Part 2

When Larry and Dick arrived upon the scene, the Sophomores had taken possession of the bridge, and the Freshmen were massed in the road. Upperclassmen――Seniors for the Sophomores and Juniors for the Freshmen――were “frisking” the combatants for weapons. No fellow with good red blood in him would go into such a conflict armed; but in a bunch of six or eight hundred undergraduates there are always a few “yellows,” and they had to be searched.

As the Juniors in pairs searched the green caps, others followed with strips of white cloth to be worn on the arm as a distinguishing mark by the attackers. “Fair play!” was the oft-repeated caution of the upperclassmen; and dire punishment was promised to the fellows who should break this tradition.

Dick plunged into the thick of things as soon as he had been searched and marked; but Larry stood aside, grimly sizing up the situation. The first thing he remarked was the time-immemorial handicap of Freshman classes, namely, the lack of leadership which is the natural consequence in a body of fellows getting together for their first united effort. Wally Dixon, the big-voiced young Mechanical who had given Larry and Dick their joint nickname on the day of their arrival, was commanding and shouting and trying to bring some sort of order out of the chaos; but he was not making much headway.

The searching and marking finished, the upperclassmen laid down the iron-clad rules of the game. Slugging was prohibited, but anything less than a knock-out went. Prisoners could be taken by either side, but they had the privilege of escaping and rejoining their own side if they could. Time would not be called until one side or the other was clearly victorious.

When all was ready, the Freshmen made their first charge, with Dixon trying to get team play by forming his men into a flying wedge. Larry, from the half-back position into which he had mechanically dropped, saw at once that it was going to fail. The Sophomores were massed solidly all the way across the bridge, and the loosely-formed wedge doubled up like a handful of sand and went to pieces when it struck the obstacle.

For a shouting, ear-splitting five minutes there was a hilarious free-for-all, in which a dozen or more of the attackers were taken prisoner and shoved to the rear under guard. Then the defenders charged in their turn――good, old-fashioned mass play, this was――and drove the disorganized mob of Freshies off the bridge and a hundred yards or so up the road.

In the little lull which followed the return of the Sophomores to their stronghold, there was dazed confusion in the ranks of the defeated, with Dixon trying in vain to rally them into fighting shape again. Into the midst of things Dick Maxwell hurled himself like a human bombshell.

“Fellows!” he yelled, “what we’re needing is a leader! Dixie, here, is doing his best, but it isn’t good enough. Isn’t that so, Wally?”――appealing to the big voice.

“You said a whole mouthful,” Dixon admitted, with splendid class spirit. “I’m only pinch-hittin’ for the right man. Who is he, Maxie?”

“I’ve got him right here!” Dick shouted, dragging Larry forcibly into the inner circle. “Here’s an old codger that’s handled grown men on a railroad job! Climb in, Larry, and tell us what to do!”

Of course, Larry would have backed straight out if he had been allowed to. But even at this early period a lot of the men knew Dickie Maxwell, and were perfectly willing to take his word. “Donovan! Donovan! What’s the matter with Donovan? There’s nothing the matter with Donovan! He’s all right, you BET!” the shout went up; and Larry found himself elected.

“If you will have it that way,” he yielded gruffly. “What I don’t know about such foolishness as this would fill a rain-water hogshead. But if the job’s got to be done, we’ll do it: just get that rubbed into your hides――every last one of you. We’re going to do it!”

“Bully for the Timanyoni Twin! Tell us how!” yelled the mob.

“Listen, then: we can’t buck that line solid, and get anywhere. Those fellows have been together long enough to know team play, and we haven’t. I want twenty men who can swim, and who aren’t afraid of getting wet. Volunteers come over to this side of the road. You other fellows mass across so they can’t see what we’re doing.”

He had his twenty in a half-second――and forty more on top of them. Rapidly he made his selection, with Wally Dixon for a captain. Not knowing more than a handful of the men, individually, he picked chiefly for size. Since his plan bulked large on the side of secrecy, he took the twenty apart and gave them their instructions. After which, they vanished in the darkness――not in the direction of the bridge.

“Now for a little drill work!” Larry called out, going back to the army proper. “Let me show you what a flying wedge really ought to be,” and for as much as fifteen minutes he kept them forming and re-forming in the road, the only shirker being Dickie Maxwell, who stood aside with his eyes fixed upon a certain point in the woods backgrounding the farther end of the bridge. And in the meantime, most naturally, the thus-far-victorious Sophomores were hurling all sorts of epithets across the dead-line, singing and shouting like the pack of young barbarians which, for the moment, they were.

Larry was forming his charging wedge for about the twentieth time when Dick, straining his eyes, saw a tiny match-light flare, lasting no longer than an eye-wink, on the farther bank of the river a few yards above the bridge approach. Instantly he darted across to Larry. “Six――fourteen――five!” he yelled, giving the old foot-ball signal; and Larry leaped to his place at the cutting edge of the wedge. “This time we GO!” he bellowed: “_Now, then_――for all you’re worth, and hang on till the last man of you is dead!”

Once more the defenders of the bridge met the charge gamely. Their front line bent, buckled, straightened itself again, and flying detachments from either flank tried to cut the splitting point of the wedge off from the tremendous shoving force behind it. Larry, head down like that of a butting ram, and his racking elbows boring a path straight into the crowding mass, seemed to bear a charmed life. Dragging hands clawed at him, fists beat upon him. Once a slugger, meanly taking advantage of the turmoil, kneed him in the stomach; but still he kept his feet and held on.

It was only a matter of minutes. While the Sophomore front line was buckling for the second time a wild yell went up from their rear. The small guard they had left to hold the northern end of the bridge had given way at the charge of the twenty huskies Larry had sent to swim the river, and in another half-minute the yearly class struggle had passed into history. Larry’s ruse had been the simplest of tricks, but even a simple trap works if it has never been tried before. Caught between two fires, the bridge defenders broke in confusion, and after that, it was every man for himself and a get-away.

Of course, Larry had his reward――and Dick, too, for that matter. For an uproarious half-hour the victorious Freshmen marched back and forth over the bridge, carrying the “twins” shoulder-high and shouting themselves hoarse for Donovan and Maxwell, the class, Old Sheddon, and the epoch-marking scrap which would put Freshmen numerals on the portal arch for the first time in eight years.

But after it was all over; after the shouting, singing mob had made its way back to the college suburb and dispersed, and Dick, hero-worshipping in proper fashion by applying the contents of Mother Grant’s arnica bottle to the handsome array of bruises Larry had acquired in the battle, ventured to add a little adulation of his own to the class leader’s triumph, Larry cut him off morosely.

“None of that from you, Dick!” he growled. “I know just how much and how little all this shouting and yelling is worth, and so do you. To-morrow morning nine-tenths of those fellows won’t know me when they meet me on the campus. For just about that percentage of them I’ll drop back and be just what I am――a workingman and the son of a workingman. They wanted a hard-hitter to-night, and I happened to be it. But that’s all there is to it. No more rah-rah stuff for me.”

“But you can’t――you simply _can’t_ go through college with that sort of a slant on things!” Dick protested, almost tearfully. “It isn’t human! You’re simply batty on that ‘workingman’ stunt. Why, those fellows you captained to-night will black your shoes――do anything on top of earth for you, if you’ll only let ’em!”

But “letting them” was the hitch that Larry Donovan, in the very beginning of his college career, was allowing the stubborn part of his own character to knot around him. There is no variety of pride quite so unreasoning as poverty-pride; and when Larry tumbled into bed a little later, it was with the fixed idea that he was going to be _in_ college without being _of_ it; that he would hoe his own row and let others do the same; a determination which, farther along, was to lead to――but of that more in its proper place.

II

THE OFFISH WORM

“Say, Maxie; what the di――hinkle is the matter with that red-headed room-mate of yours, I’d like to know?”

It was the beginning of the college year, and Old Sheddon was settling into its stride. On the campus, between classes, two first-year men were heading for their rooms and a study period. Wally Dixon, the bigger of the two, was the one who asked the disgusted question about Larry Donovan.

“Larry’s a good old scout,” said Dick Maxwell, dodging a small problem that he himself was unable to answer. “He’s a regular fellow, all right, when you come to know him.”

“Know him?” roared Dixon; “I’d like for you to tell me how anybody ever gets to know him! Look at the way he acted after you, or somebody, got him out for the class scrap at the bridge. He was a pink winner that night, with the neat little Indian-fighter trick that he pulled, and everybody on the job knew it. But when some of us went to him the next day to find out which of the class offices he’d like to have handed him, he bluffed us cold!”

“Don’t you go and lay that up against him,” Dick urged. “It’s――it’s just his way, you know.”

“Well, if anybody should ask me often enough, I’d say it’s a mighty queer way. Acts as if he had a grouch against the world.”

Dickie Maxwell, loyalest of chums, hardly knew what to say. Dixon was the son of a wealthy Kansas City packer, and Dick felt that it would be next to impossible to make him understand Larry’s attitude. For that matter, he, Dick, couldn’t understand it himself. Beginning with workmanlike contempt for what he called the “boys’-play” side of college life, Larry’s grouch, or indifference, or whatever it was, was developing into something a good bit like antagonism toward everything but the daily study grind, and what he could get out of that.

“I’ll say he’s heading in to be a worm,” Dixon went on; “worm” being Sheddon slang for a fellow who scamps the college “activities” and lives and moves and has his being in the classrooms and study periods. “He’s ripping material for the athletic squad, and if he had even a whiff of college spirit he’d be showing up in the try-outs. You ought to labor with him, Maxie; he’s needing it.”

The two parted at the campus gate, and when Dick reached his room at Mrs. Grant’s, he found Larry scowling over a problem in his trigonometry.

“Chuck the grind and talk to me a few minutes,” was Dick’s greeting as he came in. Then: “You’re cutting all the athletic try-outs, Larry. What for?”

Larry’s frown deepened. “I don’t see why I can’t make you understand,” he broke out half impatiently. “You, and most of the other fellows, I’d say, are here mostly to have a good time――or that’s the way it looks to me. I’m not. I’m here on borrowed money――no, hold on,” he protested, when Dick would have interrupted, “I know your father doesn’t look at it that way, but I do. And because it is borrowed money, I want to get the worth of it.”

“Well,” Dick retorted, “that’s just what I’m scrapping about. You won’t get the worth of it if you go on cutting out a good half of what college ought to mean to a fellow. I’ll bet you fairly ache to go on the field every time the bunch takes a try-out.”

“If I do, I take it out in aching,”――glumly.

It was the same old thing. As the son of a workingman, Larry, as we have seen, had early drawn a line upon the off side of which he had taken his stand stubbornly. College, as it appeared to him, was a place where rich men’s sons came to study as little as possible, and where a workingman was admitted only upon sufferance, as you might say.

Now when a fellow goes about with a chip on his shoulder there are plenty of people who will oblige him by knocking it off. Larry had already had kindnesses not a few shown him, and even hilarious adulation when――dragged into it bodily by Dick――he had taken part in the class “scrap,” and had led the green-caps to the first Freshman victory won in eight years. But, on the other hand, a few snobbish fellows had “shown him his place,” as he put it, and it is human nature to see the thing you are looking for, and to miss the things you’ve already made up your mind don’t exist.

“I don’t think you’re doing yourself, or Old Sheddon, fair justice,” Dick said at length. “If you were thick-headed and had to bone hard to keep up, it would be different. But you’re not――and you don’t.”

“Listen,” said Larry; “those fellows in the athletic bunch are out after ‘material,’ but that is just as far as it goes, Dick. They’d take me on as a sort of promising chunk of bone and muscle――and that’s all. I’m not in their class.”

Dick flapped his hands in despair.

“You’re the limit, Larry! That ‘class’ notion of yours, in free-for-all America, is simply bunk!”

“Is it?” Larry queried sharply. “I can prove what I say. Look at little Purdick――waiting on table in Hassler’s restaurant to earn his way: does anybody ask him to get in on any of the try-outs? Not so you could notice it. Look at Jungman, tending furnaces and wheelbarrowing ashes: Saturday, when some of the fellows were going for a hike, one of ’em said: ‘Let’s make Jungman take time off and go with us.’ Were there any frantic shouts of approval? Not on your life. Instead, Banker Waldrich said, ‘Oh, nit! he isn’t our sort.’”

Again Dick made the gesture of despair.

“I guess you’re hopeless!” he gave up; and with that he went to get his own book.

Though he said this――meaning it at the moment――Dick didn’t let up on the athletic urgencies; and faithfully, in season and out of season, he labored with Larry. As sometimes happens, even in an engineering college, a Freshman class had entered with rather scanty material in it for the class teams. And, since the ’Varsity teams have to grow up out of incoming material, the athletic “scouts” were digging hard for Freshman candidates. Unhappily, however, the fellows who approached Larry always seemed to rub him the wrong way of the grain; or he thought they did, which amounted to the same thing.

After all, it was less Dick’s urgings than a word spoken by Mr. Waddell, the pattern-shop instructor, that turned the tide. It was on an afternoon while the try-outs were still going on, and Larry was doing a little extra work in the shop. Passing through, the instructor stopped at Larry’s lathe, and there was a little talk turning upon Larry’s absence from the athletic field when everybody else was there.

Much to Larry’s surprise, the instructor took sides with Dick and the other urgers: it was a student’s duty to uphold, not only the honor of his college in class work, but in the “activities” as well. Larry thought it all over soberly, and that evening made a large and generous concession to Dick.

“This athletic business,” he began, without preface; “I’ve about made up my mind to try out for the foot-ball squad.”

The sudden shift nearly knocked Dick speechless, but he caught his breath and pounded the shifter on the back.

“That’s the right old stuff!” he exulted; “Gee-gosh! but you make me glad all around the block!”

“Hold up,” Larry amended; “I don’t want any more credit than belongs to me. I’m going in because I guess I owe it to Old Sheddon. But I’m not kidding myself any, whatever. If I get in and play a good game, the bleachers’ll give me the glad hand. But off the field I’ll still be Larry Donovan, mechanic, and the son of a mechanic.”

“Confound your picture!” said Dick, half laughing and half provoked, “you ought to have a licking, and if I were big enough I’d give you one! Why, you poor fish, don’t you know that your good, sane, ‘workingman’ ancestry is the thing you ought to be most thankful for? It is the foundation upon which the real America is built!”

Larry grunted and looked up suspiciously.

“Where’d you get all that flowery stuff?” he demanded.

“I read it in a book,” Dick confessed brazenly. “Just the same, it’s so.”

The next afternoon Larry reported to Brock, the head coach, at the gymnasium, offering himself for the try-outs.

“What have you done?” snapped the square-faced, broad-shouldered man-picker who was filling the Sheddon teams.

“Little High School baseball and foot-ball.”

“What place in foot-ball?”

“End one year; right half the next two.”

The shrewd gray eyes of the coach swept him up and down.

“H’m; you were the bridge-scrap leader, weren’t you? Come in here and strip and let’s have a look at you.”

Larry took his “physical” without a flaw; heart action perfectly normal, weight within a pound and three ounces of what his age and height called for, chest expansion well above normal. In addition, his summer’s work on the railroad-building job in the Colorado mountains had made him as hard as nails.

“You’ll do,” said the coach, and sent him to the field.

If he had been twice as finical as he was, he couldn’t have found any fault with his reception. The memorable bridge scrap was still fresh in mind, and his subsequent refusal to turn out for athletics seemed to be forgotten on the spot. Naturally, he was cast at once for Freshman foot-ball; and after a hard-working hour in the field he went to the showers with his blood dancing and with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he had been overhasty in jumping to the conclusion that his family’s station in life had anything to do with the way the fellows were regarding him.

But the good effect of this first little dip into the bigger pool was all spoiled while he was dressing in the locker-room. The steel lockers were arranged in double rows, with dressing alleys between; and in the next row two of his fellow classmen, McKnight and Rogers, out of sight but, unhappily, not out of hearing, were discussing him.

“Well, the offish worm turned out, at last, didn’t he?” McKnight was saying. “That’s Dickie Maxwell’s doing, I’ll bet. Don’t see how Maxwell can room with a fellow like him.”

“He may be a grouch, but he certainly can play ‘feet-ball,’” Rogers replied. “I’d hate to have him on a team against me.”

“He’s the rough stuff”――this was McKnight again――“but that’s about what you’d expect. They say his dad’s a section-man, or something, on a railroad. Queer how such fellows break in.”

“Oh, cut that!” said the other voice, in a tone of marked disapproval. “Can’t you ever forget that you were born with gold fillings in your teeth, Knighty? My father was a house carpenter, if it comes to that.”

“But he didn’t stay a house carpenter,” was the quick retort. “Just now he’s the head of the biggest contracting firm in the State of Iowa.”

“That doesn’t cut any ice, Knighty. You’ve got to take a fellow for what he is; not for what his father is or was.”

“That is exactly what I’m doing with the ‘worm.’ Donovan may be all right on the team, but I’d hate to see myself rooming with him.”

Larry was fully dressed by now, and he didn’t wait to hear any more. And it was only human nature again that made him remember bitterly what McKnight had said, and forget the sensible and ameliorating Rogers’ replies.

“Things break all right for you this afternoon?” Dick asked that evening after he and Larry were hived in their room.

“Oh, good enough, I guess,” was the morose reply.

“Coachie didn’t turn you down, I don’t think!” chucked the class recruiter. “Foot-ball squad, of course?”

“Freshman team,” said Larry, without looking up.

“Good! You’ll get inoculated with the real, old, simon-pure college spirit, after a bit, Larry.”

“Don’t you believe it for one single minute!” Larry flamed out hotly, in the remembrance of his wrongs. “I’m in, and I’ll stay in because I’m not a quitter. But I haven’t changed my mind a single atom!” And he repeated, for Dick’s benefit, the talk he had overheard in the locker-room; or rather, to be strictly accurate, he repeated McKnight’s part of it.

“You see, it’s just as I’ve been telling you,” he wound up in a burst of contemptuous passion. “They’re glad enough to use me as a promising bunch of bone and muscle, and that’s all. I’ll stick, for the sake of what Sheddon’s going to give me. But when it’s over, I’ll still be fighting on my side of the fence――which isn’t Ollie McKnight’s side by a thousand miles!”

True to his determination, Larry “stuck,” and after a few days of practice the Freshman team found that it had acquired a prize. Larry played with the same grim resolution that he put into his classroom work. Playing first at end, he was presently given his old High School position at half-back. For this position he was well qualified, having weight enough to buck the opposing line, combined with the speed necessary to circle the ends and slip through tackle.

It was in one of the preliminary practice games with the ’Varsity that he made his mark. As usually happens, the big fellows ran away with everything in sight, but after the game, just as Larry was leaving the locker-room, Brock, the head coach, stopped him.

“I’ve been watching your play this afternoon, Donovan,” he said brusquely. “You have the makings of a good half-back in you. How do you stand in your classroom work?”

“All right, so far, I guess,” Larry replied.

“We begin playing the schedule next week,” Brock went on. “How would you like to go along as a sub? Of course, I couldn’t put you in the Conference games, but there’ll be others.”

You’d have to be a college Freshman yourself to know how this hit Larry. It is only about once in an elephant’s age that a raw Freshie is ever singled out as even a remotely possible substitute on the big team. But right there the growing bitterness got in its work. Once more he was being taken up for his brawn, and maybe a little for his brain, but not for anything else.

“I guess I’m not available,” he said, and it came out a lot more bluntly than he had meant to make it.

“All right,” returned the coach. “It’s up to you, of course.” And that ended it.

After this little talk with Brock, Larry played all the harder in the practice games――which was the way he was built. Back in the old life, which now seemed so far away, he had wiped engines in a locomotive roundhouse; and because it was a disagreeable, dirty job, he always did it just a little more than thoroughly. Here was another engine-wiping job, he told himself; and, since he had undertaken it, he would go through with it.

Matters and things ran along this way until the foot-ball season was well started. There were class games on the home field, in one of which the Freshmen, clinching their success in the bridge scrap, literally wiped the earth with the Sophomores in a score of 47 to nothing, and public acclaim――what there was of it――gave the credit, or a good share of it, to a certain red-headed, big-boned half-back, whom nothing seemed to be able to stop.