CHAPTER I

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Charles

Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

T. HAVILAND HICKS SENIOR

BY J. RAYMOND ELDERDICE

TO MASTER LLOYD ELDERDICE

CONTENTS

I. HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN

II. "LEAVE IT TO HICKS"

III. HICKS' PRODIGIOUS PRODIGY

IV. QUOTING SCOOP SAWYER'S LETTER

V. HICKS MAKES A DECISION

VI. HICKS MAKES A SPEECH

VII. HICKS STARTS ANOTHER MYSTERY

VIII. COACH CORRIDAN SURPRISES THE ELEVEN

IX. THEOPHILUS' MISSIONARY WORK

X. THOR'S AWAKENING

XI. "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL"

XII. THEOPHILUS BETRAYS HICKS

XIII. HICKS--CLASS KID--YALE '96

XIV. THE GREATER GOAL

XV. HICKS HAS A "HUNCH"

XVI. THANKS TO CAESAR NAPOLEON

XVII. HICKS MAKES A RASH PROPHECY

XVIII. T. HAVILAND HICKS, JR.'S HEADWORK

XIX. BANNISTER GIVES HICKS A SURPRISE PARTY

XX. "VALE, ALMA MATER!"

T. HAVILAND HICKS, SENIOR

CHAPTER I

HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN

"Oh, a bold, bad man was Chuckwalla Bill--

An' he lived in a shanty on Tom-cat Hill;

Ten notches on the six-gun he toted on his hip--

For he'd sent ten buckos on the One-way Trip!"

Big Butch Brewster, captain and full-back of the Bannister College football

squad, his behemoth bulk swathed in heavy blankets and crowded into a

narrow bunk, shifted his vast tonnage restlessly. He was dreaming of the

wild and woolly West, and like a six-reel Western drama thrown on the

screen in a moving-picture show, he visioned in his slumbers a vivid and

spectacular panorama.

The first lurid scene was the Deserted Limited held up at a tank station in

the great Mojave Desert by a lone, masked bandit who winged the dreaming

Butch in the shoulder, the latter being an express guard who resisted.

After the desperado, Two-Gun Steve, had forced the engineer to run the

train back to a siding, he had ordered Butch to vamoose. Quite naturally,

then, the collegian next found himself staggering across the arid expanse,

until at last, half dead from a burning thirst, seeking vainly for a

water-hole, the vast stretch of sandy, sagebrush-studded wastes shimmered

into a gorgeous ocean of sparkling blue waters. Then, as he collapsed on

the scorching-hot sand, helpless, the cool water so near, suddenly the

scene shifted.

In quick and vivid succession, Butch Brewster beheld a burning stockade

besieged by howling Indians, and a frontier town shot up by recklessly

riding cowboys on a jamboree. Then he became a tenderfoot, badgered by

yelling, shooting roisterers, and later a sheriff, bravely leading his

posse to a sensational battle with that same Two-Gun Steve and his gang,

entrenched in a rock-bound mountain defile.

Finally, he stood with hands above his head in company with other

passengers of the Sagebrush Stagecoach, while a huge, red-shirted Westerner

with a fierce black mustache and a six-shooter in each hand belching

bullets at Butch's dancing feet, roared out huskily: "Oh--I'm a ring-tailed

roarer (_bang-bang_)! I'm a rip-snortin', high-falutin', loop-the-loopin'

_bad_ man (_bang-bang_)! I'm wild an' woolly, an' full o' fleas, an' hard

to curry below the knees--I'm a roarin' wild-cat, an' it's my night to howl

(_bang-bang_)! Yip-yip-yip-_yeee_!"

Big Butch, opening his eyes and starting up, gazed about him in sheer

surprise; for an instant, in that state of bewilderment that comes with

sudden awakening, he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse,

and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at

the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed

in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them--Western cowboys,

perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside

was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he

had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn

voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling character, and accompanied by

that same banjo twanging, which tortured the campus, and bothered would-be

studious youths!

"I'm not in a moving-picture show," Butch informed himself, as he donned

khaki trousers, football sweater, and heavy shoes. "I'm not on a Western

ranch, either. I'm in the sleep-shack of Camp Bannister, the football

training-camp of the Bannister College squad! Those fellows in the bunks

are not cowboys, Indians, and bandits--they are my teammates! I did dream

stuff that would shame a Wild West scenario, but I understand it all

now--my dreams were influenced by T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.!"

At that dramatic moment, to substantiate his statement, the raucous voice,

accompanied by resounding chords strummed on a banjo, sounded again. The

vocal and instrumental chaos was frequently punctured by revolver reports,

as the torturesome Caruso outside roared:

"Oh, Chuckwalla Bill thought life was sweet--

Till he met up with Sure-shot Pete;

A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw--

But Sure-shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"

The pachydermic Butch, fully dressed--and awake, raging in his wrath like

an active volcano, glanced at his watch, and discovered that it was exactly

five A.M.! Intensely pacified by this knowledge, he lumbered toward the

bunkhouse door and flung it open, determined to crush the pestersome youth

who thus unfeelingly disturbed the quietude of Camp Bannister at such an

unearthly hour! However, his grim purpose was temporarily thwarted--before

him spread a beautiful panorama, a vast canvas painted in rich hues and

colors, that indescribably charming masterpiece of nature, entitled dawn.

Butch, gazing from the bunkhouse doorway toward the pebbly shore of the

placid lake stretching out for two miles before him, beheld Old Sol,

blood-red, peeping above the wooded hills on the far-off, opposite strand

of Lake Conowingo; the luminous orb laid a flaming pathway across the

shimmering waters, and golden bars of light, like gleaming fingers

outstretched, fell athwart the tall pines that towered on the high bluff

back of the camp. The glorious sunshine, succeeding a flood of rosy color,

inundated the scene; it bathed in a gorgeous radiance the early autumn

woods, it illumined the bunkhouse, and another rude shanty known to the

squad as the grub-shack, it poured down on old Hinky-Dink, the ancient

negro cookee, setting the breakfast tables just outside the canvas

cook-tent.

"Deed, cross mah heart, Mistah Butch," grinned old Hinky-Dink, seeing, as

a motion picture director would express it, "Wrath registered on the

countenance" of Butch Brewster, "Ah done tole dat young Hicks dat a bird

what cain't sing an' will sing mus' be made _not_ to sing! Ah done info'med

him dat yo'-all was layin' fo' him, cause he done bus' up yo' sleep!"

A jay bird, a flashing bit of vivid blue, shot from a tall pine, jeering

shrilly at Butch; out on the lake, a trout leaped above the water for an

infinitesimal second, its shining scales gleaming in the sunshine. From the

cook-tent, where old Hinky-Dink grumbled at the frying pan, the appetizing

odor of frying fish assailed the football captain, softening his wrath.

High above the shanties, on a tall flagpole made from a straight young

pine, floated a big gold and green banner, its bright colors gleaming in

the sunshine; it bore the words:

CAMP BANNISTER

TRAINING CAMP

THE FOOTBALL SQUAD

BANNISTER COLLEGE

Head Coach Corridan, smashing the precedent that had made former Gold and

Green squads have their training camp at Bannister College, had brought

the Varsity and second-string stars to this camp on the shore of Lake

Conowingo, in the Pennsylvania mountains. For two weeks, one of which had

passed, they were to train at Camp Bannister, until college officially

opened; swimming, hunting, cross-country runs, and a healthful outdoor

existence would give the athletes superb condition, and daily scrimmages on

the level field back of the bluff rounded out an eleven that promised to be

the strongest in Bannister history.

As big, good-natured Butch Brewster stood in the bunkhouse doorway, his

wrath at the pestiferous Hicks forgotten, in his rapture at the glorious

dawn, he saw something that showed why his dreams had been of the wild

West! The expression of indignation, however, yielded to one of humorous

affection, as he gazed toward the shore.

"I can't be angry with Hicks!" breathed Butch, beholding a spectacle more

impressive than dawn. "So, the irrepressible wretch has Coach Corridan's

revolvers, used in starting our training sprints, and a lot of blank

cartridges! He is giving an imitation of a Western bad man. No wonder

I dreamed of Indians, cowboys, and hold-ups; I'll have revenge on the

heartless villain, routing me out at five!"

He saw a massive rock, rising thirty feet in air, its sheer walls scaled

only by a rope-ladder the collegians had rigged up on one side. Atop of

"Lookout There!" as the campers humorously designated the rock, roosted

a youth who possessed the colossal structure of a splinter, and whose

cherubic countenance was decorated with a Cheshire cat grin. Quite unaware

that his riotous efforts had brought out the wrathful Butch Brewster,

the youthful narrator of Chuckwalla Bill's stormy career continued his

excessively noisy séance.

His costume was strictly in character with his song. He wore a sombrero,

picked up on his Exposition trip the past vacation, a lurid red

outing-shirt, and he had wrapped a blanket around each locomotive limb to

imitate a cowboy's chaps. Two revolvers suspended from a loosened belt, _à

la_ wild West, and as Butch stared, the embryo Western bad man twanged a

banjo noisily, and roared the concluding stanza of his desperado hero's

history:

"Said Chuckwalla Bill, 'Oh, boys, plant me

With my boots on--on the wide prair-eee'--

Where the coyotes howl, they planted Bill--

An' so far as _I_ know, he's sleepin' there still!"

"Here they come," grinned Butch, hearing a tumult in the bunkhouse, and

a confused Babel of voices. "Hicks has awakened the camp. Now watch the

fellows wreak summary vengeance on his toothpick frame!"

From the sleep-shack, aroused at that weird hour by the clamor of the

irrepressible youth, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., tumbled others of the squad,

in varying stages of _déshabille_; big Beef McNaughton, right half-back,

Roddy Perkins, the Titian-haired right-end, Pudge Langdon, a ponderous

tackle, and Monty Merriweather, a clean-cut, aggressive candidate for left

end. From within, other wrathy youths howled vociferous protests at their

tormentor:

"Stop that noise; put your muzzle on again, Hicks!"--"Where's the fire?

Say, Hicks, muffle your exhaust!"--"Say, Coach, must we endure this day and

night?"

The bunkhouse fairly erupted angry collegians, boiling out like bees

swarming from a disturbed hive; Hefty Hollingsworth, the Herculean

center-rush. Biff Pemberton, left half-back, Bunch Bingham, Tug Cardiff,

and Buster Brown, three huge last-year substitutes; second-string players,

Don Carterson, Cherub Challoner, Skeet Wigglesworth, and Scoop Sawyer. A

dozen others, from sheer laziness, hugged their bunks devotedly, despite

the terrific turmoil outside.

"It's a disgrace, a _howling_ shame!" exploded Beef, his elephantine frame

swathed in blankets to conceal a lack of vestiture, "Last night, until

midnight, that graceless wretch roosted on 'Lookout There' and because the

glorious moonlight made him sentimental and slushy, he twanged his banjo

and warbled such mushy stuff as 'My Love is young and fair. My Love has

golden hair!' When does he expect us to sleep?"

"He doesn't!" explained Monty Merriweather, with succinct lucidity,

grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold

shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock,

while _I_ climb up the rope-ladder and close with him! Then some of you

prehistoric pachyderms ascend, and we'll chuck that pestersome insect into

the cold, cold lake--"

"Done!" chuckled Butch Brewster, delightedly. So, while he, Beef

McNaughton, Hefty Hollingsworth, and others beguiled the jeering Hicks,

expressing in dynamic, red-hot sentences their exact opinions of his

perfidy, the athletic Monty imitated a mountain-scaling Italian soldier.

He climbed stealthily up the swaying rope-ladder; nearer and nearer to the

unsuspecting youth he crept, while the cherubic Hicks, to tantalize the

group below, again burst forth:

"_Whoop-eee_! I'm a bold, _bad_ man (_bang-bang_)! I got ten notches on my

ole six-gun--I'm a _killer_. I wings a man before breakfast every day! I

got a private burying-ground, where I plants my victims (_bang-bang_)!

Yip-yip-yip-_yee_! Oh, I'm a--_Ouch_, Monty--leggo me--Oh, I'll be

good--why didn't I pull that rope-ladder up here? Don't bust my

banjo--don't let Butch get me--"

Monty Merriweather, reaching the flat top of the rock, had courageously

flung himself, without regard for the Bad Man's desperate record, on the

startled Hicks, whose first thought was for his beloved banjo. While he

held the blithesome tormentor helpless, Butch, Beef, and Roddy Perkins

climbed the rope-ladder, and the grinning youth was soon in their clutches,

while the collegians below, like a Roman, mob aroused by the oratory of Mr.

Mark Antony, howled for revenge:

"Bust the old banjo over his head, Butch!"--"Sing to him, Beef--that's

an _awful_ revenge on Hicks!"--"Tie him to the rock--make him miss his

breakfast!"

"Hicks," growled Butch, eyeing his sunny comrade ominously, "you ought to

be tarred and feathered, and shot at sunrise! When Bannister opens, you

will be a Senior, and you'll disgrace '19's dignity! This is a sample of

what we have endured at college for three years, and the worst is yet to

come! You have committed the awful atrocity of awakening Camp Bannister

at five A. M. with your ridiculous imitation, of a Western desperado. To

dampen your ardor, we will chuck you into the cold lake--just as you are!"

"Help! Assistance! Aid! Succor!" shouted the happy-go-lucky Hicks, as the

behemoth Butch and Beef seized him, swinging him aloft with ludicrous ease,

"Police! Fire! Murder! Take care of my banjo, Monty. Tell all the fellows

at old Bannister I died game, and plant Hair-Trigger Bill with his boots

on! _Oooo_, Beef, Butch, _have a heart_, that water is _cold_!"

T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., relieved of banjo and revolvers, but his

shadow-like structure still clad in shoes, trousers, with imitation "chaps"

and flamboyant red shirt, with his classic head still adorned by

the sombrero, was swung back and forth by the two bulky football

stars--once--twice--

"_Three_--Let him go!" shouted Butch Brewster, and like a falling meteor,

the splinter-like youth, who had already fallen from grace, shot from the

rock, head-first, disappearing with a spectacular splash in the icy waters

of Lake Conowingo. Knowing Hicks to be as much at home in the water as a

fish in an aquarium, the hilarious squad on shore prepared to jeer his

reappearance above the water; however, their program was interrupted by

old Hinky-Dink, who stood in the cook-tent doorway, belaboring a dishpan

lustily with a soup-ladle, and shouting:

"Breakfus' am served; fus' an' las' call fo' breakfus; all dem what am late

don't git no breakfus!"

"Breakfast!" exclaimed Monty Merriweather, who, with Roddy, Butch, and

Beef, remained on the rock, despite the summons of the Cookee. "Hurry up,

Hicks, I'm ravenous. Say, Butch, suppose all that Western regalia makes him

water-logged; he's a terribly long while down there! Didn't he look like

the hero in a moving-picture feature? We've given him the water-cure, but

he will do that same stunt over again. That sunny-souled Hicks is simply

Incorrigible!"

A second later, the grinning, cheery countenance of T. Haviland Hicks,

Jr., shot above the water, and simultaneously with his appearance, just as

though he had been chanting below the surface, for the entertainment of the

finny denizens of Lake Conowingo, the irrepressible youth roared:

"A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw--

But Sure-Shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"