Part 7

"This, Mr. Catherwood," he opined finally, "is, as you see, 'back-hand.' Moreover, it is quite clear to me that it was penned by some one who used his left hand, although he is, naturally, what we call 'right handed.'"

The professor remembered his "The Count of Monte Cristo."

"Ah----"

At Catherwood's exclamation he looked up quickly.

"That's why I could not identify it," the young man added.

"But, Mr. Catherwood," the assistant professor continued, "isn't it rather odd that you did not see--did not recognize the two men who assailed you; for of course there were two--the note reads----"

He looked down at the crumpled sheet again--"'We shall call at your room this evening.' Isn't it rather strange?" He awaited Catherwood's reply, calmly.

"I think there was but one!"

The assistant professor started.

"_One!_" he exclaimed. "Why it is more mysterious than ever--and you didn't see him, Mr. Catherwood?"

"No, sir, I did not."

"You did not?"

"No, sir...."

"Well, _I_ declare," ejaculated Mrs. Turner.

Mr. Lowe smoothed over the note and folded it. "I shall take this," he said--"that is, if you do not mind."

"No--no--of course not----"

"And, Mr. Catherwood," he added, "I am to assume, am I, that you can throw no light on this--on this most mysterious matter...?"

At that instant a knock fell on the door.

"Come in," Catherwood called.

The door was pushed back and a young man with a note-book in his hand stood on the threshold.

"I'm Green," he explained. "I'm on the _'Varsity News_. You're Catherwood, aren't you? Yes; well, we got wind of the case. Fellow heard your landlady yell and telephoned us. What does it amount to----?"

The assistant professor, squaring his shoulders, assumed the privilege of answering the breezy youth.

"Perhaps," he said, "it might be as well not to go into details just now. Mr. Catherwood was assaulted in his room last night and was found gagged and tied in his bed not an hour ago. It is a case for official investigation. Mr. Catherwood was made, much against his will, naturally, to miss an important examination this morning--I may say a very important examination. There is a meeting of the faculty to be held to-night when I shall present the facts of this most shocking affair as I have gathered them and I am confident that an official investigation will follow. You may say as much...."

The reporter had been busy with his note-book.

Now looking up at Catherwood, he asked: "What's the matter with his face?"

"I believe it is iodine," the assistant professor replied, frigidly.

Little Green grinned.

"You're a sure beaut," he exclaimed.

"I think that will be all," observed the assistant professor drily.

"Oh yes, yes--that's all--thank you very much; good-morning." And the journalist vanished.

The eyes of Catherwood and the assistant professor met.

"I think I should wash my face, if I were you," suggested Mr. Lowe. "You may be able to remove some of the stain."

Catherwood went to the stand in the corner of the room. For a space he sputtered the water in the bowl. "Any better?" he asked, at length.

Mr. Lowe shook his head sadly.

"No--it won't come off. You had best see a doctor."

He rose.

"Now, Mr. Catherwood," he said, "as I have said, this is a case for the most thorough investigation. You need not give yourself any uneasiness. The University authorities will, you may be sure, sift matters to the bottom. You have been maltreated; abused, tortured, and, I may say, disfigured."

Catherwood, with a sigh, sank into the Morris chair by the window.

"I shall take the matter up this evening at faculty meeting. Mark my word, we shall discover your assailant or assailants at once; for despite your belief to the contrary, it is my opinion that two men, if, indeed, not more, had a hand in your undoing. We shall see. I shall talk of the case to several this afternoon and I suppose you would have no hesitancy in appearing at the meeting to-night, if your presence there should be deemed desirable."

"No," Catherwood replied, weakly, "not if they want me." The hand he passed across his brow trembled.

"I observe you are nervous," the assistant professor said. "Get a little rest this afternoon." He shook his head slowly. "It is very unfortunate," he added, "that the president is away; however, I am confident we shall have the case cleared up before his return. You, of course, Mr. Catherwood, have no reason not to assist us in every way possible?"

"None at all." The young man leaned back and closed his eyes, and sighed deeply.

"However, I must say, you have not seemed to me as interested as----"

Catherwood sat upright.

"I'm half sick," he cried, "half sick. It's so strange. I know no one who would have a reason for hazing me; I can't understand it; it's like a bad dream."

He rose and paced back and forth the length of the room.

"Ah, yes, to be sure," the assistant professor murmured, consolingly. "Now, I shall go. You will hear from me later--perhaps very soon."

Catherwood stood motionless in the middle of the floor until he heard the outer door close, then he descended the stairs slowly, and encountering Mrs. Turner in the kitchen begged the privilege of taking dinner at her table.

"This face," he explained. "I can't go to 'Pret's' with this face."

And she, gentle motherly soul, bade him be seated, and fed him well, and consoled him; while Willie, fascinated by the streaked and horrid face of the self-bidden guest, allowed his rice-pudding to grow cold while he gazed at him.

III

Little Green, the pink-cheeked reporter of the _'Varsity News_, was not that at all, and on this occasion he gave his name the lie direct.

Little Green possessed a nasal organ keenly atuned to news. As he hastened back down town after his summary dismissal from Catherwood's room, he calculated accurately the latent story value in the assistant professor's indefinite account of his pupil's case.

He glanced at his watch, snapped the case, thrust it back into his pocket--and ran.

He estimated the time with reference to the publication hour of the Detroit afternoon papers.

He saw before him, as plainly as he saw the snow banks, one hour and thirty minutes. The period was material, tangible. Little Green, as he turned into Main Street and sped on toward Huron Street, not only saw it, but felt it; almost _tasted_ it.

"Here, you!" he cried, bursting in upon the indolent operator in the little, box-like telegraph office.

He seized a block of blue-white paper that lay on the counter.

"What's up?" asked the operator dreamily.

By way of answer little Green thrust a sheet of the blue-white paper at him.

"Get that on the wire--hurry--it's a scoop."

The operator smiled sadly and checked off the words. He glanced up at the clock--regulated electrically from the observatory--and scribbled the "filing time" at the bottom of the sheet.

Little Green fidgeted.

"Say, cancha hurry?" he asked anxiously.

"Plenty time," replied the operator calmly; and so there was, but little Green was enveloped in a haze of zeal that set perspectives all awry.

Presently the little machine on the glass-topped table began to click.

Little Green, standing at the counter, counted the clicks.

_Clickety--click--click--clickety--click--clickety._

"You got 'em?" he asked eagerly.

"Yep." Calmly.

Little Green emitted a sigh of relief and proceeded, carefully but hastily, to fill sheet after sheet torn from the block of blue-white paper. He scratched out, wrote in, amplified, condensed. He wrote in many tiny paragraphs; for little Green was wise beyond his years.

And while he wrote, oblivious of the _clickety--click--click_ of the little machine on the table, of the droning tick of the electrically regulated clock, of the rasp of his pencil on the paper, the indolent operator looked up.

"Rush three hundred," he called with a yawn.

Little Green grinned. Another page and he brought his "story" to a snappy end with a tiny, quick little sentence.

He knew the run of his own "copy."

He was conscious that he had exceeded the order by sixty words, approximately, and he hesitated an instant. Then thrusting the numbered sheets at the operator, he exclaimed: "Here, take it; I'll wait for another order."

In half an hour it came. It was for a photograph of Catherwood.

How little Green procured that photograph even after Catherwood's threat that he'd kill him if he used it, is a story in itself--a story for another time. But in less than an hour after the receipt of the telegraphic request it was in the post-office bearing on its plain wrapper a special delivery stamp.

It has been suggested that little Green was wise beyond his years. He was just wise enough not to tell _all_ his story to an afternoon paper at so late an hour.

So, with a confidence born of a short but crowded experience, he sent out by wire eight queries to as many morning papers in the middle- and the further-west.

Meanwhile that occurred which little Green had been far-sighted enough to expect would occur.

The tall, angular, boy-faced agent of the Associated Press in Detroit wandered into the office of the _Journal_ shortly after one o'clock.

Passing the city desk he tickled the man sitting there, on his round, shiny, bald spot, and as he looked up with a scowl, asked blandly:

"Anything doing?"

The city editor growled and resumed reading the typewritten page that lay before him.

The agent wandered into the office of the state editor, where a man with long hair sat, fidgeting in a swivel chair and mumbling to himself under his breath.

"Anything?" asked the agent, tersely, at the same time reaching for the proofs that dangled from a hook at the side of the desk.

The state editor looked up, scowling. He disliked being annoyed when talking to himself.

"Pretty good one from Ann Arbor," he snapped. "Find it there."

The agent ran hastily through the proofs and retained one. The others he hung back on the hook.

"Much obliged," he said, and strolled out of the office.

At six o'clock that night the story was "on the A. P. wire," and being ticked off in every newspaper telegraph room from Portland to Portland, for the night manager at Chicago had called it "bully good stuff."

And when it came clicking into those offices to which little Green had wired shortly after noon, the desk men in charge recognized the incompleteness of the "A. P. story," and forthwith telegraphed their unknown correspondent for more. Regular correspondents were totally disregarded. Little Green was supreme; and no one realized that supremacy more keenly than little Green himself. He was the king of the night with his story; and sheet after sheet he filled with his jagged, irregular chirography, and the dreamy operator kept up with him.

But there came an end to his work at last, as there comes an end to all things; and when the end came in this particular case, little Green whistled, slipped his pencil into his pocket and sauntered out of the telegraph box jauntily. He did not recall until he reached the office of the _'Varsity News_ that he had not eaten since morning. He glanced at his watch. He would write the "story" for his own paper now--and then--Supper.

All of which may explain to the reader of this veracious tale why it was that the president of the University, as he glanced over his _Providence Journal_ in Providence the next morning, suddenly started in his chair, and calling for a telegraph blank sent this message to the dean of the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts:

"Take no action in Catherwood case. Sift it. Leave for Ann Arbor at once."

And likewise it may account for the sudden exclamation of the dean himself, as at breakfast, earlier that same morning in Ann Arbor, his eye chanced to fall upon a column-and-one-half story with a two column display head, that blazed forth to all the world many details unknown to him in the case of Frederick Edward Catherwood.

He had attended the faculty meeting the night before, when the case was threshed out to the finest grain, and he had heard no such explanation of the affair as stared at him now in cold black type from the front page of his morning paper.

A _secret_ secret society in the University, the function of which was to haze every one big or little who for one reason or another, might fall under its bann! He had never heard of any such organization. And yet--and yet----

Oh, little Green! Oh, little Green! Little did you dream to what ill end your rare invention, your insane imaginings, would result!

For, after partaking that night of a luncheon and dinner rolled into one big steak in "Tuts," little Green sought his room where he slept the sleep of vigorous youth till a beam of the winter sun, shining through his alcove window, fell athwart his eyes and wakened him.

As for Catherwood, he had not been commanded to appear before the faculty. Indeed, of what transpired at that momentous meeting he never knew; that is to say, definitely, but every one learned, in a general way, something of the wordy resolutions that were passed and the learned opinions that were there put forth, all of which tended to no purpose save to obscure more thickly, rather than illumine more brilliantly, the strange affair.

The dean presided--a large man with reddish hair and pleasant eyes and a jerky, nervous manner.

Inasmuch as it was assistant professor Lowe who had found Catherwood, gagged and tied, that _savant_ was asked to give his opinion, first.

With much natural evasion of the subject, and a cloud of "ahs" and "aws," he explained as lucidly as his slow moving mind would permit how he had rushed into the room to discover his pupil stowed away upon the bed behind a barricade of chairs.

"And, professor," inquired the dean, "you can throw no light upon the case; you have learned nothing--that is to say--oh--ah--nothing that might serve as a clue to the apprehension of the offenders?"

The room became as still as the royal ante-chamber whilst the king dies beyond the arras.

The assistant professor fumbled in his pockets and finally drew out the crumpled note that Catherwood had given him, which he offered the dean, meekly, as becomes a serf in the presence of his master.

The dean pursed his lips and looked down at the sheet.

"Oh--ah," he muttered. And then added, passing it back to the assistant professor, "I--oh--ah--make nothing out of this--nothing at all. It is very simple. It shows that Mr.--oh--ah--Catherwood was assaulted by two--two--persons. But, _that_, gentlemen, we already know. What we now wish to learn is: _Who were they?_"

The assistant professor shook his head, wearily.

"Yes, yes," he muttered.

At this point an aged man at the rear of the room rose, and clearing his throat asked in a dry, metallic cackle: "Am I to understand that the young gentleman is a member of a fraternity?"

It was quite apparent that no one appreciated clearly the significance of the old gentleman's question.

The dean stared inquiringly over his glasses at the assistant professor of history.

"He is not----"

"He is not," echoed the dean.

"Oh," cackled the old gentleman and sat down. His prejudice against fraternities was well known. Several of the younger men present, who wore their pins on occasion, glanced at one another and smiled.

"It would--oh--ah--seem to me," began the dean, when he was interrupted by that dry, metallic cackle a second time.

"Does he contemplate joining a fraternity?"

"No," Lowe shouted.

"Oh"--and the old gentleman sat down again.

In the second row there rose a round, boy-faced man with a pompadour, who, after clearing his throat, began:

"It would seem to me, gentlemen, that we are on the wrong track; what? It would seem to me that there is a way--a sure way--of apprehending the villains who seem to have worsted our young friend, Mr. Catherwood; what?"

Every man in the room leaned forward, and again the hush became awesome.

"And it is?" observed the dean, very soberly.

"_That we compare the handwriting of that note with all the students' signatures in our possession; what?_"

There ensued a general exchange of puzzled looks and then the dean exclaimed:

"A very good idea, my dear professor--oh--ah--a most ingenious idea; but--oh--ah--would _you_ be willing to undertake to make the suggested comparisons?"

"Well I thought the clerks in the registrar's office might----"

"Very good--_very_ good!" said the dean--"I believe there are about thirty-five hundred such signatures--oh--ah--quite a week's work for the entire office force--quite----"

Several of his colleagues openly congratulated the boy-faced genius who seemed to them to be the only man with a plan worthy of adoption.

Amid the general exchange of felicitations before which the genius blushed and stammered his confusion, assistant professor Lowe rose and caught the eye of the dean.

"Order--oh--ah--order, gentlemen!" the latter called. "Professor Lowe seems to have a word----"

"It's just a word," was the reply, "but, gentlemen, the plan suggested can be of no avail and for a very simple reason----" He looked down at the boy-faced junior professor in astronomy who had formulated the plan referred to and who looked up at him, weakly, sufferingly.

"And what is the reason?" inquired the dean severely, loth to have a theory declared impracticable which he had seemed to favor.

"It is that this note was written--ingeniously I am willing to admit--by a right handed person, who, to disguise his writing, wrote with his left hand in what we call the 'back-hand' style. All writings, under such circumstances, are alike. My authority, gentlemen, is Dumas; of whom some of you may have heard." And with this cuttingly sarcastic speech the assistant professor of history sat down.

There was an instant's silence, broken by the old gentleman at the back of the room who had fallen asleep some minutes before. Awakening, just as assistant professor Lowe delivered his retort, he had heard but a word, and that word was pleasant to his aged ear.

"What's that?" he called.

No one assumed the task of explaining to him and he dozed off again.

As it was, for three hours, upward of seventy-five full-blooded, able-bodied men wrangled over an affair that little Green had assumed the responsibility of making clear to the wider world outside. Theories, opinions, solutions, were flung at the dean until he felt his head swim, and saw double.

In the entire assemblage there was but one who had taken no active part in the discussion, but, rather, had appeared to look on merely, an interested, if at times annoyed, spectator--the professor of French.

He was observed occasionally to yawn.

During a lull he got upon his feet and straightway, without clearing his throat--said:

"Gentlemen, it seems to me we are as far from a solution of this affair as we were when we assembled. For one I am getting tired and am going home,"--he was quite independent for there was a standing "call" for him from an eastern institution.--"Now I have a suggestion to make. It is this: Suppose we all go home, and await the return of the president. Meanwhile let us keep our eyes and ears open, and our mouths shut; perhaps we may see and hear things that will indicate the proper course for us to take. In any event, it would seem wisest for us to await the return of the president. Good-night, gentlemen."

And buttoning his overcoat about him, the professor of French left the room.

It was not until then that the futility of their discussion dawned upon his colleagues. Some one moved that the meeting adjourn. The motion was carried. The old gentleman voted the single nay.

The dean walked home with assistant professor Lowe. Their conversation was wholly upon the case in hand. And when the dean left the younger man at the latter's door, he said: "I--oh--ah--I confess to being more puzzled than ever. A very mysterious affair--oh--ah--a _most_ mysterious affair."

And so it was that the puzzlement of the worthy dean deepened next morning as he read little Green's sprightly, suggestive story.

But the frown vanished from his brow and the wonder from his eyes, when, as he left the house, a messenger handed him the president's telegram. And he hastened to the campus to make known to his colleagues the glad tidings that had come to him in the depths of his perplexity.

IV

The various and varying newspaper accounts of the affair awoke Ann Arbor from its peaceful slumber and for a space the town lived. For two days interest developed with the passage of the hours. Speculation became general. Opinions were as many as those who offered them; until there was not a man or woman from the Cat Hole to Ashley Street who did not advance a theory, new or old.

A like puzzlement, but one tempered by more original conjecture, characterized the attitude of the undergraduate body as a whole. For two days Catherwood had not appeared upon the campus, but at all hours friends and mere nodding acquaintances called at his rooms only to be refused admittance by Mrs. Turner, whom he had bade inform all callers that he was ill, very ill, quite too ill to be seen.

Little Green was one of these callers. He had expected the refusal of admission which Mrs. Turner, with many apologies, gave him and straightway he telegraphed his papers that Catherwood was dying as the result of the great bodily injuries he had received at the hands of his unknown undergraduate assailants. For little Green knew by instinct what many a reporter requires long years to learn--that a "story" is "good" just as long as there is a drop of "life" blood left in it, and not an instant longer.

Little Green fairly reveled in the commotion he had caused. The regular college correspondents, anæmic, frightened little fellows, were at a loss to know who had beaten them in their own papers. It was little Green's game, absolutely his, and he purposed playing it alone, aided and abetted in the achievement of this purpose by the various telegraph editors whom he sought to serve. And so far as the faculty was concerned, the frequenter the dispatches, the more woefully addled did the professorial brain become.

Out in the state, and in adjoining states, wise editors, looking down, as it were, from some high place, wrote venomous and vicious editorials in which the legislature was called upon to pass laws abolishing hazing in institutions of the commonwealth by making the practice of it a felony, punishable by imprisonment. Parents in the further west with sons and daughters at Ann Arbor feared for their children's lives. School boards passed resolutions. Guardians wrote to the heads of various university departments asking if their wards were quite safe, alone and unprotected in Ann Arbor. A New York newspaper, on the second day, dispatched its most ingenious "woman reporter" to the scene of action and in three hours the sprightly creature had woven a fictional fabric beside which the tale of Ali Baba was the glowing, gleaming truth. She revived all the half-forgotten stories of ancient hazing rites, dead these many years, and wrote of them as of contemporary practice. And the imaginative artist in the home office illustrated her vivacious article elaborately, seeking to convey to the eye horrors of undergraduate torture that words were useless to describe.

Skeletonized, the story was wired across the sea and the ponderous _Times_ gave forth an editorial in which it averred that such refined cruelty had never been heard of in English academic life; not even in the palmiest days of Rugby and of Eton at the height of the fagging system.

Amidst the wild excitement, little pink-cheeked Green grinned at his reflection in his mirror and exclaimed:

"Gad! You've got 'em goin', Greeny; you've got 'em goin'. Greeny, _you're it_!"

And he was; for three swift, brilliant days.

For then the president came.

He came unannounced save by the telegram the dean received at breakfast on the second day.