I’m only going to add one thing to what my friend Purdick here has
already said to you. I have Mr. Bolinger’s authority for saying that
the _Chronicle_ will print all the facts in Donovan’s case if you don’t
come across and help us get the man or men higher up.”
Dickie Maxwell, having had less than no experience in such matters,
expected another explosion. But it did not come. Instead, the ward boss
merely chuckled good-naturedly and tendered Havercamp one of the black
cigars――which Havercamp didn’t take.
“I’m expectin’ ’twas on’y a rough bit av a joke on the young felly,
Misther Havercamp,” he said. “You little college b’ys are always
puttin’ thim up on wan another.”
“Call it whatever you like,” cut in Havercamp brusquely. “We want the
man who did the job, with an order to him to tell us who put him up to
it. We’ll do the rest.”
The boss pressed the ball of a fat thumb on a bell-push, and in a
minute or two the stubble-bearded fellow who had led Larry to his
undoing came in.
“’Tis the little joke ye played on wan o’ the college lads last Monday
night, Jerky,” Clanahan explained to his henchman. “’Tis a peck av
throuble ye stirred up――widout m’anin’ to. Ye’ll be going wid Misther
Havercamp and these lads and doin’ what they want ye to do to take th’
kinks out av it.”
The man nodded as if the order were all in the day’s work, and with
Havercamp for their leader the four tramped out and down the narrow
stair. In the street Havercamp quickly called an auto hack, and in grim
silence a swift run was made to the college suburb. It ended in front
of the house assigned to Dr. Shotliffe, Dean of the Mechanical School,
and the four passengers got out and ascended the steps. As he rang the
door-bell, Havercamp gave the Clanahan henchman a final word.
“You’ve got your orders; all we ask of you is that you tell the
straight truth, no matter whom it hits. If you do that, there won’t be
any afterclap――for you.”
What took place in the Dean’s study after the four had been admitted
does not form any part of the Old Sheddon records. But two days later
a faculty meeting was called and four members of the Freshman class,
Bryant Underhill, Alexander Crawford, John Dugger and Albert Markley
were summarily dropped from the Registrar’s list of undergraduates, and
Old Sheddon knew them no more.
And on the same day Larry Donovan――a Larry once more light-hearted
and able to look the world and all the people in it squarely in the
eye――took his old place at right half on the ’Varsity practice field.
XIII
THE GREEN CAP BONFIRE
“What are you fellows going to do in the summer vacation?”
It was Ollie McKnight who wanted to know, and he had just come in
from the gymnasium showers where he had been cooling off after a
lively practice with the Freshman team; scrimmages which, in the warm
afternoon, were a little like sessions in a Turkish bath.
There were various answers from the half-dozen Freshmen lounging in the
big room at Mother Grant’s which had been occupied for nearly half of
the college year by Larry and Purdick. Welborn, the big Aggie, said he
was going home to Missouri to work on the farm. Wally Dixon said his
father was building an addition to his packing plant in Kansas City,
and that he’d probably have a job wheelbarrowing concrete, or something
of that sort. Cal Rogers made a similar response. His father was a
contractor, and he, Cal, supposed there was a wheelbarrow or a shovel
or a pick waiting for him at his home town in Iowa.
“How about you two Timanyoni Twins?” McKnight asked, tossing the
question to Dick Maxwell and Larry.
“Work for me, too, if I can find anything to do,” Larry said; and Dick
wrinkled his nose at McKnight.
“You’ll have to stay and see Commencement through for the rest of us,
Knighty,” he said. “We’re all too industrious to hang around here for
doings where Freshmen have to stick on the side lines and don’t get a
look-in.”
“That’s the way of it,” little Purdick put in. “Commencement’s no
Freshman game. Do you stay, Knighty?”
“Not on your life. I’ve got a job, too, strange as it may seem. It’s
northern Minnesota and the iron country for mine. While you fellows
are doing your little summer chores all over the lot you can get a
long-distance snap-shot of me down in some open cut in the Mesaba,
chucking coal into the tummy of a steam shovel, or something of that
sort.”
“Yes, I think I see you with overalls on!” said Rogers sarcastically.
“You’ll be doing a cross-country run in a million-dollar buzz-wagon,
or sailing a brass-mounted yacht up the Maine coast, or something like
that. I know you, Knighty.”
“Maybe you did know me last summer, or the summer before,” McKnight
got back. “But that isn’t saying that you know me now. I’ve already
asked Dad if I can’t go to the Mesaba and begin to learn the steel
business from the bottom, and he didn’t write to say ‘yes.’ Not on your
moving-picture. He wired it.”
Wally Dixon shook his head in mock solemnity.
“You shouldn’t ought to do things like that, Ollie; not unless you’re
sure there’s no heart disease in your family. Think of the terrible
shock it must have been when they got your letter.”
“That’s all right,” laughed the son of the steel magnate
good-naturedly. “I’ll admit I was one of the Willie-boys when I came
here last fall, but it’s only fair to Old Sheddon to say that I hope
she’s done a little something for me in nine months.”
After a bit more of this good-natured joshing the fellows began to drop
out, one by one, drifting away to their respective rooming places. The
year-end examinations were on, the outdoor activities were stringing
out to a close, and even the bright stars who had made “A’s” and “B’s”
in the semester tests were cramming a bit for the final trials.
“You’re going to make the turn all right, this time, aren’t you,
Purdy?” asked Larry, after the others had gone, referring, for the
first time since Purdick had come to room with him, to the small one’s
discouraging flunk-out of the previous year.
“Easy,” said Purdick; “thanks to you and to that other fellow whose
name you won’t tell me. Can’t you take the bridle off of that promise
now, Larry?”
“Permission not yet given,” Larry grinned.
“Will it ever be given?”
“Maybe――some day.”
Silence for a little while, and then Purdick began again. “I’ve been
leaning hard upon what you said to me――that freezing cold night in my
old room over Heffelfinger’s: that you’d have taken the money yourself
if you’d been in my place. Can you say it again, Larry?”
“Easier now than I could then. The fellow who built your scholarship is
a man, all the way up and down, Purdy. I’d bank on him for anything.”
“It wasn’t Dick Maxwell?”
Larry laughed. “No, it wasn’t Dickie. But you mustn’t begin to worm
things out of me by the process of elimination. Let’s be fair to your
‘good angel.’ All he asks is to stay unknown. Besides, I shouldn’t
wonder if he’d forgotten all about the scholarship by this time. It’d
be just like him.”
Purdick looked up quickly.
“Do you mean by that he’s got so much money that two thousand dollars,
more or less, don’t mean anything to him?” he asked.
Larry had a swift jab from that inner sense which is sometimes called
after-wit, realizing that he had said too much.
“You shut up, Purdy; I’m not going to say another word about it.
You’ve got the boost, and the other fellow’s got what does him a lot
more good than the money is doing you. That’s all there is to it, and
you couldn’t get any more out of me if you were to give me the third
degree.”
That settled it for the time being, and during the few remaining days
which led up to Commencement Week everybody was too busy to think or
talk about anything but the year-end job in hand.
It was after the examinations were over, and there was not much left
for a Freshman to do but to burn his green cap and go home, that Larry
and little Purdick took a farewell evening hike out to the bridge which
bore their class numerals. It had been a perfect June day, and the
evening matched it harmoniously. A light shower the night before had
laid the dust, spring green was waving from the trees and nodding to
them from the fields, and the song of the cardinal was abroad in the
land.
“You didn’t turn out for the bridge scrap, did you, Purdy?” said
Larry, as they hoisted themselves to seats on the approach parapet
where he and Dick Maxwell had sat through a pretty painful session one
evening some few weeks earlier.
“You know I didn’t. About that time o’ night I was washing dishes in
Hassler’s kitchen.”
“But you’ll be in the next one. We’ll be the defenders next fall, and
we want to keep those old figures up there for another year.”
“Lot of good I’d be!” scoffed the small one. “If we should happen to
get a few grasshoppers in the next Freshman class, perhaps I might be
able to pull a leg off of one or two of ’em. But that’s about all.”
“Size isn’t everything,” Larry offered. Having plenty of it himself, he
could easily disregard the lack of it in others. Then: “Have you always
been off weight, Purdy?”
“Ever since I can remember. My mother was small.”
In all their close association as room-mates Purdick had rarely talked
of himself or his past, and never of his people. But now, perhaps
because the parting for the summer was so near at hand, he let out a
little.
“We were poor folks,” he went on; “poor in the way you don’t know
anything about, because your father had a trade and a good one. Mine
was a day laborer, and there were seven mouths to fill.”
“Five children?” said Larry. “That’s our number at home.”
“That was our number, but it isn’t any more; there are only two of us
now――my sister Alice and I.”
“And your father and mother?”
“Both dead. Mother was never very strong, and the fight was too hard
for her. After the other children died, she sort of lost her――her
courage, I guess. That left only father and two children; and Alice
wasn’t big enough to do much. That’s how I learned to cook and wash
dishes.”
“Then your father died?”
“He was killed――in the steel works. It was an open-hearth furnace, and
he was on the puddler’s gang. There was a loose board in the run-way,
and the hand-rail was broken. The men had complained, time and again,
but nothing was done. One day father slipped.” He stopped abruptly, and
when he spoke again it was to say, “Do you wonder that things have made
sort of an anarchist of me, Larry?”
“Huh!” said Larry, “you’re not much of an anarchist.”
“Not the long-haired kind, maybe. But I’ve got to stay on my own side
of the fence. There’s a horrible lot of injustice in this old world,
Larry.”
“Sure there is,” Larry agreed. Then, to keep Purdick from running off
on one of his bitter streaks: “Where is your sister now, Purdy?”
“She’s in Elsmere. You know they have a sort of an apprentice course
there; a girl can work in the kitchen and have certain hours in the
Domestic Economy classes. And that’s another thing: Allie’s been having
just about as hard a time as I had before you took me in. You never
said there were any strings tied to that scholarship money. There
weren’t any, were there?”
“Not a single string.”
“Well, of course, I split it with Allie right away. That was one of
the things that made me take it without making you tell me more about
it.”
“Um,” said Larry. “Then you’ll have to go to work this summer to earn
some more.”
“That’s all right; I expected to do that, anyway.”
“What kind of a job?”
Purdick shrugged his shoulders. “Beggars mustn’t be choosers; and
little beggars have to take what’s handed out to them. I haven’t the
muscle to tackle any real man-sized job. I suppose it will be office
drudgery of some kind――if I’m lucky enough to land anything.”
Larry had a swift and rather discomforting picture of the small one
hived in some city office building and running an adding machine, or
something of that sort, through the hot months.
“You ought to have a real vacation, Purdy; some job that would keep you
outdoors every minute in the day,” he said.
“Fat chance!” Purdick returned, with a hard little laugh. “None of the
outdoor jobs wants a sawed-off like me.” Then, after a pause: “Don’t
you sweat about me, Larry. You’ve done enough for me, as it is. Let’s
go to supper.” And he slid down from his place on the wall.
They had tramped along in comradely silence for possibly half of the
long mile lying between the county bridge and the university grounds
when they crossed a ramshackly little wooden span over a creek emptying
into the river a few hundred yards to their left. The flimsy structure
shook under them as they walked across it, and Purdick made gibing
comment.
“Isn’t that just like the loose ends that are let go in all public
works!” he criticised. “Here is a fine, hard-surfaced highway, the
main county outlet to the north, with a concrete bridge over the river
that probably cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars, and right here
they’ve left that old wooden trap that a man wouldn’t dare drive a
‘Henry’ over faster than a cow could walk!”
Larry turned and looked the “trap” over with a mechanical eye. It was
all that Purdick had said it was. “I’d hate to put a loaded truck on
it,” he remarked; and then they walked on.
They had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards beyond the creek and
its ramshackle bridge when they heard the distant honk of an automobile
horn. The machine was coming along the pike behind them, and they
could see that it was being driven at a good clip. Moreover, it was
approaching the wooden span without showing any signs of slackening the
speed.
“Gee!” Larry exclaimed, “if he hits that scrap heap going like that――”
He got no farther, for at that precise instant the oncoming machine did
hit the scrap heap. As the two trampers sprang aside to give a clear
road, there was a ripping crash, a shrill scream from somebody in the
auto, and car and wooden bridge disappeared in a cloud of dust.
“Great Moses!” gasped little Purdick, “I’ll bet the last one of them’s
killed!”
“Come on!” Larry shouted, and they broke all track records in a flying
sprint to the scene of the disaster.
It was a pretty bad smash. The car was a heavy touring machine. It
had turned part way over on its side in the fall and was tangled
hopelessly in the bridge timbers and planking.
Its occupants――there were three of them, a woman, a girl and a
man――were caught under the crushed top, and when Larry and Purdick ran
up, the girl was crying and trying to lift the woman, who seemed to
be either dead or in a dead faint. The man, bronzed, middle-aged, and
looking as if he might be a retired cattle king, was pinned between the
bent steering-wheel and the back of the driving seat, but he did not
seem to be badly injured.
“If you two can take a plank and pry me loose,” he said quite calmly,
as Larry and Purdick jumped down into the chaos and fell frantically at
work. In a jiffy the thing was done, and then the three of them tore
the broken top away and got the woman and the girl out. With every
chance for a fatal accident, or at least a sad array of broken bones,
it proved that no one of the three was seriously hurt. The woman, a
stoutly built lady with the prettiest silvering hair Larry had ever
seen――so he was saying to himself――came to as they lifted her to the
level of the roadway, and a torn dress seemed to be the worst of her
injuries. The girl had a cut in one round arm made by a piece of flying
glass when the wind-shield broke, but she tied her handkerchief around
it and after that was done, paid no more attention to it than a boy
would.
When they all reached a point at which they could draw a long breath
and begin to straighten things out, Larry looked hard at the sunburned
gentleman and said: “Aren’t you Dick Maxwell’s Uncle Billy Starbuck,
from Brewster, Colorado?”
“You’ve guessed it the first time,” said the cattle-kingish gentleman
with a grim little smile. “And you’re young Donovan, aren’t you?――the
fellow who was with Dick last summer up in the Tourmaline?”
“Yes; I’m Larry, and this is Charles Purdick, my room-mate,” said
Larry, introducing his fellow rescuer. “We’d been out for a little hike
and were going back when we saw you coming.”
“How far are we from town?” asked “Uncle Billy.”
“Only about half a mile; it’s just over the top of that hill,” Larry
answered. “If you’ll stay here with the ladies, we’ll run back and find
an auto for you. You were going to stop at Sheddon anyway, weren’t you?”
“Again you’ve guessed it,” said the bronzed man, who seemed to be
taking the smash-up as calmly as if high-priced cars grew on bushes for
anybody to pick. “We were driving through from Chicago to New York, and
we came around this way to spend a few hours with Dick before he starts
for home.”
Purdick had stood aside while this bit of talk was going on, and he was
wondering who the pretty――though somewhat pudgy――little girl was. She
had apparently forgotten her cut arm and was standing on the creek bank
looking down at the smashed auto. Purdick moved a little nearer because
he was afraid the bank would cave in and let her down.
“That bank is pretty soft,” he cautioned. “I wouldn’t go too near the
edge if I were you.”
She turned and looked him over appraisingly.
“What a funny little green cap,” she commented. “That’s Freshman,
isn’t it? Are you a Sheddon Freshman?”
Purdick nodded. “For a few days longer――until the grade markings are
handed out.”
“I’ve got a brother in the Freshman class. I wonder if you know him.
I’m Ruth McKnight.”
“Know Ollie McKnight? I should say I do! He’s one of the best friends
I’ve had this year.”
“That’s nice,” said the girl. “I guess you’re the ‘Purdy’ he’s been
writing about in his letters. You’re the Red-Wagon boy.”
Purdick hadn’t the slightest idea what she meant, but he was handsomely
forgetting the McKnight millions when he said: “I’m anything Ollie
wants to call me.”
That was all there was time for at the moment. Larry had been down in
the wreck getting one of the seat cushions for the lady to sit on while
she waited, and as he was climbing out, another auto came along headed
townward. The farmer driving it stopped on the farther edge of things
and called across to the “survivors” of the wreck.
“Hello, neighbors! Trouble to burn, h’ain’t ye? Anybody hurt?”
“Nothing serious,” said Dick’s uncle-by-marriage. “Luck was with us.”
“But ye can’t git nowhere without your wagon. Wait till I drive round
by t’other bridge and I’ll give ye a lift to town,” and he turned his
car and started back to make the detour.
While they waited, Larry and Purdick pulled broken timbers out of the
wrecked bridge and built warning road barriers on each side of the
creek. In a short time the kindly farmer drove up and the shipwrecked
ones were given places in his car. He told Larry and Dick they were
welcome to standing-room on the running boards, but they thanked him
and said they’d walk――that they were walking, anyway.
“Did you hear what that girl was telling me?” Purdick asked, after
Dick’s uncle had told them both to be sure and look him up at the hotel
in town, and the auto had sped away up the hill.
Larry shook his head. “No; I was talking to Mr. Starbuck.”
“She’s Ollie McKnight’s sister. She didn’t say how she came to be
with Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck, but I suppose the Starbucks and McKnights
are friends. Is Mr. Starbuck a rich man? But of course he is, or he
wouldn’t ride off and leave a six-thousand-dollar car lying in the
ditch without giving it a second look.”
Larry laughed.
“He can afford to, I guess. He and Dick’s father own a gold mine
together, and he is a director in one of the Brewster banks.”
“Huh!” said Purdick, and the tone in which he said it meant that Uncle
Billy Starbuck wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, at all the kind of rich
man that he had been taught from his infancy to hate and despise.
“Mr. Starbuck is everybody’s ‘Uncle Billy’ in Brewster,” Larry went on.
“He used to be a cowboy, they say, and after that he was a prospector
and had all sorts of hard times.”
“Huh!” said little Purdick again, and this time he added: “He doesn’t
look or act like a man that any amount of money would spoil.” Beyond
this he was silent until after they had topped the hill and the
university buildings were in sight. Then he said: “What d’you suppose
Ollie’s sister meant by calling me ‘the Red-Wagon boy’?”
Larry choked for a minute. Here was all sorts of a chance that, right
at the very last moment, the fat of the Red-Wagon scholarship was going
to be spilled in the fire.
“Did――did she call you that?” he stammered, clawing desperately to gain
time.
“Yes. She said Ollie had been calling me that in his letters home.”
“Just some of Knighty’s foolishment, I guess,” said Larry. “He’s taken
that way sometimes.”
The reply seemed to satisfy Purdick. Anyway, he didn’t ask any more
ticklish questions, then, or later when they were together in their
room after supper, hustling into their oldest clothes to take part in
the Freshman cap-burning, which was scheduled for eight o’clock on the
campus.
Purdick had said at first that he wouldn’t go to the cap-burning;
meaning thereby that he was still clinging to some of the old
prejudices and was disposed to hold aloof from mingling with the class
as a body. Though Larry had had prejudices enough of his own at the
beginning of the year, it was he who had finally persuaded Purdick not
to spoil the whole year by being “stuffy,” as he phrased it, at the
very end of things.
“Reckon the Soffies’ll make any bad breaks?” Purdick asked, struggling
into a shop jumper to take the place of his cast-off coat.
“They’d better not,” said Larry grimly. “We walloped them last fall and
we can do it again, if we have to. But the fellows tell me that the
Soffie interference at the cap-burnings has been dying out. I guess
they won’t monkey with us to-night.”
Larry’s prediction proved to be a true one. When they reached the
rendezvous on the campus, the big bonfire was already blazing, and
the men of their class were gathering in full force for the final
ceremony of their year as Freshmen. Though the cap-burning is strictly
a Freshman rite, the other classes were out to look on, but there was
no attempt made to interfere with the programme.
College songs were sung, the Sheddon series given, and Wally Dixon,
who, besides being a promising full-back, was pretty generally known
as the class joker, made a speech in which he paid what you might call
left-handed compliments to every fellow in the class whose name he
could remember. After Dixon had worked off every joke, old or new, that
he could think of, the men formed in line, single file, and marched
solemnly around the big fire. At the third circling the green caps were
flung into the blaze one by one as the procession passed a given point,
and the final event of the Freshman year was over.
It was at the moment of dispersal, after the last cap had gone up in
smoke, that Dick halted Purdick and Larry.
“Cal Rogers has lent me his car, and I want you two fellows to go over
to the Brandon House with me to meet Uncle Billy and Aunt Stella. They
seem to think, some way, that you saved their lives, or something, in
that auto accident they had.”
It was quite like both of the two invited ones that they should try to
squirm out, but Dick was insistent, though he did yield far enough to
give them time to go over to their room and change their clothes.
“All right; chase along and put on the glad rags,” he said. “I’ll be
at the Man-o’-War with the car as soon as you’re ready.” And so they
parted.
XIV
“WESTWARD HO!”
Dick picked Larry and Purdick up at Mrs. Grant’s a few minutes after
the cap burning, and the three drove over to town. Leaving the borrowed
Rogers car parked in front of the hotel, they found Mr. and Mrs.
Starbuck and Ruth McKnight in the mezzanine lounge. Ollie McKnight, who
had promised to bring a bunch of his frat brothers over after the cap
burning, had not yet shown up, so Dick, Larry and Purdick had the field
all to themselves for the time being.
Much to Larry’s comfort, as well as to little Purdick’s, the Starbucks
passed over the auto accident and the “rescue” lightly, and when the
group of six began to fall apart into pairs, with Dick’s aunt asking
him a lot of things about his first year’s experience in college, and
“Uncle Billy” cross-questioning Larry about how far he had gone in
geology and the natural sciences in his High School course, Purdick
found himself sort of abandoned to the tender mercies of the pudgy
little girl who had named herself as one of the prospective heirs to
the McKnight millions.