Part 11

“Now, see here, Purdy; let’s fight this thing out once for all. You’ve got the same idea that Larry brought here with him at first――about the classes and the masses, and all that. I don’t know where you’ve been living all your life, but it certainly couldn’t have been in the America that I know the most about. You come out West with us next summer and we’ll show you the real America; a place where people――or most of ’em, anyway――will take you for what you are, and not for what you’ve got in the bank. It’s only in the crowded places that you soak up that ‘class’ stuff.”

Purdick looked away.

“I’d like to believe you, Maxwell; honestly, I would,” he said. “And you’re right about one thing. I’ve lived in cities――factory cities――all my life. But to get back to Larry: this thing is fairly killing him by inches. He doesn’t say anything to me, but I know. When he’s here in the room he just grinds and grinds; crawls back into his shell and pulls the hole in after him. And the minute he’s got his work up, he pulls his cap over his face and digs out. Sometimes he doesn’t came back until one or two o’clock in the morning.”

“I know,” said Dick; “takes to the woods. That’s what he used to do in the old days when anything went crossways with him. I know what he’s doing; he’s fighting that temper he told you about. He isn’t afraid of anybody but himself. I brayed about that temper thing when you spoke of it a minute ago, but he’s got it, all right. If he ever turned loose on Undy, he’d kill him. I know, because I’ve seen him fighting mad one or two times when he was just a kid in knee breeches.”

Purdick shoved his books aside.

“There’s no time like the present, Maxie. If we’re going to try to straighten this mess up for Larry, let’s go to it.”

“I’m with you,” said Dick, getting upon his feet quickly. “Only I haven’t any more idea than the man in the moon where to begin.”

“Perhaps I can help out a little on that end of it,” said Purdick, with a sort of crooked smile, adding: “I’m about ten years older than you are, Maxie, in some things.” And then he got his coat and cap and they went out together.

Most naturally, when they were in the street, Dick thought Purdick would head for one of the houses across the campus where the various members of the faculty lived. The only possible thing to do, as he saw it, was to get some one of the professors interested and so start a faculty investigation. But Purdick seemed to have a plan of his own, for when they reached the cross-street corner, he turned short and led the way toward the bridge and the town.

There was no pause made until they reached “Pat’s Place,” and none there, save that Purdick glanced up at the windows in the second story as if to see whether they were lighted or dark. Following the upward glance, Dick saw that there was a light in an upper room, and the next thing he knew he was climbing a narrow stair at Purdick’s heels. At a door near the stair-head, Purdick rapped, and a mumbling voice said thickly: “Come in, then!”

What Dick saw when the door opened under Purdick’s hand was a rather gaudily furnished room with a thick-piled carpet on the floor which looked as if it were rarely swept. There was a desk in the middle of the room, and in the pivot-chair belonging to it sat a man with a round, fat face, little pig-like black eyes, black mustaches curled at the ends, and shiny black hair plastered in a barber’s curl on his forehead. To keep up the color scheme the man had a black cigar clamped between his teeth, and on his feet, which were cocked up on the desk, were shoes which looked as if they had just escaped from the polishing attack of a bootblack.

Dick didn’t know the man from Adam, but he read the papers often enough to be able to guess at once that the upper room was the private――and unofficial――office of the most notorious of the little city’s board of aldermen, Mr. Patrick Clanahan.

“Little college lads, eh?” grunted the man in the chair, as they filed in and stood before him. “What’d ye be wantin’ o’ me at this time o’ night?”

Dick couldn’t have told to save his life, but little Purdick seemed to labor under no handicap whatever.

“It’s about your saloon down-stairs, Mr. Clanahan,” he said, looking the fat-faced man squarely in the eyes. “Last Monday night one of our fellows was taken in there and drugged. We want to know who hired your people to do it.”

“Lord love us!” chuckled the black-haired boss. “Would ye listen to the nerve av the little cockerel? ‘We want to know who hired your people to do it,’ says he!”

“That’s it,” said Purdick coolly. “We know they were hired, and we want to know who paid them for it.”

The fat alderman took his feet down from the desk and the little pig-like eyes snapped viciously.

“Ye little fool!” he bit out, “d’ye think f’r wan minute ye can run a bluff the like o’ that on Pat Clanahan? Get out o’ here, the both av yez, before I’d be t’rowin’ yez out!”

But little Purdick stood his ground.

“You’ll find that it isn’t a bluff. We don’t care anything about your people down-stairs, though it might make trouble if it was known that your place is one where a fellow could have knockout drops given to him in a glass of water. What we want to know――what we’re going to find out――is who bribed them to do it, Mr. Clanahan.”

It was just here that the real explosion came. Bounding to his feet and making a move as if he would come around the desk to throw them out, the fat-faced ward boss blew up.

“There’s the dure!” he shouted, pointing to it with a pudgy finger. “Shut it whin ye go out! ’Tis babes in ar-rms yez are to be comin’ here and talkin’ knockout drops to Patsy Clanahan! I’d have yez to know――――”

Little Purdick led the way out as he had led it in, carefully closing the door upon the remainder of the explosion. On the sidewalk Dick drew a long breath.

“You sure had your nerve along with you, Purdy, just as he said,” he gasped. “Did you think you could do anything with a man like that?”

“I gave him his chance,” was the cool-voiced rejoinder. “You remember the story in the old spelling-book, about the farmer who caught the apple thieves up in his trees and threw clods at them first before he began to throw stones. I was just throwing a little clod or two; but now we’ll go and see if we can’t rustle up a few stones.”

The next place Purdick headed for was the _Micrometer_ office, on the top floor of the _Chronicle_ Building. Luckily, they found Havercamp there, and he was alone in the little editorial den of the college daily.

“Hello, you near-Soffies!” he grinned as they entered. “What are you doing out at this time o’ night?”

“Time o’ night’s time o’ the early evening,” said Purdick. Then: “It’s about Larry Donovan. Of course, you’ve heard the story?”

Havercamp’s grin faded.

“I never was so knocked out in my life. He was here with me up to eleven o’clock that night, and I remember when he left he said he had to go home and work on some test stuff that was still waiting.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“Not a sign of him. He’s chucked the reporting job, along with everything else. Hacked about being dropped from the team, I suppose.”

“Listen, Havercamp,” said Purdick; and he briefed the real facts in the scandal case for the managing editor in true newsman fashion.

“Oho!” said Havercamp; “so that’s it, is it?――tolled in with a smooth lie and then drugged. What have you done about it?”

Again, and in the same crisp speech, Purdick told of their late call upon Mr. Patrick Clanahan.

“Of course, you knew _that_ wouldn’t get you anywhere,” said Havercamp. “You have to pull a gun on Pat when you want to hold him up. Wait a minute.”

He was gone possibly ten minutes instead of one, but when he came back his eyes were snapping.

“Just been having a little heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Bolinger, of the _Chronicle_,” he explained. “The _Chronicle_ will back us if we want to make it a fight to a finish. Let’s go.”

Again Dick followed blindly, though this time it was Havercamp who was leading the way. Still, he wasn’t very greatly surprised to find that the way led back to the garishly furnished room over “Pat’s Place.” At the stair-head landing Havercamp didn’t knock; he opened the door and walked in. As when Dick and Purdick had presented themselves, the ward boss had his feet on the desk, and he was just lighting another of the midnight-black cigars.

Havercamp was even more brittle than Purdick had been.

“You know who I am, Mr. Clanahan,” he began, “and what we’ve come for. I’m only going to add one thing to what my friend Purdick here has already said to you. I have Mr. Bolinger’s authority for saying that the _Chronicle_ will print all the facts in Donovan’s case if you don’t come across and help us get the man or men higher up.”

Dickie Maxwell, having had less than no experience in such matters, expected another explosion. But it did not come. Instead, the ward boss merely chuckled good-naturedly and tendered Havercamp one of the black cigars――which Havercamp didn’t take.

“I’m expectin’ ’twas on’y a rough bit av a joke on the young felly, Misther Havercamp,” he said. “You little college b’ys are always puttin’ thim up on wan another.”

“Call it whatever you like,” cut in Havercamp brusquely. “We want the man who did the job, with an order to him to tell us who put him up to it. We’ll do the rest.”

The boss pressed the ball of a fat thumb on a bell-push, and in a minute or two the stubble-bearded fellow who had led Larry to his undoing came in.

“’Tis the little joke ye played on wan o’ the college lads last Monday night, Jerky,” Clanahan explained to his henchman. “’Tis a peck av throuble ye stirred up――widout m’anin’ to. Ye’ll be going wid Misther Havercamp and these lads and doin’ what they want ye to do to take th’ kinks out av it.”

The man nodded as if the order were all in the day’s work, and with Havercamp for their leader the four tramped out and down the narrow stair. In the street Havercamp quickly called an auto hack, and in grim silence a swift run was made to the college suburb. It ended in front of the house assigned to Dr. Shotliffe, Dean of the Mechanical School, and the four passengers got out and ascended the steps. As he rang the door-bell, Havercamp gave the Clanahan henchman a final word.

“You’ve got your orders; all we ask of you is that you tell the straight truth, no matter whom it hits. If you do that, there won’t be any afterclap――for you.”

What took place in the Dean’s study after the four had been admitted does not form any part of the Old Sheddon records. But two days later a faculty meeting was called and four members of the Freshman class, Bryant Underhill, Alexander Crawford, John Dugger and Albert Markley were summarily dropped from the Registrar’s list of undergraduates, and Old Sheddon knew them no more.

And on the same day Larry Donovan――a Larry once more light-hearted and able to look the world and all the people in it squarely in the eye――took his old place at right half on the ’Varsity practice field.

XIII

THE GREEN CAP BONFIRE

“What are you fellows going to do in the summer vacation?”

It was Ollie McKnight who wanted to know, and he had just come in from the gymnasium showers where he had been cooling off after a lively practice with the Freshman team; scrimmages which, in the warm afternoon, were a little like sessions in a Turkish bath.

There were various answers from the half-dozen Freshmen lounging in the big room at Mother Grant’s which had been occupied for nearly half of the college year by Larry and Purdick. Welborn, the big Aggie, said he was going home to Missouri to work on the farm. Wally Dixon said his father was building an addition to his packing plant in Kansas City, and that he’d probably have a job wheelbarrowing concrete, or something of that sort. Cal Rogers made a similar response. His father was a contractor, and he, Cal, supposed there was a wheelbarrow or a shovel or a pick waiting for him at his home town in Iowa.

“How about you two Timanyoni Twins?” McKnight asked, tossing the question to Dick Maxwell and Larry.

“Work for me, too, if I can find anything to do,” Larry said; and Dick wrinkled his nose at McKnight.

“You’ll have to stay and see Commencement through for the rest of us, Knighty,” he said. “We’re all too industrious to hang around here for doings where Freshmen have to stick on the side lines and don’t get a look-in.”

“That’s the way of it,” little Purdick put in. “Commencement’s no Freshman game. Do you stay, Knighty?”

“Not on your life. I’ve got a job, too, strange as it may seem. It’s northern Minnesota and the iron country for mine. While you fellows are doing your little summer chores all over the lot you can get a long-distance snap-shot of me down in some open cut in the Mesaba, chucking coal into the tummy of a steam shovel, or something of that sort.”

“Yes, I think I see you with overalls on!” said Rogers sarcastically. “You’ll be doing a cross-country run in a million-dollar buzz-wagon, or sailing a brass-mounted yacht up the Maine coast, or something like that. I know you, Knighty.”

“Maybe you did know me last summer, or the summer before,” McKnight got back. “But that isn’t saying that you know me now. I’ve already asked Dad if I can’t go to the Mesaba and begin to learn the steel business from the bottom, and he didn’t write to say ‘yes.’ Not on your moving-picture. He wired it.”

Wally Dixon shook his head in mock solemnity.

“You shouldn’t ought to do things like that, Ollie; not unless you’re sure there’s no heart disease in your family. Think of the terrible shock it must have been when they got your letter.”

“That’s all right,” laughed the son of the steel magnate good-naturedly. “I’ll admit I was one of the Willie-boys when I came here last fall, but it’s only fair to Old Sheddon to say that I hope she’s done a little something for me in nine months.”

After a bit more of this good-natured joshing the fellows began to drop out, one by one, drifting away to their respective rooming places. The year-end examinations were on, the outdoor activities were stringing out to a close, and even the bright stars who had made “A’s” and “B’s” in the semester tests were cramming a bit for the final trials.

“You’re going to make the turn all right, this time, aren’t you, Purdy?” asked Larry, after the others had gone, referring, for the first time since Purdick had come to room with him, to the small one’s discouraging flunk-out of the previous year.

“Easy,” said Purdick; “thanks to you and to that other fellow whose name you won’t tell me. Can’t you take the bridle off of that promise now, Larry?”

“Permission not yet given,” Larry grinned.

“Will it ever be given?”

“Maybe――some day.”

Silence for a little while, and then Purdick began again. “I’ve been leaning hard upon what you said to me――that freezing cold night in my old room over Heffelfinger’s: that you’d have taken the money yourself if you’d been in my place. Can you say it again, Larry?”

“Easier now than I could then. The fellow who built your scholarship is a man, all the way up and down, Purdy. I’d bank on him for anything.”

“It wasn’t Dick Maxwell?”

Larry laughed. “No, it wasn’t Dickie. But you mustn’t begin to worm things out of me by the process of elimination. Let’s be fair to your ‘good angel.’ All he asks is to stay unknown. Besides, I shouldn’t wonder if he’d forgotten all about the scholarship by this time. It’d be just like him.”

Purdick looked up quickly.

“Do you mean by that he’s got so much money that two thousand dollars, more or less, don’t mean anything to him?” he asked.

Larry had a swift jab from that inner sense which is sometimes called after-wit, realizing that he had said too much.

“You shut up, Purdy; I’m not going to say another word about it. You’ve got the boost, and the other fellow’s got what does him a lot more good than the money is doing you. That’s all there is to it, and you couldn’t get any more out of me if you were to give me the third degree.”

That settled it for the time being, and during the few remaining days which led up to Commencement Week everybody was too busy to think or talk about anything but the year-end job in hand.

It was after the examinations were over, and there was not much left for a Freshman to do but to burn his green cap and go home, that Larry and little Purdick took a farewell evening hike out to the bridge which bore their class numerals. It had been a perfect June day, and the evening matched it harmoniously. A light shower the night before had laid the dust, spring green was waving from the trees and nodding to them from the fields, and the song of the cardinal was abroad in the land.

“You didn’t turn out for the bridge scrap, did you, Purdy?” said Larry, as they hoisted themselves to seats on the approach parapet where he and Dick Maxwell had sat through a pretty painful session one evening some few weeks earlier.

“You know I didn’t. About that time o’ night I was washing dishes in Hassler’s kitchen.”

“But you’ll be in the next one. We’ll be the defenders next fall, and we want to keep those old figures up there for another year.”

“Lot of good I’d be!” scoffed the small one. “If we should happen to get a few grasshoppers in the next Freshman class, perhaps I might be able to pull a leg off of one or two of ’em. But that’s about all.”

“Size isn’t everything,” Larry offered. Having plenty of it himself, he could easily disregard the lack of it in others. Then: “Have you always been off weight, Purdy?”

“Ever since I can remember. My mother was small.”

In all their close association as room-mates Purdick had rarely talked of himself or his past, and never of his people. But now, perhaps because the parting for the summer was so near at hand, he let out a little.

“We were poor folks,” he went on; “poor in the way you don’t know anything about, because your father had a trade and a good one. Mine was a day laborer, and there were seven mouths to fill.”

“Five children?” said Larry. “That’s our number at home.”

“That was our number, but it isn’t any more; there are only two of us now――my sister Alice and I.”

“And your father and mother?”

“Both dead. Mother was never very strong, and the fight was too hard for her. After the other children died, she sort of lost her――her courage, I guess. That left only father and two children; and Alice wasn’t big enough to do much. That’s how I learned to cook and wash dishes.”

“Then your father died?”

“He was killed――in the steel works. It was an open-hearth furnace, and he was on the puddler’s gang. There was a loose board in the run-way, and the hand-rail was broken. The men had complained, time and again, but nothing was done. One day father slipped.” He stopped abruptly, and when he spoke again it was to say, “Do you wonder that things have made sort of an anarchist of me, Larry?”

“Huh!” said Larry, “you’re not much of an anarchist.”

“Not the long-haired kind, maybe. But I’ve got to stay on my own side of the fence. There’s a horrible lot of injustice in this old world, Larry.”

“Sure there is,” Larry agreed. Then, to keep Purdick from running off on one of his bitter streaks: “Where is your sister now, Purdy?”

“She’s in Elsmere. You know they have a sort of an apprentice course there; a girl can work in the kitchen and have certain hours in the Domestic Economy classes. And that’s another thing: Allie’s been having just about as hard a time as I had before you took me in. You never said there were any strings tied to that scholarship money. There weren’t any, were there?”

“Not a single string.”

“Well, of course, I split it with Allie right away. That was one of the things that made me take it without making you tell me more about it.”

“Um,” said Larry. “Then you’ll have to go to work this summer to earn some more.”

“That’s all right; I expected to do that, anyway.”

“What kind of a job?”

Purdick shrugged his shoulders. “Beggars mustn’t be choosers; and little beggars have to take what’s handed out to them. I haven’t the muscle to tackle any real man-sized job. I suppose it will be office drudgery of some kind――if I’m lucky enough to land anything.”

Larry had a swift and rather discomforting picture of the small one hived in some city office building and running an adding machine, or something of that sort, through the hot months.

“You ought to have a real vacation, Purdy; some job that would keep you outdoors every minute in the day,” he said.

“Fat chance!” Purdick returned, with a hard little laugh. “None of the outdoor jobs wants a sawed-off like me.” Then, after a pause: “Don’t you sweat about me, Larry. You’ve done enough for me, as it is. Let’s go to supper.” And he slid down from his place on the wall.

They had tramped along in comradely silence for possibly half of the long mile lying between the county bridge and the university grounds when they crossed a ramshackly little wooden span over a creek emptying into the river a few hundred yards to their left. The flimsy structure shook under them as they walked across it, and Purdick made gibing comment.

“Isn’t that just like the loose ends that are let go in all public works!” he criticised. “Here is a fine, hard-surfaced highway, the main county outlet to the north, with a concrete bridge over the river that probably cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars, and right here they’ve left that old wooden trap that a man wouldn’t dare drive a ‘Henry’ over faster than a cow could walk!”

Larry turned and looked the “trap” over with a mechanical eye. It was all that Purdick had said it was. “I’d hate to put a loaded truck on it,” he remarked; and then they walked on.

They had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards beyond the creek and its ramshackle bridge when they heard the distant honk of an automobile horn. The machine was coming along the pike behind them, and they could see that it was being driven at a good clip. Moreover, it was approaching the wooden span without showing any signs of slackening the speed.

“Gee!” Larry exclaimed, “if he hits that scrap heap going like that――”

He got no farther, for at that precise instant the oncoming machine did hit the scrap heap. As the two trampers sprang aside to give a clear road, there was a ripping crash, a shrill scream from somebody in the auto, and car and wooden bridge disappeared in a cloud of dust.

“Great Moses!” gasped little Purdick, “I’ll bet the last one of them’s killed!”

“Come on!” Larry shouted, and they broke all track records in a flying sprint to the scene of the disaster.

It was a pretty bad smash. The car was a heavy touring machine. It had turned part way over on its side in the fall and was tangled hopelessly in the bridge timbers and planking.

Its occupants――there were three of them, a woman, a girl and a man――were caught under the crushed top, and when Larry and Purdick ran up, the girl was crying and trying to lift the woman, who seemed to be either dead or in a dead faint. The man, bronzed, middle-aged, and looking as if he might be a retired cattle king, was pinned between the bent steering-wheel and the back of the driving seat, but he did not seem to be badly injured.