infantile frankness that she said: “I’m awfully glad you got hold of
Ollie and made him give up something for once in his life. He used to
be so tremendously piggish, you know. How did you do it?”
Purdick swallowed hard once or twice and looked as if he were going to
choke. Finally he contrived to say: “You must be taking me for somebody
else, I guess. I never made your brother give up anything.”
“But didn’t Larry Donovan call you ‘Purdick’ out there by the wreck
when he was talking to Uncle Billy?”
“That’s my name,” said Purdick, still more or less in the condition of
a person who had stumbled over a wheelbarrow that he didn’t know was in
the way.
“Well, then; maybe you didn’t just make Ollie give up――of course you
didn’t, if it comes to that. But he _did_ give up, just the same, and
that is what really counts. He says now that he’s going to give up his
summer vacation so as to have money enough to do it again.”
Purdick’s stare had by this time become perfectly vacant.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said; “I don’t know any more than a crazy
person what you’re talking about.”
“How funny!” she returned. “I mean the Red-Wagon scholarship, of
course. It was the best thing that has ever happened to Ollie. He is
such a terrible spendthrift――for just foolish things, you know. And
when he wrote Daddy that he had taken the two thousand dollars that
Daddy sent him to buy a new car with to make a scholarship for you――he
called it the Red-Wagon scholarship because he was going to buy a red
automobile――and was meaning to go to work this summer so that he could
have his vacation money to make another scholarship for somebody else,
we were all just simply petrified, and――Why, what’s the matter?”
We may suppose that Purdick’s usually pale face was trying to turn all
the colors of the rainbow. So Ollie McKnight was the one who had given
him the two thousand dollars which was to help him through the Sheddon
course! If Larry had only told him in the beginning!
The rainbow flush was gone and his face was even paler than usual
when he forced himself to say: “Did you ever live in Steelville,
Pennsylvania?”
“Why, yes,” said the girl. “I was born there.”
“So was I,” said little Purdick, and his eyes were narrowing curiously.
Then came the next question: “Was your father the general manager of
the steel works there?”
“Not at first. But he was before we left to go and live in Chicago.”
It was all out now. Ollie’s father――and this girl’s――was the man whom
_his_ father’s fellow laborers had said was responsible for the loose
platform and the broken railing in the open-hearth furnace house, and
so, indirectly, at least, responsible for the death which had left two
orphans to fight their way as best they could with the bread-winner
gone. And it was McKnight money he had been living on!
Purdick never knew afterward how he managed to keep on talking to the
girl after this horrible revelation had battered its way into his
brain. The thing he remembered most clearly was the tremendous feeling
of relief he had when Ollie came up with half a dozen of the fellows
from his fraternity house, and he――Purdick――was able to slip aside and,
as you might say, efface himself. One thing, and only one, was clear in
his mind; he must never spend another penny of the money, and what he
had already spent must be paid back. From the way he looked at it, it
was blood-money――nothing more or less.
Fifteen minutes later Larry found his room-mate at the stairhead,
quietly making his escape.
“Making a sneak, are you?” said Larry, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Well, so am I, if anybody should ask you. Got to go home and pack in a
hurry. It’s ‘Westward Ho!’ for us on the early morning train.”
“You and Dick, you mean?”
“M-m, yes; for Dick and me.”
“I’ll help you pack,” Purdick offered, and not another word was said
until Larry was turning on the lights in the room they had been sharing
for something like half a year. Then it was that Purdick, dropping
wearily into a chair, said his say.
“I’m not blaming you any, Larry; I guess you’ve been doing only what
you had to do. But if you had told me at first that it was Ollie
McKnight who was putting up the money for me, I’d have died before I
would have taken it.”
“Why, Purdy!” exclaimed Larry. And then: “Did Ruth McKnight tell you?”
Purdick nodded.
“She didn’t know that I didn’t know. Neither did she know that my
father was killed in the Steelville Furnace at the time when her father
and Ollie’s was the general manager.”
“Well?” said Larry, failing to see the connection.
“Don’t you see?” said Purdick harshly. “Wasn’t he my father’s murderer?
Wasn’t that loose plank and broken railing reported time and again,
and nothing was done about them?”
Now there had been a time, and not so many months back, at that, when
Larry Donovan, taking a leaf out of the book of his experience as an
apprentice and helper in the railroad shop at home where he had heard
some of the men constantly talking about the greed of the capitalists
and their disregard for the comfort and safety of their workmen, would
have given at least a qualified assent to little Purdick’s bitter
charge. But he was no longer the one-sided fellow he had been when his
college mates had called him “The Offish Worm.”
“Let’s see a minute,” he temporized. “Was it positively known that Mr.
McKnight had been told about the loose board?”
“Put yourself in his place,” was Purdick’s retort. “If you were in
charge of a mill or a furnace where men’s lives were at stake, wouldn’t
you consider it a part of your job to see such reports and act upon
them?”
“I know,” Larry countered quickly, “but I’ve worked in a shop long
enough to know that a lot of things that ought to go to the man higher
up never get there. We had a foreman who was always jumping on the
men for kicking about bad safety appliances. I don’t believe he ever
reported half of ’em to anybody who had the authority to order them
fixed.”
It was just here that the real miracle began to show itself, like
the face of the sun crawling out of the shadow of a total eclipse.
Though he hardly realized it, and would, perhaps, have refused to
admit it, the college year, so different from the year in which he
had worked and failed, had planted a lot of new things in Charles
Purdick. The timely help that had come at a moment when he was so
sick and discouraged that it seemed as if he must give up the fight
for an education; the way in which Larry had stood by him; the frank
and helpful friendship of such “rotten rich” fellows as Dick Maxwell,
Wally Dixon, Cal Rogers and Ollie McKnight; recollections of all these
“mollifications,” if you could call them so, came crowding in when the
old class-and-mass hatred tried to get in its word. And in the end it
was the “mollifications” that won out――at least, in the matter of Ollie
McKnight’s generous gift.
“I――I guess I can’t go back on Ollie, after all,” he admitted, finally.
“I was savage at first――when his sister told me. I kept telling myself
that I’d work my fingers to the bone to pay that money back, and that
I’d starve before I’d use another penny of it. I――I guess that was just
plain, low-down meanness in me, Larry.”
“Now you’re talking like a sure-enough man!” said Larry, chuckling
as delightedly over the victory as he would if he had stood in Ollie
McKnight’s shoes. “Let’s call it a locked door, and if I were you, I’d
never let Ollie know that his little scheme for keeping the thing dark
has gone blooey. Seems to me that’s the whitest thing to do.”
“You’re right; you’re mighty nearly always right, Larry,” said Purdick,
jumping up to help Larry get his trunk out of the closet. “Now if I
were only sure of getting a job this summer――”
“What did you have in mind?” queried Larry, as craftily as if he were
trying to trap somebody into betraying a secret.
“It’s the big city and a hot office for mine,” said Purdick, as Larry
began to throw his clothes pell mell into the open trunk.
“Bet you a dollar you never see the inside of an office this whole
summer,” was the joshing reply.
“I wish I didn’t have to. But that’s where I’ll land. I’m not husky
enough for anything else, unless it’s slinging dishes in a restaurant,
or something like that.”
“Well,” Larry went on in the same sort of triumphant joshing tone,
“I’ll bet you another dollar that you _do_ sling dishes this summer, a
part of the time――only they’ll be tin ones. Take me up?”
“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” said little Purdick; and he
didn’t.
“Of course you don’t, and I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks another
minute. You’re going to Colorado with Dick and me.”
“Who――who said I was?”
“Mr. William Starbuck said so――and he meant it. Dick and I are going
to put in the whole summer prospecting in the Hophra Mountains for
tungsten, bauxite, and the chrome-bearing ores. Uncle Billy is
financing the job, and he came down here to-day especially to ask
Dick if he didn’t want to pick out a couple of his classmates for
bunkies and go to it. It will be simply one long picnic; big woods, big
mountains, big game if we want it, and camping out all summer long.”
“Y-yes,” stammered little Purdick, “but――but where do I come in?”
Larry laughed uproariously, in a fashion that Old Sheddon had taught
him.
“By the door of the cooking fire, if anybody should ask you. The minute
Uncle Billy said ‘a couple of your classmates’ Dick grabbed for you.
So, any time you get sore at us, you can square things by starving us
to death. Neither Dick nor I could cook a decent meal, not if our lives
depended on it. And, oh, boy! when you come back after a summer in
our good old mountains, your best friend won’t know you. If we don’t
put some meat on those little old rat’s bones of yours it’ll be the
queerest thing that ever happened, in the Hophras or out of ’em. Come
on and let’s get your trunk out. We catch the five-o’clock Limited in
the morning. For, of course, you _are_ going with us?”
“Going?” said little Purdick, and his pale blue eyes were shining; “I’d
crawl on my hands and knees all the way to Colorado to get the chance
to go!” Then: “Oh, gosh, Larry! a whole summer out of doors: you don’t
know what that means to me. If――if you’ll just haul off and give me a
swift kick, so that I’ll know I’m not asleep and dreaming――――”
“I know,” Larry laughed. “That was just the way I felt when Uncle Billy
fired it at Dick and me over yonder in the hotel. But it’s all wool and
a yard wide. We go and you go. Now get to work on that trunk or it’ll
be midnight before we can begin to cork it orf in our ’ammicks. For
it’s Westward Ho! with a rumbelow, and――and――oh, shucks! I never can
remember the rest of it. Get busy and pack!”
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to
follow the text that they illustrate.
――Reduced the page numbers in the Table of Contents, for Chapters
VII to XIV, by 1 to match the corresponding chapter beginning
page number in the content.
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
End of Project Gutenberg's Dick and Larry: Freshmen, by Francis Lynde