Jason drew the top bed in a bare-walled, bare-floored room with two
other boys, as green and countrified as was he, and he took turns with
them making up those beds, carrying water for the one tin basin, and
sweeping up the floor with the broom that stood in the corner behind
it. But even then the stark simplicity of his life was a luxury. His
meals cost him three dollars a week, and that most serious item began
to worry him, but not for long. Within two weeks he was meeting a part
of that outlay by delivering the morning daily paper of the town. This
meant getting up at half past three in the morning, after a sleep of
five hours and a half, but if this should begin to wear on him, he
would simply go earlier to bed; there was no sign of wear and tear,
however, for the boy was as tough as a bolt-proof black gum-tree back
in the hills, his capacity for work was prodigious, and the early
rising hour but lengthened the range of each day's activities. Indeed
Jason missed nothing and nothing missed him. His novitiate passed
quickly, and while his fund for "breakage" was almost gone, he had,
without knowing it, drawn no little attention to himself. He had
wandered innocently into "Heaven"--the seniors' hall--a satanic offence
for a freshman, and he had been stretched over a chair, "strapped," and
thrown out. But at dawn next morning he was waiting at the entrance and
when four seniors appeared he tackled them all valiantly. Three held
him while the fourth went for a pair of scissors, for thus far Jason
had escaped the tonsorial betterment that had been inflicted on most of
his classmates. The boy stood still, but in a relaxed moment of
vigilance he tore loose just as the scissors appeared, and fled for the
building opposite. There he turned with his back to the wall. "When I
want my hair cut, I'll git my mammy to do it or pay fer it myself," he
said quietly, but his face was white. When they rushed on, he thrust
his hand into his shirt and pulled it out with a mighty oath of
helplessness--he had forgotten his knife. They cut his hair, but it
cost them two bloody noses and one black eye. At the flag-rush later he
did not forget. The sophomores had enticed the freshmen into the
gymnasium, stripped them of their clothes, and carried them away,
whereat the freshmen got into the locker-rooms of the girls, and a few
moments later rushed from the gymnasium in bloomers to find the
sophomores crowded about the base of the pole, one of them with an axe
in his hand, and Jason at the top with his hand again in his shirt.
"Chop away!" he was shouting, "but I'll git SOME o' ye when this pole
comes down." Above the din rose John Burnham's voice, stern and angry,
calling Jason's name. The student with the axe had halted at the
unmistakable sincerity of the boy's threat.
"Jason," called Burnham again, for he knew what the boy meant, and the
lad tossed knife and scabbard over the heads of the crowd to the grass,
and slid down the pole. And in the fight that followed, the mountain
boy fought with a calm, half-smiling ferocity that made the wavering
freshmen instinctively surge behind him as a leader, and the onlooking
foot-ball coach quickly mark him for his own. Even at the first
foot-ball "rally," where he learned the college yells, Jason had been
singled out, for the mountaineer measures distance by the carry of his
voice and with a "whoop an' a holler" the boy could cover a mile. Above
the din, Jason's clear cry was, so to speak, like a cracker on the whip
of the cheer, and the "yell-master," a swaying figure of frenzied
enthusiasm, caught his eye in time, nodded approvingly, and saw in him
a possible yell-leader for the freshman class. After the rally the
piano was rolled joyously to the centre of the gymnasium and a
pale-faced lad began to thump it vigorously, much to Jason's
disapproval, for he could not understand how a boy could, or would,
play anything but a banjo or a fiddle. Then, with the accompaniment of
a snare-drum, there was a merry, informal dance, at which Jason and
Mavis looked yearningly on. And, as that night long ago in the
mountains, Gray and Marjorie floated like feathers past them, and over
Gray's shoulder the girl's eyes caught Jason's fixed on her, and
Mavis's fixed on Gray; so on the next round she stopped a moment near
them.
"I'm going to teach you to dance, Jason," she said, as though she were
tossing a gauntlet to somebody, "and Gray can teach Mavis."
"Sure," laughed Gray, and off they whirled again.
The eyes of the two mountaineers met, and they might have been back in
their childhood again, standing on the sunny river-bank and waiting for
Gray and Marjorie to pass, for what their tongues said then their eyes
said now:
"I seed you a-lookin' at him."
"'Tain't so--I seed you a-lookin' at her."
And it was true now as it was then, and then as now both knew it and
both flushed. Jason turned abruptly away, for he knew more of Mavis's
secret than she of his, and it was partly for that reason that he had
not yet opened his lips to her. He had seen no consciousness in Gray's
face, he resented the fact, somehow, that there was none, and his
lulled suspicions began to stir again within him. In Marjorie's face he
had missed what Mavis had caught, a fleeting spirit of mischief, which
stung the mountain girl with jealousy and a quick fierce desire to
protect Jason, just as Jason, with the same motive, was making up his
mind again to keep a close eye on Gray Pendleton. As for Marjorie, she,
too, knew more of Mavis's secret than Mavis knew of hers, and of the
four, indeed, she was by far the wisest. During the years that Jason
was in the hills she had read as on an open page the meaning of the
mountain girl's flush at any unexpected appearance of Gray, the dumb
adoration for him in her dark eyes, and more than once, riding in the
woods, she had come upon Mavis, seated at the foot of an oak, screened
by a clump of elder-bushes and patiently waiting, as Marjorie knew, to
watch Gray gallop by. She even knew how unconsciously Gray had been
drawn by all this toward Mavis, but she had not bothered her head to
think how much he was drawn until just before the opening of the
college year, for, from the other side of the hill, she, too, had
witnessed the meeting in the lane that Jason had seen, and had wondered
about it just as much, though she, too, had kept still. That the two
boys knew so little, that the two girls knew so much, and that each
girl resented the other's interest in her own cousin, was merely a
distinction of sex, as was the fact that matters would have to be made
very clear before Jason or Gray could see and understand. And for them
matters were to become clearer, at least--very soon.