time in your home town and knew all about the Donovans.”
“Exactly,” snapped Dick. “Just after the Rockford Poly game last fall,
Bry Underhill took occasion to black-list Larry to a bunch of the
fellows for no better reason than that his father was a workingman.
Larry happened to overhear what he said and was going to lick him, but
the other fellows got in and stopped it. Bry bragged then that he’d run
Larry out of Old Sheddon, and he tried to do it, using Snitty Crawford
for a cat’s-paw. Now he is trying, in another way, to get him shoved
off the team. There isn’t a single word of truth in the stories he’s
telling around about Larry and his people, and I’d be willing to bet my
next year’s allowance that he never so much as heard of Larry until he
came here to Sheddon.”
MacClay spread his hands.
“Of course, I’m taking your word for it, Maxie, straight from the
shoulder,” he said, heartily enough. “I didn’t want to believe this
mess of gossip about Donovan; but at the same time, Bess is my only
girl cousin, and――well, you know how a fellow feels about such things.”
“Sure I do,” Dick acceded cheerfully. “All I’ll say is that you owe
Larry something for singling him out as the only man on the team that
you didn’t invite here this afternoon; also, you owe him something for
saving Bess’s life last summer. You can make a payment on both debts by
giving Underhill’s lies a bash in the face every time you get a chance.”
“I’ll do it,” MacClay promised, and then Dick went to the door to watch
for Larry’s coming, knowing pretty well the Donovan disposition to
break and run at the most remote first view of anything like a social
function.
For the purpose Dick had in mind, it was lucky that he was waiting
at the door when Larry turned in from the street. Having been so
carefully ignored in the invitation-giving, Larry knew nothing about
the small “informal” at the Samovar. But like the war horse in the
Bible, he scented the battle from afar just about as soon as he left
the sidewalk, and Dick’s unworded prophecy that he would duck and run
would have had its fulfilment if the watcher at the door hadn’t chased
out and grabbed him.
“No, you don’t,” Dick laughed; “I was laying for you, you old dodger.”
“But what is it?” Larry wanted to know. “And where do I come in?”
“By the front door, if you’re asking me. I was afraid you’d forget and
not come at all.”
“If it’s some social doings, I wish I had forgotten. You know well
enough that I’m no earthly good at that sort of thing.”
“I know you’re going to be good at this one. Come on in and take your
medicine like mamma’s little man.” And Larry had to go, because Dick
had such a firm grip on him that a frantic wrestling match was about
the only thing that offered any chance of escape.
Now, with Richard Maxwell, junior, a purpose usually held much more
than was suffered to appear on the surface. From the moment at the
close of the foot-ball practice when he had discovered that Larry was
left out of the invitation list, he had been plotting like the villain
in a play, and thus far there had been no hitch. What was particularly
needed was an audience of sufficient size, and this he had secured by
taking it upon himself to add handsomely to MacClay’s biddings, telling
as many of the men as he could reach in the time afforded that they
owed it to MacClay to come around and do honor to his guests.
Therefore and wherefore it was a pretty well crowded club-room that
Larry was presently dragged into, and Dick didn’t give him a moment
in which to cool his heels――or his courage. Almost before he knew
what was happening, Larry found himself shaking hands with a tall,
well-preserved gentleman with a mop of graying hair which looked as if
it might once have belonged to a foot-ball captain, and the gentleman
was saying, evidently following up something that Dick had said:
“So you’re _that_ Donovan, are you? Well, now――this is a pleasure that
I’ve been promising myself ever since last summer. Why did you run away
without giving us a chance to thank you for the splendid thing you and
Dick did when our Pullman broke loose?”
Larry said, “I don’t know, Mr. Holcombe,” which was about as near the
fact as he could come without going into an explanation a mile long,
and that probably wouldn’t be understood after it was made.
“I believe you are right,” smiled the tall man; and then he was wise
enough, or kindly enough, to steer away from that subject and start
another upon which Larry was much more at home. “I was watching your
play this afternoon with a great deal of interest. We used to play a
sort of game that we called foot-ball in my college days, and there was
a time when I thought I was something of a dabster at it myself. Do
you play on the ’Varsity next year?”
“If I can make good in the practice.”
“I guess there is no fear but what you’ll do that,” and while
the visitor went on talking about foot-ball and the tremendous
improvements――“differences,” he called them――which the game had taken
on since his own time, the second layer in Dick’s purpose uncovered
itself. With a deft cleverness all his own, he was contriving to get
just as many of those present as possible to observe the cordial
footing upon which the vice-president of the Nevada Short Line (no
inconsiderable railroad, if you please!) was meeting Larry Donovan. And
the cap-sheaf to that was placed when the great man finally called his
daughter and turned Larry over to her.
“I think it is high time you were letting me say ‘Thank you,’ Mr.
Donovan,” was the way Miss Bessie began on him; and there was a
dog-like plea in his eyes when he blurted out:
“Oh, say――please don’t ‘Mister’ me; I――I’m just ‘Larry’ to my friends,
and――and――――”
“And we are your friends; you can certainly count upon that. But tell
me, how did you _ever_ have the nerve to chase that runaway car?”
“Why-ee, I don’t know. I guess it didn’t take so very much nerve. You
see, it had to be done. The car was running away.”
“Oh! So things that have to be done don’t require extra courage. Is
that what you’re trying to tell me? It’ll take more than the bare
saying so to convince me. Let’s go somewhere and sit down.”
Again Dick uncovered that purposeful second layer. “You see,” he
said to one of the fellows who he knew had been carelessly spreading
Underhill’s calumnies; “you see how people who really know Donnie
appreciate him. Bess Holcombe met him last summer out in Colorado, you
know, and, incidentally, he saved her life on a runaway car――no, not
an auto――a Pullman on the railroad. You couldn’t tell the Holcombes
anything against him, and get away with it.”
Oddly enough, after the first few minutes, Larry found himself getting
along very well indeed with the daughter of, perhaps, the richest man
he had ever shaken hands with. Which was something to Miss Holcombe’s
credit, too, for she was rather fond of taking “rises” out of bashful
young fellows. Most naturally, their talk went back to that day in the
Tourmaline Canyon at first, but it got around to more modern things
after a bit.
“You are taking the Mechanical course in Sheddon?” the girl asked, when
things present had been given a chance.
“Taking at it,” said Larry modestly.
“And Dickie Maxwell’s in Civil?”
“He is. His father is a C. E., you know.”
“Mr. Maxwell is a Sheddon old-grad., isn’t he?”
“Yes; that is how Dick and I come to be here. It’s a good old dump.”
The girl laughed.
“If you go on playing foot-ball the way you did this afternoon, you’ll
put Sheddon on the map,” she said. “Where did you learn?”
“Brewster High. We had a corking team for a bunch of kids. I’ll say
that much for it if it did have to count me in as right half.”
“That is where you’ll play on the ’Varsity, isn’t it?”
“Surest thing you know――if Coach Brock doesn’t find a better man.”
If any one had told Larry one short hour earlier that at half-past five
that same afternoon he would be talking thus chummily with a girl――any
girl, let alone Miss Elizabeth Holcombe――he would have taken a chance
and called that person a hopeless pipe-dreamer. More than that, he went
on talking with her, and still more, when the time came for the guests
to go to the eastbound train to which their private car was to be
attached, he made one of a group of Dick’s and MacClay’s intimates who
went to the station to see them off.
It was while they were walking together back to the college side of
the river over the reconstructed Main Street bridge that Larry said to
Dick: “Did you hear what Miss Bess said to me as I was putting her on
her car?”
“Asked you to come to see her if you ever came to New York, didn’t she?”
“That was it. I wonder if you could tell me if she really meant it.”
“Meant it? Of course she did. Why shouldn’t she?”
Larry’s answer was no answer at all, but what he said marked a distinct
milestone in his changing――and broadening――attitude toward the moneyed
minority.
“The Holcombes seem to be just ‘folks’ like the rest of us,” was his
summing up of the plunge into the social amenities; and Dick was wise
enough to let the remark stand just as it was made.
That evening Larry went over to the Omeg house to help Dick “bone” a
little more against some tests that were coming. After the work session
was over, Dick sat back with a quizzical smile and said: “I don’t think
you’ll have any more trouble with the Underhill lies now, Larry――after
what happened this afternoon.”
“Ump,” said Larry. “I’ve been thinking: I guess it wasn’t so much of a
‘happening’ as it might have been. Didn’t you know that I was the only
member of the team that wasn’t invited to the Samovar?”
“Maybe I did.”
“And you ‘framed’ it so I’d have to meet the Holcombes anyway, even if
MacClay didn’t want me to?”
Dick’s smile broadened into a mischievous grin.
“What you don’t know won’t ever hurt you one little bit,” he replied
banteringly; adding, as Larry got up to go: “I owe you more than I can
ever pay, anyhow. Let’s let it go at that. But there’s one other little
thing I’d like to say. I happen to know that Bry Underhill is perfectly
savage about the thing you let out on him――stealing those mottoes from
the flooded house. The next time he takes a lick at you he’s going to
make it count, if he can. Just thought I’d mention it so you could
watch out. Night-night.”
XI
IN WHICH LARRY HAS A HEADACHE
Schools of journalism are doubtless excellent things in their way, but
many a bright young newspaperman has had his start in helping to keep a
college daily “functioning,” so to speak. Beginning with the athletic
reporter’s job on the _Micrometer_ by writing copious columns which the
editor usually cut to paragraphs, Larry was learning, and Havercamp,
who was slated for editor-in-chief for the next college year, kept a
weighing-and-measuring eye on the big, curly-headed Freshman who was
slowly but surely learning the lesson of what ought, and what ought
not, to be printed in a college newspaper.
“Ever been in Yellowstone Park, Larry?” Havercamp asked, one night in
May when Larry had stayed over in town to help put the paper to bed.
“Not yet,” said Larry. “Why?”
“You remind me of one of the geysers――Old Faithful. Goes off at regular
intervals and never misses a lick. That’s what counts in the long
run――even more than the brilliant intellect you read about――and don’t
often see. You can’t write much yet, but you have the knack of being
able to tell when the other fellow writes right. Do you get me?”
“I guess so,” Larry laughed. “You’re trying to feed me up a bit, aren’t
you?”
“Something of the sort, yes. In a few weeks we’ll be electing the
editorial staff of the ‘_Mike_’ for next year. Some of the fellows
think you ought to run for athletic editor. The ‘_Mike’s_’ going to
need a ‘steady’ or so next year, and you’d fill the bill.”
“Not good enough,” Larry objected decisively.
“That’s for the other fellows to say. I think you are.”
“You ought to have a frat man,” was Larry’s next objection. “The
fraternities have taken a good deal of interest in athletics this year
and they ought to be encouraged.”
Havercamp grinned. He was one of the most enthusiastic fraternity men
in Sheddon, and it amused him hugely to have a barbarian pointing out
that the fraternities ought to be “encouraged.”
“Think we need ‘hoping up’ some, do you?” he laughed. “I like your
cheek. Is that the best you can offer?”
“The best, but not all,” Larry went on. “I’m willing to do what comes
my way to keep any of the Sheddon activities going. Just the same,
though I don’t know where I’m going to land at the end of my four
years, I’m reasonably sure it won’t be on a newspaper job. Another
thing is, if I don’t fall down, I expect to be on the team next year.”
“That wouldn’t make any difference,” said Havercamp. “Anything else?”
Larry looked down.
“Yes. You know it as well as I do, Havvy, that I’m not ‘popular’ in any
big sense. Fellows on the _Micrometer_ staff ought to be popular.”
The managing editor sat back in his chair with his eyes half closed.
“That little thing has puzzled me more than a few, Donnie,” he admitted.
“But you know it’s so,” Larry persisted.
“I know that some of the fellows seem to be always trying to put you in
bad, yes; and I’ve never seen any reason for it.”
Larry thought he knew the reason, but he was close-mouthed enough about
his own affairs not to wish to talk about this particular one. He
knew he had earned the enmity of Bryant Underhill and his following,
and that meant the enmity of whatever proportion of the student body
Underhill and his cronies could influence.
“I guess maybe there’s reason enough――for the fellows who do it,” was
all he said in reply to Havercamp’s implied question; and just then the
first copies of the paper came up, and they both fell to work scanning
these preliminary “pulls” for last-minute correction of errors.
“Bry Underhill is one of the fellows who has it in for you,” Havercamp
resumed, after the “go ahead” order had been ’phoned down to the press
room.
“I know it,” said Larry. “At first he was sore at me because my father
happens to be a railroad man working for day-pay instead of a salary.
And now he’s got a bigger grudge――since Dick and I caught him and
Crawford looting a house for ‘souvenirs’ on the night of the flood, and
I was brash enough to talk about it.”
Havercamp shook his head.
“Underhill’s a bad actor. But because he flings his dad’s money around
with an open hand and drives a sporty auto and poses as a ‘free and
easy,’ he has a following――such fellows always do have. What I can’t
understand is how he gets by with the Registrar in his classroom
record. Nobody ever hears of his doing any real work.”
“There are others, as well,” said Larry; and as he was leaving the
little editorial den on the top floor of the _Chronicle_ Building to
go home: “There are times when a fellow is tempted to believe that
money――enough of it――will buy most anything in this world, Havvy. So
long. Got to mog over to the shack and get down to brass tacks; couple
of tests coming to-morrow.”
Now, as every one who is familiar with the town of which Old Sheddon
is an over-the-river part knows, the _Chronicle_ Building is well up
the hill on the left-hand side of the main street, not quite out of the
business district, but well over in the edge of it farthest from the
river. Turning west at the newspaper corner, Larry glanced up at the
clock in the dome of the court-house. Its hands were pointing to eleven.
At the moment the streets were nearly deserted, though in the “booze
block,” as a certain square well down toward the river was called, the
saloons (now happily a thing of the past) were all open and doing, or
so it seemed to Larry, an unusual amount of late-hour business.
Since he passed that way nearly every evening on his way to and from
the _Micrometer_ office, he went on toward the bridge without paying
any attention either to the lighted dives on one hand, or to the groups
of late-hour loafers cluttering the sidewalk on the other. But just as
he was passing the last of the saloons a man stepped out of a group
of three, followed him and touched him on the shoulder. Larry wheeled
quickly, with his muscles hardening themselves; but the man, a rather
burglarish-looking fellow with a week-old beard blackening the lower
half of his face and a workman’s cap pulled well down over a pair of
beady eyes, spoke him fair, as they used to say in our grandfathers’
time.
“Name’s Donovan, ain’t it?” said the man, shifting the stub of his
cigar from one corner of his hard mouth to the other, and talking out
of the corner thus vacated.
“It is,” said Larry briefly. Then, quite as briefly, “What do you want?”
The man ignored the question.
“Young fellow named Maxwell’s a pal o’ yours, ain’t he?”
“He’s my friend, yes. What about him?”
“Li’l’ too much bug-juice, I reckon,” was the half-leering reply.
“Somebody ought to knock ’im down an’ run ’im off home. Thought mebbe
youse’d like to know.”
Most naturally, Larry was just plain horrified. That Dick, after his
one bad slip and narrow escape, should make another that was infinitely
worse, seemed utterly unbelievable. Then he remembered that for the
past few days Dick had been blue and discouraged for fear that, after
all, he mightn’t be able to make passing grades in the year-end
examinations. Could it be possible that he had let his discouragement,
which, as everybody had told him, was nothing worse than the nervous
scare of a fellow who has been working his brain a bit too hard, drive
him into another kind of dissipation?
All this, as we may figure, flashed through one half of Larry’s mind
in the few seconds during which he stood staring at the slouching
bearer of bad news and trying, with the other half of the thinking
machinery, to determine what possible object the man could have in
lying to him――if he were lying.
“You must be mistaken,” he said at last. “The Maxwell you’re talking
about isn’t the Maxwell I know.”
“I guess yes. Anyways, the last I seen o’ him he was singin’ an’
hollerin’ f’r youse to come an’ steer ’im home.”
Larry’s resolution was taken impulsively. There were a thousand chances
to one that the thing was a hideous mistake, but where Dick was
concerned he was not willing to take the one chance.
“Pitch out and show me,” he said brusquely; and when the man turned
back toward the noisiest of the saloons, Larry followed him.
It was at the very door of the noisy place, and just as he was about
to enter it at the heels of his guide, that he ran squarely into a
boisterous crowd of Sheddonians heading collegeward. Then he remembered
suddenly that this was the night when Sock and Buskin, the college
dramatic society, was giving a performance in the town opera house.
Since, for Dick’s sake, he couldn’t stop to explain anything, Larry
tried to dodge into the noisy place quickly, hoping that he hadn’t been
recognized. But the hope was a vain one. Welborn, the big-hearted――but
loud-mouthed and not too tactful――Aggie Freshman who roomed at Mrs.
Grant’s, was a member of the bunch of homing theater-goers, and he saw
Larry and bawled out a half-joking warning.
“Hey, you, Donnie! Come out o’ there! You’re on the team, and that’s
breaking training!”
Being pretty badly flustered anyway, Larry did the worst thing he could
have done――dodged again and made no answer. And it was not until he
was following the unshaven loafer into the purlieus of the place that
he realized fully what his action must have meant to Welborn and the
others.
Welborn’s bawled-out hail had called the attention of every Sheddonian
in the bunch to the fact that he, Larry Donovan, was entering a saloon
at eleven o’clock at night in company with a fellow who looked as if he
might be a bank burglar at the very least. And he had ducked as if he
were ashamed to be seen. As certainly as the autumn would ripen little
red apples the story would go from mouth to mouth, and while a break of
that kind might pass unremarked in the case of a known member of the
fast set, it wouldn’t go that way when the one who made it happened to
be a potential member of next year’s ’Varsity and was supposed to be in
training――at least to the extent of taking respectable care of himself.
“Show me where Maxwell is, quick,” he snapped at his guide. “I haven’t
any time to waste fooling ’round such a place as this.”
“I c’n show you where he was a few minutes ago,” said the hard-faced
man, leading the way to a row of box-like card-rooms in the rear, and
at the word he opened the door of one of the boxes.
Larry looked in and saw that the place was empty. A single unshaded
electric light hung over a round table which, with a few chairs,
completed the furnishings of the bare cell. The man seemed nonplussed.
“’S queer,” he muttered. “He was in here a li’l’ spell ago. Wait a
minute and I’ll dig ’im up f’r youse.”
Larry’s first impulse was to make a bolt for the street and the open
air. Every clean-living fiber of him was protesting against the ribald
clamor of the place, the smoke-soaked atmosphere, the sickening,
stifling smell of liquor and stale beer. But the thought of Dick, and
that one chance in a thousand that the whole thing wasn’t some wretched
mistake, held him. Besides, at the command to “wait,” the man had
shoved him into the little room and shut the door; but for that he was
rather thankful, since it cut him off from the bar-room and its noisy
occupants.
Pulling up one of the chairs, Larry sat down to make the best of what
began to seem like a mighty disagreeable job. Naturally, all he could
think of, at first, was the awful thing that had happened to Dick,
and as he dwelt upon it, it seemed more and more unbelievable. Surely
Lansing and Dick’s other friends in the Zeta Omegas wouldn’t let things
come to such a pass after they had seen what a brave fight Dick was
making to “come back” after his nearly fatal run-in with the Underhill
bunch and the “Mixers.” Larry asked himself what a frat was for,
anyway, if it couldn’t lay hold of a fellow who was in the dumps and
jolly him over the rough places.
Thinking so hard about these things, it was perhaps five minutes or so
before he began to realize the breathless, half-suffocating closeness
of the little card-room, and the stifling alcoholic smell that seemed
to be growing stronger the longer he had to breathe it. When he did
realize it, he found that his head was swimming and his eyes were
smarting strangely. Starting up to go and open the door, the dizziness
half overcame him, and in trying to sit down again he missed the chair
awkwardly and almost slid under the table.
While he was pulling himself up and wondering vaguely what had come
over him, the door opened a little way, and the stubble-bearded man
stuck his head in to say: “I’ve found out where yer pally went to. Come
on, an’ we’ll go get him.”
Larry tried again to get up, and again the nauseating vertigo made him
see black. “If I――could have a drink of――water,” he gasped, and he was
dimly conscious of the disappearance of the hard-visaged man, and of
his reappearance a little later with a glass of water. Little as he
cared for the opinion of this hard-bitted person, he was ashamed of the
way his hands shook when he took the glass and drained it to the last
drop.
For a minute or so the cold drink seemed to revive him, but the effect
was only temporary. When he tried once more to get upon his feet his
legs refused to hold him up, and an immense desire to sleep came over
him like a smothering pall. Struggling vainly against the overmastering
lethargy, he dropped back into the chair and, bending over the table,
hid his face in the crook of an arm just to rest for a second or so.
And that was the last he remembered.
When he next opened his eyes, the low-slanting sun was shining in his
face, and he was lying on a forkful of straw in what appeared to be
a deserted cow stable. Dazed and bewildered, he sat up and tried to
make out where he was and how he came to be there. Dimly and like the
figures of a dream his latest waking recollections came straggling
back; the noisy and noisome saloon; the stubble-bearded man who
talked out of the corner of his mouth; the stifling atmosphere of the
close little room in which he had been waiting for the man to return,
bringing Dick Maxwell.
[Illustration: Dazed and bewildered, he sat up and tried to make out
where he was]