Part 12

“If you two can take a plank and pry me loose,” he said quite calmly, as Larry and Purdick jumped down into the chaos and fell frantically at work. In a jiffy the thing was done, and then the three of them tore the broken top away and got the woman and the girl out. With every chance for a fatal accident, or at least a sad array of broken bones, it proved that no one of the three was seriously hurt. The woman, a stoutly built lady with the prettiest silvering hair Larry had ever seen――so he was saying to himself――came to as they lifted her to the level of the roadway, and a torn dress seemed to be the worst of her injuries. The girl had a cut in one round arm made by a piece of flying glass when the wind-shield broke, but she tied her handkerchief around it and after that was done, paid no more attention to it than a boy would.

When they all reached a point at which they could draw a long breath and begin to straighten things out, Larry looked hard at the sunburned gentleman and said: “Aren’t you Dick Maxwell’s Uncle Billy Starbuck, from Brewster, Colorado?”

“You’ve guessed it the first time,” said the cattle-kingish gentleman with a grim little smile. “And you’re young Donovan, aren’t you?――the fellow who was with Dick last summer up in the Tourmaline?”

“Yes; I’m Larry, and this is Charles Purdick, my room-mate,” said Larry, introducing his fellow rescuer. “We’d been out for a little hike and were going back when we saw you coming.”

“How far are we from town?” asked “Uncle Billy.”

“Only about half a mile; it’s just over the top of that hill,” Larry answered. “If you’ll stay here with the ladies, we’ll run back and find an auto for you. You were going to stop at Sheddon anyway, weren’t you?”

“Again you’ve guessed it,” said the bronzed man, who seemed to be taking the smash-up as calmly as if high-priced cars grew on bushes for anybody to pick. “We were driving through from Chicago to New York, and we came around this way to spend a few hours with Dick before he starts for home.”

Purdick had stood aside while this bit of talk was going on, and he was wondering who the pretty――though somewhat pudgy――little girl was. She had apparently forgotten her cut arm and was standing on the creek bank looking down at the smashed auto. Purdick moved a little nearer because he was afraid the bank would cave in and let her down.

“That bank is pretty soft,” he cautioned. “I wouldn’t go too near the edge if I were you.”

She turned and looked him over appraisingly.

“What a funny little green cap,” she commented. “That’s Freshman, isn’t it? Are you a Sheddon Freshman?”

Purdick nodded. “For a few days longer――until the grade markings are handed out.”

“I’ve got a brother in the Freshman class. I wonder if you know him. I’m Ruth McKnight.”

“Know Ollie McKnight? I should say I do! He’s one of the best friends I’ve had this year.”

“That’s nice,” said the girl. “I guess you’re the ‘Purdy’ he’s been writing about in his letters. You’re the Red-Wagon boy.”

Purdick hadn’t the slightest idea what she meant, but he was handsomely forgetting the McKnight millions when he said: “I’m anything Ollie wants to call me.”

That was all there was time for at the moment. Larry had been down in the wreck getting one of the seat cushions for the lady to sit on while she waited, and as he was climbing out, another auto came along headed townward. The farmer driving it stopped on the farther edge of things and called across to the “survivors” of the wreck.

“Hello, neighbors! Trouble to burn, h’ain’t ye? Anybody hurt?”

“Nothing serious,” said Dick’s uncle-by-marriage. “Luck was with us.”

“But ye can’t git nowhere without your wagon. Wait till I drive round by t’other bridge and I’ll give ye a lift to town,” and he turned his car and started back to make the detour.

While they waited, Larry and Purdick pulled broken timbers out of the wrecked bridge and built warning road barriers on each side of the creek. In a short time the kindly farmer drove up and the shipwrecked ones were given places in his car. He told Larry and Dick they were welcome to standing-room on the running boards, but they thanked him and said they’d walk――that they were walking, anyway.

“Did you hear what that girl was telling me?” Purdick asked, after Dick’s uncle had told them both to be sure and look him up at the hotel in town, and the auto had sped away up the hill.

Larry shook his head. “No; I was talking to Mr. Starbuck.”

“She’s Ollie McKnight’s sister. She didn’t say how she came to be with Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck, but I suppose the Starbucks and McKnights are friends. Is Mr. Starbuck a rich man? But of course he is, or he wouldn’t ride off and leave a six-thousand-dollar car lying in the ditch without giving it a second look.”

Larry laughed.

“He can afford to, I guess. He and Dick’s father own a gold mine together, and he is a director in one of the Brewster banks.”

“Huh!” said Purdick, and the tone in which he said it meant that Uncle Billy Starbuck wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, at all the kind of rich man that he had been taught from his infancy to hate and despise.

“Mr. Starbuck is everybody’s ‘Uncle Billy’ in Brewster,” Larry went on. “He used to be a cowboy, they say, and after that he was a prospector and had all sorts of hard times.”

“Huh!” said little Purdick again, and this time he added: “He doesn’t look or act like a man that any amount of money would spoil.” Beyond this he was silent until after they had topped the hill and the university buildings were in sight. Then he said: “What d’you suppose Ollie’s sister meant by calling me ‘the Red-Wagon boy’?”

Larry choked for a minute. Here was all sorts of a chance that, right at the very last moment, the fat of the Red-Wagon scholarship was going to be spilled in the fire.

“Did――did she call you that?” he stammered, clawing desperately to gain time.

“Yes. She said Ollie had been calling me that in his letters home.”

“Just some of Knighty’s foolishment, I guess,” said Larry. “He’s taken that way sometimes.”

The reply seemed to satisfy Purdick. Anyway, he didn’t ask any more ticklish questions, then, or later when they were together in their room after supper, hustling into their oldest clothes to take part in the Freshman cap-burning, which was scheduled for eight o’clock on the campus.

Purdick had said at first that he wouldn’t go to the cap-burning; meaning thereby that he was still clinging to some of the old prejudices and was disposed to hold aloof from mingling with the class as a body. Though Larry had had prejudices enough of his own at the beginning of the year, it was he who had finally persuaded Purdick not to spoil the whole year by being “stuffy,” as he phrased it, at the very end of things.

“Reckon the Soffies’ll make any bad breaks?” Purdick asked, struggling into a shop jumper to take the place of his cast-off coat.

“They’d better not,” said Larry grimly. “We walloped them last fall and we can do it again, if we have to. But the fellows tell me that the Soffie interference at the cap-burnings has been dying out. I guess they won’t monkey with us to-night.”

Larry’s prediction proved to be a true one. When they reached the rendezvous on the campus, the big bonfire was already blazing, and the men of their class were gathering in full force for the final ceremony of their year as Freshmen. Though the cap-burning is strictly a Freshman rite, the other classes were out to look on, but there was no attempt made to interfere with the programme.

College songs were sung, the Sheddon series given, and Wally Dixon, who, besides being a promising full-back, was pretty generally known as the class joker, made a speech in which he paid what you might call left-handed compliments to every fellow in the class whose name he could remember. After Dixon had worked off every joke, old or new, that he could think of, the men formed in line, single file, and marched solemnly around the big fire. At the third circling the green caps were flung into the blaze one by one as the procession passed a given point, and the final event of the Freshman year was over.

It was at the moment of dispersal, after the last cap had gone up in smoke, that Dick halted Purdick and Larry.

“Cal Rogers has lent me his car, and I want you two fellows to go over to the Brandon House with me to meet Uncle Billy and Aunt Stella. They seem to think, some way, that you saved their lives, or something, in that auto accident they had.”

It was quite like both of the two invited ones that they should try to squirm out, but Dick was insistent, though he did yield far enough to give them time to go over to their room and change their clothes.

“All right; chase along and put on the glad rags,” he said. “I’ll be at the Man-o’-War with the car as soon as you’re ready.” And so they parted.

XIV

“WESTWARD HO!”

Dick picked Larry and Purdick up at Mrs. Grant’s a few minutes after the cap burning, and the three drove over to town. Leaving the borrowed Rogers car parked in front of the hotel, they found Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck and Ruth McKnight in the mezzanine lounge. Ollie McKnight, who had promised to bring a bunch of his frat brothers over after the cap burning, had not yet shown up, so Dick, Larry and Purdick had the field all to themselves for the time being.

Much to Larry’s comfort, as well as to little Purdick’s, the Starbucks passed over the auto accident and the “rescue” lightly, and when the group of six began to fall apart into pairs, with Dick’s aunt asking him a lot of things about his first year’s experience in college, and “Uncle Billy” cross-questioning Larry about how far he had gone in geology and the natural sciences in his High School course, Purdick found himself sort of abandoned to the tender mercies of the pudgy little girl who had named herself as one of the prospective heirs to the McKnight millions.

It was right out of a clear sky, so to speak, and with perfectly infantile frankness that she said: “I’m awfully glad you got hold of Ollie and made him give up something for once in his life. He used to be so tremendously piggish, you know. How did you do it?”

Purdick swallowed hard once or twice and looked as if he were going to choke. Finally he contrived to say: “You must be taking me for somebody else, I guess. I never made your brother give up anything.”

“But didn’t Larry Donovan call you ‘Purdick’ out there by the wreck when he was talking to Uncle Billy?”

“That’s my name,” said Purdick, still more or less in the condition of a person who had stumbled over a wheelbarrow that he didn’t know was in the way.

“Well, then; maybe you didn’t just make Ollie give up――of course you didn’t, if it comes to that. But he _did_ give up, just the same, and that is what really counts. He says now that he’s going to give up his summer vacation so as to have money enough to do it again.”

Purdick’s stare had by this time become perfectly vacant.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said; “I don’t know any more than a crazy person what you’re talking about.”

“How funny!” she returned. “I mean the Red-Wagon scholarship, of course. It was the best thing that has ever happened to Ollie. He is such a terrible spendthrift――for just foolish things, you know. And when he wrote Daddy that he had taken the two thousand dollars that Daddy sent him to buy a new car with to make a scholarship for you――he called it the Red-Wagon scholarship because he was going to buy a red automobile――and was meaning to go to work this summer so that he could have his vacation money to make another scholarship for somebody else, we were all just simply petrified, and――Why, what’s the matter?”

We may suppose that Purdick’s usually pale face was trying to turn all the colors of the rainbow. So Ollie McKnight was the one who had given him the two thousand dollars which was to help him through the Sheddon course! If Larry had only told him in the beginning!

The rainbow flush was gone and his face was even paler than usual when he forced himself to say: “Did you ever live in Steelville, Pennsylvania?”

“Why, yes,” said the girl. “I was born there.”

“So was I,” said little Purdick, and his eyes were narrowing curiously. Then came the next question: “Was your father the general manager of the steel works there?”

“Not at first. But he was before we left to go and live in Chicago.”

It was all out now. Ollie’s father――and this girl’s――was the man whom _his_ father’s fellow laborers had said was responsible for the loose platform and the broken railing in the open-hearth furnace house, and so, indirectly, at least, responsible for the death which had left two orphans to fight their way as best they could with the bread-winner gone. And it was McKnight money he had been living on!

Purdick never knew afterward how he managed to keep on talking to the girl after this horrible revelation had battered its way into his brain. The thing he remembered most clearly was the tremendous feeling of relief he had when Ollie came up with half a dozen of the fellows from his fraternity house, and he――Purdick――was able to slip aside and, as you might say, efface himself. One thing, and only one, was clear in his mind; he must never spend another penny of the money, and what he had already spent must be paid back. From the way he looked at it, it was blood-money――nothing more or less.

Fifteen minutes later Larry found his room-mate at the stairhead, quietly making his escape.

“Making a sneak, are you?” said Larry, clapping him on the shoulder. “Well, so am I, if anybody should ask you. Got to go home and pack in a hurry. It’s ‘Westward Ho!’ for us on the early morning train.”

“You and Dick, you mean?”

“M-m, yes; for Dick and me.”

“I’ll help you pack,” Purdick offered, and not another word was said until Larry was turning on the lights in the room they had been sharing for something like half a year. Then it was that Purdick, dropping wearily into a chair, said his say.

“I’m not blaming you any, Larry; I guess you’ve been doing only what you had to do. But if you had told me at first that it was Ollie McKnight who was putting up the money for me, I’d have died before I would have taken it.”

“Why, Purdy!” exclaimed Larry. And then: “Did Ruth McKnight tell you?”

Purdick nodded.

“She didn’t know that I didn’t know. Neither did she know that my father was killed in the Steelville Furnace at the time when her father and Ollie’s was the general manager.”

“Well?” said Larry, failing to see the connection.

“Don’t you see?” said Purdick harshly. “Wasn’t he my father’s murderer? Wasn’t that loose plank and broken railing reported time and again, and nothing was done about them?”

Now there had been a time, and not so many months back, at that, when Larry Donovan, taking a leaf out of the book of his experience as an apprentice and helper in the railroad shop at home where he had heard some of the men constantly talking about the greed of the capitalists and their disregard for the comfort and safety of their workmen, would have given at least a qualified assent to little Purdick’s bitter charge. But he was no longer the one-sided fellow he had been when his college mates had called him “The Offish Worm.”

“Let’s see a minute,” he temporized. “Was it positively known that Mr. McKnight had been told about the loose board?”

“Put yourself in his place,” was Purdick’s retort. “If you were in charge of a mill or a furnace where men’s lives were at stake, wouldn’t you consider it a part of your job to see such reports and act upon them?”

“I know,” Larry countered quickly, “but I’ve worked in a shop long enough to know that a lot of things that ought to go to the man higher up never get there. We had a foreman who was always jumping on the men for kicking about bad safety appliances. I don’t believe he ever reported half of ’em to anybody who had the authority to order them fixed.”

It was just here that the real miracle began to show itself, like the face of the sun crawling out of the shadow of a total eclipse. Though he hardly realized it, and would, perhaps, have refused to admit it, the college year, so different from the year in which he had worked and failed, had planted a lot of new things in Charles Purdick. The timely help that had come at a moment when he was so sick and discouraged that it seemed as if he must give up the fight for an education; the way in which Larry had stood by him; the frank and helpful friendship of such “rotten rich” fellows as Dick Maxwell, Wally Dixon, Cal Rogers and Ollie McKnight; recollections of all these “mollifications,” if you could call them so, came crowding in when the old class-and-mass hatred tried to get in its word. And in the end it was the “mollifications” that won out――at least, in the matter of Ollie McKnight’s generous gift.

“I――I guess I can’t go back on Ollie, after all,” he admitted, finally. “I was savage at first――when his sister told me. I kept telling myself that I’d work my fingers to the bone to pay that money back, and that I’d starve before I’d use another penny of it. I――I guess that was just plain, low-down meanness in me, Larry.”

“Now you’re talking like a sure-enough man!” said Larry, chuckling as delightedly over the victory as he would if he had stood in Ollie McKnight’s shoes. “Let’s call it a locked door, and if I were you, I’d never let Ollie know that his little scheme for keeping the thing dark has gone blooey. Seems to me that’s the whitest thing to do.”

“You’re right; you’re mighty nearly always right, Larry,” said Purdick, jumping up to help Larry get his trunk out of the closet. “Now if I were only sure of getting a job this summer――”

“What did you have in mind?” queried Larry, as craftily as if he were trying to trap somebody into betraying a secret.

“It’s the big city and a hot office for mine,” said Purdick, as Larry began to throw his clothes pell mell into the open trunk.

“Bet you a dollar you never see the inside of an office this whole summer,” was the joshing reply.

“I wish I didn’t have to. But that’s where I’ll land. I’m not husky enough for anything else, unless it’s slinging dishes in a restaurant, or something like that.”

“Well,” Larry went on in the same sort of triumphant joshing tone, “I’ll bet you another dollar that you _do_ sling dishes this summer, a part of the time――only they’ll be tin ones. Take me up?”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” said little Purdick; and he didn’t.

“Of course you don’t, and I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks another minute. You’re going to Colorado with Dick and me.”

“Who――who said I was?”

“Mr. William Starbuck said so――and he meant it. Dick and I are going to put in the whole summer prospecting in the Hophra Mountains for tungsten, bauxite, and the chrome-bearing ores. Uncle Billy is financing the job, and he came down here to-day especially to ask Dick if he didn’t want to pick out a couple of his classmates for bunkies and go to it. It will be simply one long picnic; big woods, big mountains, big game if we want it, and camping out all summer long.”

“Y-yes,” stammered little Purdick, “but――but where do I come in?”

Larry laughed uproariously, in a fashion that Old Sheddon had taught him.

“By the door of the cooking fire, if anybody should ask you. The minute Uncle Billy said ‘a couple of your classmates’ Dick grabbed for you. So, any time you get sore at us, you can square things by starving us to death. Neither Dick nor I could cook a decent meal, not if our lives depended on it. And, oh, boy! when you come back after a summer in our good old mountains, your best friend won’t know you. If we don’t put some meat on those little old rat’s bones of yours it’ll be the queerest thing that ever happened, in the Hophras or out of ’em. Come on and let’s get your trunk out. We catch the five-o’clock Limited in the morning. For, of course, you _are_ going with us?”

“Going?” said little Purdick, and his pale blue eyes were shining; “I’d crawl on my hands and knees all the way to Colorado to get the chance to go!” Then: “Oh, gosh, Larry! a whole summer out of doors: you don’t know what that means to me. If――if you’ll just haul off and give me a swift kick, so that I’ll know I’m not asleep and dreaming――――”

“I know,” Larry laughed. “That was just the way I felt when Uncle Billy fired it at Dick and me over yonder in the hotel. But it’s all wool and a yard wide. We go and you go. Now get to work on that trunk or it’ll be midnight before we can begin to cork it orf in our ’ammicks. For it’s Westward Ho! with a rumbelow, and――and――oh, shucks! I never can remember the rest of it. Get busy and pack!”

Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to follow the text that they illustrate.

――Reduced the page numbers in the Table of Contents, for Chapters VII to XIV, by 1 to match the corresponding chapter beginning page number in the content.

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

End of Project Gutenberg's Dick and Larry: Freshmen, by Francis Lynde