’t you know that he
came here to Old Sheddon with me?”
“There are lots of things I don’t know about him,” was the quick
rejoinder. “For one thing, I never could find out why he ran away that
day last summer and wouldn’t let us even so much as thank him for
saving our lives.”
“Bashful,” Dick laughed, though he knew very well that it was
grouchiness and workingman prejudice rather more than bashfulness that
had made Larry take to the woods on that memorable afternoon.
“Where is he?” the girl asked. “I think I’ve met all the other members
of the team, haven’t I?”
“He’ll be over, after a little,” said Dick; and just then MacClay
butted in and took his cousin away to meet another group of his
classmates.
It was shortly after this that MacClay took his turn at drawing Dick
Maxwell aside.
“You were talking to Bess a few minutes ago: it was about Donovan,
wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t I hear you say that he was coming here?”
Dick was beginning to be a trifle nettled.
“You might have, if you ‘listened in’ hard enough.”
“Who invited him?”
“I did.”
“Now see here, Maxie; you’re not a dead one, and you must have heard
the stories that are going around about Donovan. For that matter, you
come from the same town, and you must know what sort of a fellow he is.”
Dick straightened himself belligerently.
“You’re just the man I’ve been looking for, MacClay; somebody who
can tell me precisely the sort of fellow Larry Donovan is. It’s just
possible that I don’t know; I haven’t been acquainted with him more
than ten or a dozen years.”
MacClay looked embarrassed. He was a very decent fellow in the main,
though somewhat inclined to take himself and his own little world a
trifle too seriously.
“I’ll just ask you one question, Maxie: have you any sisters?”
“Yes; two of ’em.”
“Would you be willing to have Donovan meet them?”
“Rats! They’re only kids, but, barring the difference in ages, he’s
known them as long and as well as he has me.”
“And he’s accepted by your people――in your home?”
“Of course he is. Why shouldn’t he be?”
MacClay looked still more embarrassed.
“There’s a mistake out, somewhere,” he said. “Shubrick was telling me――”
“Who told Shubrick?” Dick cut in.