Part 10

Most naturally, Larry was just plain horrified. That Dick, after his one bad slip and narrow escape, should make another that was infinitely worse, seemed utterly unbelievable. Then he remembered that for the past few days Dick had been blue and discouraged for fear that, after all, he mightn’t be able to make passing grades in the year-end examinations. Could it be possible that he had let his discouragement, which, as everybody had told him, was nothing worse than the nervous scare of a fellow who has been working his brain a bit too hard, drive him into another kind of dissipation?

All this, as we may figure, flashed through one half of Larry’s mind in the few seconds during which he stood staring at the slouching bearer of bad news and trying, with the other half of the thinking machinery, to determine what possible object the man could have in lying to him――if he were lying.

“You must be mistaken,” he said at last. “The Maxwell you’re talking about isn’t the Maxwell I know.”

“I guess yes. Anyways, the last I seen o’ him he was singin’ an’ hollerin’ f’r youse to come an’ steer ’im home.”

Larry’s resolution was taken impulsively. There were a thousand chances to one that the thing was a hideous mistake, but where Dick was concerned he was not willing to take the one chance.

“Pitch out and show me,” he said brusquely; and when the man turned back toward the noisiest of the saloons, Larry followed him.

It was at the very door of the noisy place, and just as he was about to enter it at the heels of his guide, that he ran squarely into a boisterous crowd of Sheddonians heading collegeward. Then he remembered suddenly that this was the night when Sock and Buskin, the college dramatic society, was giving a performance in the town opera house. Since, for Dick’s sake, he couldn’t stop to explain anything, Larry tried to dodge into the noisy place quickly, hoping that he hadn’t been recognized. But the hope was a vain one. Welborn, the big-hearted――but loud-mouthed and not too tactful――Aggie Freshman who roomed at Mrs. Grant’s, was a member of the bunch of homing theater-goers, and he saw Larry and bawled out a half-joking warning.

“Hey, you, Donnie! Come out o’ there! You’re on the team, and that’s breaking training!”

Being pretty badly flustered anyway, Larry did the worst thing he could have done――dodged again and made no answer. And it was not until he was following the unshaven loafer into the purlieus of the place that he realized fully what his action must have meant to Welborn and the others.

Welborn’s bawled-out hail had called the attention of every Sheddonian in the bunch to the fact that he, Larry Donovan, was entering a saloon at eleven o’clock at night in company with a fellow who looked as if he might be a bank burglar at the very least. And he had ducked as if he were ashamed to be seen. As certainly as the autumn would ripen little red apples the story would go from mouth to mouth, and while a break of that kind might pass unremarked in the case of a known member of the fast set, it wouldn’t go that way when the one who made it happened to be a potential member of next year’s ’Varsity and was supposed to be in training――at least to the extent of taking respectable care of himself.

“Show me where Maxwell is, quick,” he snapped at his guide. “I haven’t any time to waste fooling ’round such a place as this.”

“I c’n show you where he was a few minutes ago,” said the hard-faced man, leading the way to a row of box-like card-rooms in the rear, and at the word he opened the door of one of the boxes.

Larry looked in and saw that the place was empty. A single unshaded electric light hung over a round table which, with a few chairs, completed the furnishings of the bare cell. The man seemed nonplussed.

“’S queer,” he muttered. “He was in here a li’l’ spell ago. Wait a minute and I’ll dig ’im up f’r youse.”

Larry’s first impulse was to make a bolt for the street and the open air. Every clean-living fiber of him was protesting against the ribald clamor of the place, the smoke-soaked atmosphere, the sickening, stifling smell of liquor and stale beer. But the thought of Dick, and that one chance in a thousand that the whole thing wasn’t some wretched mistake, held him. Besides, at the command to “wait,” the man had shoved him into the little room and shut the door; but for that he was rather thankful, since it cut him off from the bar-room and its noisy occupants.

Pulling up one of the chairs, Larry sat down to make the best of what began to seem like a mighty disagreeable job. Naturally, all he could think of, at first, was the awful thing that had happened to Dick, and as he dwelt upon it, it seemed more and more unbelievable. Surely Lansing and Dick’s other friends in the Zeta Omegas wouldn’t let things come to such a pass after they had seen what a brave fight Dick was making to “come back” after his nearly fatal run-in with the Underhill bunch and the “Mixers.” Larry asked himself what a frat was for, anyway, if it couldn’t lay hold of a fellow who was in the dumps and jolly him over the rough places.

Thinking so hard about these things, it was perhaps five minutes or so before he began to realize the breathless, half-suffocating closeness of the little card-room, and the stifling alcoholic smell that seemed to be growing stronger the longer he had to breathe it. When he did realize it, he found that his head was swimming and his eyes were smarting strangely. Starting up to go and open the door, the dizziness half overcame him, and in trying to sit down again he missed the chair awkwardly and almost slid under the table.

While he was pulling himself up and wondering vaguely what had come over him, the door opened a little way, and the stubble-bearded man stuck his head in to say: “I’ve found out where yer pally went to. Come on, an’ we’ll go get him.”

Larry tried again to get up, and again the nauseating vertigo made him see black. “If I――could have a drink of――water,” he gasped, and he was dimly conscious of the disappearance of the hard-visaged man, and of his reappearance a little later with a glass of water. Little as he cared for the opinion of this hard-bitted person, he was ashamed of the way his hands shook when he took the glass and drained it to the last drop.

For a minute or so the cold drink seemed to revive him, but the effect was only temporary. When he tried once more to get upon his feet his legs refused to hold him up, and an immense desire to sleep came over him like a smothering pall. Struggling vainly against the overmastering lethargy, he dropped back into the chair and, bending over the table, hid his face in the crook of an arm just to rest for a second or so. And that was the last he remembered.

When he next opened his eyes, the low-slanting sun was shining in his face, and he was lying on a forkful of straw in what appeared to be a deserted cow stable. Dazed and bewildered, he sat up and tried to make out where he was and how he came to be there. Dimly and like the figures of a dream his latest waking recollections came straggling back; the noisy and noisome saloon; the stubble-bearded man who talked out of the corner of his mouth; the stifling atmosphere of the close little room in which he had been waiting for the man to return, bringing Dick Maxwell.

When was all this?――how long ago? And was it the rising sun, or the setting, that was shining in on him through the open stable door? He pulled out his watch, the good old reliable timepiece by which his father had once run trains on the home railroad, and which had been given to him as a parting gift when he left for college. Not once since it had been his had he let it run down; but now it had run down, stopping with its hands pointing to half-past nine. His jaw dropped. That must have been half-past nine in the morning!

Larry propped his head in his hands and tried once more to piece the vaguenesses up into some sort of an understandable whole. Was it possible that he had slept through half a night and almost all of a day? Suddenly it came over him with a shock like a bucketing of cold water that this was, or had been, the day for the tests in Math. and Physics――and he had cut not only these, but all his other classes as well!

That shock brought him to his feet with a bound, and he was dismayed to find that he was still wobbly and uncertain when he stood up, and that he had a headache that was worse than any he had ever experienced in his healthy, clear-headed life. This started him off on another line of speculative wondering. What had happened to him in the close little room where he had waited for the return of the hard-faced loafer? Was it possible that the mere reek of the place had made him so drunk that he could sleep eighteen hours on end, and then wake up with his head feeling as big as a bushel basket?

Stumbling out of the cow stable he found himself in a part of the town that he had never visited; the poorer quarter behind the row of saloons in Main Street. The stable, which evidently hadn’t been used for a long time, stood in a neglected back lot fronting upon a dirty alley, and through the alley he made his way to the street and so across the bridge to the college suburb.

Dodging aside as soon as he had crossed the river, he hoped he might be able to reach Mrs. Grant’s and his room without meeting anybody he knew. But at the very last, as he was turning the final corner, he ran into Dick Maxwell and two other members of the Omegs. It was Dick who blocked the way and said: “Just been up to your room to see if you’d been heard from yet. Coach Brock wanted to know where you’d dropped out to. Where’ve you been, and what makes you look as if you’d been pulled backwards through a knot-hole?”

Larry steadied himself with a grip on the corner fence post, and in place of answering the double question, asked one of his own.

“Where were you at eleven o’clock last night, Dick?”

Dick’s reply was prompt.

“Up to about that time I was in the house lounge with Cranny and Stillwell here, chewing Physics with them for the test to-day. After that I was hitting the hay for a home run in my little downy. Why?”

“Nothing,” said Larry, and he went on to the Man-o’-War gate with a great light beginning to filter through the headache clouds. One thing, at least, was clear: the stubble-faced loafer had told a lie cut out of whole cloth. There had been no Dick Maxwell to be knocked down and dragged out and carried home.

In his room Larry found Purdick working over a demonstration drawing, and the small one nearly jumped up and flung his arms around the home-comer when he saw who it was that had opened the door.

“Suffering Jehu! I never was so glad to see anybody in my life!” he exclaimed, shoving the drawing-board back on the study table. Then: “They’ve had me fighting mad all day.”

“Who had?” said Larry, dropping into a chair to get back to the old trick of holding his head in his hands.

“Markley and Dugger, and that bunch. They’ve been telling it all over the campus that they saw you last night in a back room at ‘Pat’s Place’ _dead drunk_! I tried to lick Dugger for saying it, but he carried too big a wallop for me.”

“Huh!” said Larry, looking out between his fingers; “that’s where you got that black eye, was it? You’re a mighty loyal little rat, Purdy, and I only wish you’d been fighting for something worth while. I was in ‘Pat’s Place’ last night, and if I wasn’t drunk, there was something else mighty funny the matter with me. I just waked up a little while ago, and my head feels bigger than a barrel, right now. But what were Markley and Dugger doing in Pat’s?”

“The way they’re telling it, they had been to the Sock and Buskin show, and after it was out they stopped in the Rookery to get an ice-cream soda. As they were passing Pat’s on their way over, some fellow out in front told them that there was one of their college bunkies drunk in a back room. They say they went in and found you lying spread out on a table and so far gone that they thought it would be too much of a job to get you home. So, with the help of the barkeeper and the fellow who had told them, they lugged you out to an old barn in a vacant lot and left you to sleep it off. I didn’t believe ’em, of course. If I had, I’d’ve gone to hunt you up. It’s all a pack of lies, isn’t it? You didn’t drink anything in that miserable dog-hole, did you?”

“Nothing but a glass of cold water.”

“Tell me,” Purdick commanded; and Larry told the whole story, or so much of it as was clear enough to be recalled. Purdick heard him through without interrupting, and then, out of an experience that was wider――and sadder――than any his big-bodied room-mate had ever gone through, he grappled with the mysteries.

“You say the card-room smelled of alcohol and the smell grew stronger: I guess it was meant to. Don’t you know that a person can get drunk just breathing the fumes of the stuff?”

“I didn’t know it,” Larry admitted.

“Well, it’s so. The sawdust on the floor was probably soaked for you before you went in. Then, with the door shut, you’d soon go off your head.”

“But, listen――Markley and Dugger say they carried me out, and that couldn’t have been very long after I went off the handle. Just smelling the stuff wouldn’t make a fellow sleep eighteen hours, would it?”

“No; but the glass of water, or what was in it, probably did the rest. You were doped.”

For some little time Larry didn’t speak. When he broke the silence, it was to say: “That brings on a lot more talk, doesn’t it, Purdy? Why should those plug-uglies at ‘Pat’s Place’ want to fill me up with lies and then drug me?”

“Easy,” said little Purdick. “They were paid to do it.”

“What! You mean the Underhill push?”

“It’s beating its way into your head at last, is it? Bry Underhill’s been telling it around again, as he did a month or so ago, that you’d never play anything but practice games on the ’Varsity――never come back to Sheddon after this year. He’s cooked up the proper scheme, this time, to knock you out. The story will get around to Brock――Undy will see to it that it does get around to him――and you know how strict he is about the booze.”

Again there was a little silence in the big room, and at the end of it Larry started to his feet with his fists clenched.

“It was a ‘frame-up,’ just as you say, Purdy,” he said, speaking slowly as he always did when his temper was threatening to get out of control. “I’ve tried, all along, not to be vindictive toward Underhill and his crowd, but this thing hits the limit. I’m going after that fellow now, and he’ll be the one who won’t come back to Sheddon next year instead of me!

“Now, I want you to do me a little favor. I’m as hungry as a wolf, but I don’t want to face the bunch at the supper-table to-night. Slip down and see Mother Grant and ask her if you can’t bring my supper up to me. You can tell her I’ve got a bad headache, and you won’t miss the truth by a sixty-fourth of an inch. Skip for it while I go to the bath-room and hold my head under the cold-water faucet. I want to be able to think straight after I get a few calories inside of me.”

XII

FRIENDS IN NEED

After little Purdick had seen Larry put away a trayful of supper, which had to do duty for itself and two other missed meals, with an appetite that seemed to make no account of the left-over headache, he hoped Larry would tell him what plan he had in mind for getting square with Bryant Underhill and his unprincipled accomplices.

But there proved to be nothing doing in that line. With the supper despatched, Larry hurled himself upon his books after the manner of a fellow who has lost a whole day out of his calendar and is determined to make it up in the shortest possible interval of time. And when Purdick went to bed at half-past ten, his room-mate was still digging away, and nothing more had been said about the Underhill square-up.

The next day it was just the same. How Larry explained things to his professors, made up the lost day’s class-cuts, and contrived to get credit for the tests he had missed, were matters upon which Purdick was left uninformed. But Ollie McKnight, between whom and little Purdick there had grown up an intimacy which was as odd as it was comradely, brought in a bit of news that was calculated to key any friend of Larry’s up to the fighting pitch. It was to the effect that Brock, the head coach, had taken Larry off the foot-ball team; had either suspended or fired him, McKnight didn’t know which.

“That’s simply an outrage!” Purdick burst out, adding: “I suppose you know what it comes from?”

“Sure,” said the son of Consolidated Steel; “Brock’s heard the story that’s going around about Larry’s being off on a bat. How much do you know about it, Purdy? Is any part of it true?”

Purdick told what he knew, and McKnight gave a low whistle.

“Larry can’t deny it, eh?――or, at least, can’t deny anything but the intention? And his explanation, which you and I take at its face value, of course, won’t look very good to people who don’t know Larry; in fact, I shouldn’t wonder if a good many of the fellows wouldn’t call it a rather clumsy lie. What does Dickie Maxwell say about it?”

“Dick was up to the room last evening just before Larry came in. He hadn’t heard the story then. You couldn’t make _him_ believe that Larry is telling anything but just the plain straight truth.”

“Of course he’s telling the truth. Trouble is, it’s going to sound too improbable to be believed. What Larry ought to do is to go right after this Underhill bunch and show it up――prove that it was a frame-up.”

“That’s what he said he was going to do, last night,” said Purdick.

“All right,” McKnight nodded. “You tell him when he’s ready to start in he can count upon me and all the fellows in our house. We’re for him, even if it takes a round robin to the faculty.”

Purdick nursed that little offer of help and held himself in readiness to spring it when Larry should again broach the subject of a just vengeance upon the Underhill plotters. But when another evening had all but passed, and Larry hadn’t once mentioned the “frame-up,” its perpetrators, or the humiliating blow that Coach Brock had dealt him, Purdick could no longer contain himself.

“Ollie McKnight says you’re put off the team,” he said, stooping to untie his shoes. “Is that so?”

Larry nodded.

“Did you tell Brock what you told me?”

Larry nodded again, adding:

“He didn’t believe what I told him, of course; nobody would.”

“Well?” Purdick broke out raspily. “Are you going to take it lying down from this bunch of money-rotten highbinders? You said last night that you were going after them for blood.”

Larry sat back in his chair at the study table, and the good gray eyes were a bit gloomy.

“I know I did, Purdy, and I meant it――then.”

“But you don’t mean it now?”

“No.”

“Why?”

Larry was silent for a moment.

“I don’t know as I could make you understand, though I guess maybe Dick Maxwell would. I’ve got a horrible temper, Purdy.”

“Yes you have!”――with what was meant to be scathing irony. “You’re just too easy for any common kind of use――chicken-hearted where other people are concerned, _I’d_ call it!”

“Don’t you make any such mistake as that,” Larry said quickly, with the gloom in his eyes changing swiftly to the fighting glow that came into them when he was struggling for that extra yard on the foot-ball field. “I could smash every man in that gang and never turn a hair!”

“Then why don’t you do it?”

“Well, partly because I don’t dare to.”

“Afraid?”――incredulously.

“Yes; afraid of myself.”

“Ump!” said little Purdick; “I wear a six-and-three-quarters hat. I guess you’ll have to make it plainer than that for a head the size of mine.”

“I’m just afraid to let go, that’s all. You’ve read in war stories how men, soldiers, who have been decent, sober fellows all their lives get to be brutes and devils when they let the brute-and-devil part of ’em come to the top. I’ve been holding my brute-and-devil down ever since I was a little kid, and I don’t dare to let it get up now. That’s all there is to it, Purdy.”

“So you’ll let this lying story go on spilling itself all over the place, and lose your chance for the ’Varsity, and maybe get a call-down from the faculty, all because you’re afraid you might let go all holds if you went after the fellows who are trying to do you up?”

“It’s as true as if you were reading it out of a book,” said Larry, and with that he turned back to his drawing-board, and Purdick went to bed.

To a man up a tree, that might have seemed to be the end of it, so far as Larry’s reinstatement on the team or his vindication on the campus was concerned. But little Purdick was of the tribe of those who stick and hang. He was pleased to believe that he owed Larry the biggest debt that one fellow could possibly owe another, and he didn’t propose to see his benefactor’s record smashed by any such vengeful plot as――he made no doubt――the Underhill conspirators had concocted and carried out. If Larry wouldn’t fight for himself, then he, Charles Purdick, would fight for him――and to the last ditch.

But just how to go about it, with Larry unwilling to say or do anything in his own defense, was a problem. Purdick waited for a day or two, hoping that Dick Maxwell would turn up; and on the third day after Larry had been dropped from the team, Dick did turn up.

“Where’s Larry?” he ripped out, bursting into the big room just as Purdick was settling down for the evening grind on his Math.

“He’s gone out somewhere,” said Purdick.

Dick flung himself into a chair.

“That miserable, low-down lie that’s going ’round about him!” he boiled over. “Did you know he’d been dropped from the team?”

Purdick nodded. “That was three days ago. I’ve been hoping you’d come over.”

“Conspiracy of silence!” Dick fumed. “No one of the fellows in the house wanted to be the first to tell me, and I haven’t been on the field since last Saturday. What’s Larry doing about it?”

“Nothing.”

“But, Great Moses, something’s got to be done!”

Purdick shook his head.

“Larry won’t do anything, and it’s just about breaking his heart. I’ve tried to buck him up and get him to make a fight and show the Underhill bunch up for what it is, but he won’t do it; says he’s got such a bad temper that there won’t be any end to it if he lets himself go.”

“Yes; he and his temper!” Dick snorted. Then: “It was a put-up job, of course?”

“Not the slightest doubt of it, in my mind. You know what they told him over there at ‘Pat’s Place’――that you’d gone off the hooks and were needing somebody to take you home. Larry fell for it, and then they managed to get him into one of the little card-rooms that had probably been ‘fixed’ for him――alcohol spilled around on the floor. That got him half sick to begin with, and then, when he asked for a drink of water, they doped him.”

“Huh!” said Dick. “So that’s the straight of it, is it? Naturally, I hadn’t heard that part of it. It was after that that Markley and Dugger found him, I suppose?”

“Yes. That part of it is probably true. They found him asleep and helped carry him out to the old cow barn. But it sticks in my craw that they didn’t need to have anybody tell them _where_ to find him.”

“Of course they didn’t. That was part of the plot. And you say Larry won’t try to do anything to clear himself?”

“No.”

“Then it’s up to us,” said Dick promptly. “You owe him something, Purdy, and so do I. We’ll get together on this thing and show that money-rotten bunch up for what it really is.”

Purdick’s eyes narrowed.

“Your father is a rich man, too, isn’t he?” he thrust in quietly.

“What of that?”

“N-nothing; only I thought maybe you might want to stay on your own side of the fence.”