Part 4

“It’s snitching, in a way, I suppose, but I’ve got to tell you, Donnie. Underhill and his bunch eat at the restaurant, pretty often. They talk before me just as if I wasn’t there――as I guess they would before any ‘menial.’ Underhill’s got it in for you. I overheard him tell the other fellows of his crowd that he was going to make Sheddon too hot to hold you; he said the university wasn’t big enough to hold you and him at the same time.”

“That was just bunk,” said Larry contemptuously.

“I don’t know,” Purdick returned slowly. “He’s got all the money there is in the world; and a spender always gets a crowd around him――of the kind that’ll do his dirty work for him.”

“How come you know so much about it, Purdy?”

“It’s up to me to know. This is my second year in Sheddon. I was here last year and flunked out――had to take the work over again. I guess I’m not much good, anyway.”

Larry had his own opinion about that. What he suspected was that Purdick had had to do so much outside work for the money-earning that he hadn’t had time, or the needed energy, for study――which was the fact.

While Larry was arriving at the fact, Purdick got up to go. But at the door he turned, and his face was white and the hand on the door-knob was shaking.

“Donovan, I hope you’ll do that fellow up, cold!” he snapped, with his pale eyes ablaze.

“Ump!” said Larry. Then: “Why the sudden burst of fury?”

“You know, perfectly well. He and his kind are always putting you and me and our kind to the wall――squeezing the life out of the working classes. They got my father between the millstones and ground him till he died! But our time’s coming; and when it does come――look out!”

“Here, you firebrand――come back here!” Larry called; but the door had slammed and the lame dog was gone.

For some little time after Purdick had left him, Larry sat at the table with his square chin propped in his cupped hands. Class distinctions, as between rich and poor, had never troubled him very much in his home life. There hadn’t been any hard-and-fast line drawn in the home High School, or, if there had been, it was fellows like himself――sons of workingmen――who drew it.

Naturally, while he was working spare time in the railroad shop and roundhouse, he had heard more or less talk about labor and capital, and about the battle that would one day be fought to a finish between the two; but most of this had gone in one ear and out the other. Dick Maxwell’s father, who, besides being general manager of the railroad, was a fairly wealthy mine owner, was the only “capitalist” he had ever known, and there was certainly no fault to be found with him.

But the Underhill tribe――new-crop rich, somebody had called them――was another matter. Of course, Bryant Underhill, Sheddon Freshman, wasn’t responsible for what his father did; but he was evidently willing to have sins enough of his own to answer for.

Then, on the other side, here was little Purdick, type of the down-trodden; spiteful and vindictive; the stuff out of which anarchists are made. Larry drew a long breath. Even in this early stage of it, college life was opening up some pretty large fields.

As to the Underhill threat――that he, Larry Donovan, was to be forced to leave Sheddon――Larry dismissed this promptly. Quite likely Underhill, helped by his own set, might try to start something; but, if so, he wouldn’t get anywhere with it.

That was the way Larry left it when he went to bed that night; and by morning he had forgotten the threat. But the morning ushered in a day to be marked in the calendar with a letter in charcoal black; a day in which everything seemed to go wrong end to.

It began in “Practical Mechanics.” In Sheddon three of the engineering courses――Electrical, Mechanical and Civil――include so many hours a week of shop work. At that moment Larry’s section was in the blacksmith’s shop; fifty students at fifty forges doing actual blacksmithing, under an instructor who was himself a skilled workman.

Having grown up with tools and forges and machinery, Larry thought of the shop work as an easy walk-over, and so it had been up to this day of helpless botchings. But now he couldn’t seem to get anything right. The hour was given to welding, and the metal simply wouldn’t weld. Larry cleaned his fire again and again; put it out once and built it over afresh; and still he made nothing but botches.

“You’ll have to do better than this, Donovan,” warned the instructor, at the close of the futile hour. Then he added something that wasn’t quite deserved. “You fellows who have had a bit of outside shop experience mustn’t think you know it all. I can’t give you anything better than a cipher on this morning’s work.”

With this for a send-off it wasn’t very strange that the entire day went wrong. Larry blew up in English, went to pieces in Physics, made a mess of his drawing hour, and even stumbled in Math.――in the very lesson in which he had successfully coached his “lame dogs.”

“This sure has been one beautiful day!” he growled to Dick, when they were settled in their room for the evening. “I’ve gone bunk on everything I’ve touched!”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Dick easily. “Everybody has a day like that once in a while. You just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning; that’s all.”

Very sensibly, Larry tried to let it go at that; but, oddly enough, it refused to “go.” Day after day the failures continued, usually beginning with the shop work and then spreading, like a contagious disease, to everything else. In the foundry his flasks “fell down,” and the castings came out looking as if a dog had gnawed them. In the pattern shop, plane-irons that he had whetted to a razor-edge nicked and spoiled the job. In the machine shop it was even worse; every machine tool he tried to use bucked on him and ruined something.

Of course, there were consequences――mighty unpleasant ones. With poor markings, or what you might call no markings, he was called before the chief of the shop staff, warned once that he would have to pull his standing up, warned a second time, and then, one morning, a faculty notice came. He was falling below passing grades in everything but Mathematics. If he couldn’t do better, the faculty would reluctantly be obliged to conclude that he hadn’t sufficient preparation for a college course.

“I don’t know what is the matter with me,” he confessed to Dick on the day when the faculty notice came. “I’m just all shot to pieces. Why, Dick, I don’t know myself any more! Things that used to come as easy as rolling off a log stump me as if I’d never heard of them before.”

“Not sick, are you?” Dick queried sympathetically.

“Only in my fool head and hands. I break everything I touch; and when I get a question in class, I simply blow up. I don’t blame the professors. Anybody would think I was solid ivory from the neck up!”

Dick shook his head. “I can’t understand it any better than you can, Larry. But there’s a reason, if you could find it. You’re not worrying about anything, are you?”

“Home matters, you mean? There’s nothing to worry about at home. No; my grief is right here, with myself.” Then, with a look of wretchedness that was pretty foreign to the good, wide-set eyes: “It’ll break my heart, Dick, if I have to flunk out. And I’m headed straight for it now, sure as a gun!”

Dickie Maxwell got up and began to walk the floor with his hands in his pockets. Finally he said: “Say, Larry; how much do you know about Psychology?”

Larry grunted. “Nothing; except that I don’t take much stock in it. Why?”

“I’ve been messing in it a little lately. There’s a lot of the stuff that I don’t understand, but there are some things that I do. For instance, if you get off on the wrong foot in a sprint, the wrongness is likely to stick to you through the whole race.”

“Everybody knows that much,” Larry admitted. “But what has that got to do with my ‘busting’?”

“I was just coming to that. If you blow up in something in the morning, you’re likely to go on blowing up all day.”

“All right; that’s exactly what I do.”

“Your section has shop work in the mornings, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s in the shops that you begin to go bad, isn’t it?”

“For two solid weeks I’ve been breaking or spoiling everything I’ve touched.”

“There you are. With such a send-off, old Doctor Psychology would say that, unless you should fetch yourself up with a round turn, you’d be likely to go on foozling all day. And that’s what you do.”

“You’ve said it. But that doesn’t get me anywhere.”

“Wait: we’ve chased it back to the shop work. Now let’s take another tack. Have you got any ‘lame dogs’ in the shops――fellows that follow you around and try to get helped?”

“Yes, one; fellow named Crawford. He is sticking to me yet, though goodness knows there isn’t any reason why he should.”

“Hah!” said Dick, dropping into a chair. “Snitty Crawford, eh? I don’t much like that big fumbler, Larry.”

“I don’t either. But he’s such a miserable dub in Prac. Mechan., that I felt as though somebody ought to give him a boost.”

“Know him any, outside of the class work?”

Larry shook his head, and Dick went on:

“It just so happens that I do. He’s the worst sort that ever gets into college; a fawner on some fellow with more money than brains. Off the campus he’s Bry Underhill’s shadow.”

Larry jumped as if some one had slapped him. In a flash little Purdick’s warning, long since forgotten, came back to him――“a spender always gets a crowd around him――of the kind that’ll do his dirty work for him.” Could it be possible――――

“Say, Dick,” he broke out savagely; “do you suppose anybody could have been framing me up to ‘bust’ on this shop work, right along?”

“Why――if you had an enemy that hated you hard enough: I’ll admit that’s what I had in mind, Larry; but it can’t be. A fellow who would do such a thing as that couldn’t stay twenty-four hours in Old Sheddon.”

“Couldn’t he?” Larry said; but that is all he did say. And when Dick would have gone on to talk more about the present-moment sad state of affairs, the “shark” stuck his nose in a book and seemed to have lost all interest in the subject of his critical standing――or his no-standing――in the Registrar’s records.

But the next morning, in the shop-work period, he was as sharp-eyed as a cornered rat. His job――“exercise,” they called it――that morning was to turn a piece of round shafting to fit the hole in a pulley. Lathe work was one of the things he had learned fairly well in the old home railroad shop, and he ran the roughing chip in a few minutes. Setting the tool for the finishing chip, he stopped the lathe and turned to the bench behind him to try the gauge in the pulley-hole. As he did so, somebody passed between him and his lathe, and he looked up quickly. It was Crawford.

That was enough to make him extra cautious. Before starting the lathe again he examined the reading of the micrometer scale on the tool-rest. The mischief had been done. The tool had been advanced, just the least little fraction in the world, but it was enough. If he had let the tool run without resetting, the piece of work would have been spoiled.

With this for a starter, he not only kept his eye on Crawford during the entire period; he also put the fellow next to him on the watch. Three separate times the “lame dog” set traps for him into which he would have blundered helplessly if he hadn’t been forewarned. Once, in a screw-cutting exercise, the gears were changed on his lathe, and it had been done so deftly that he wouldn’t have believed it if the gears themselves hadn’t proved it. Again, it was a sly loosening of the tail-stock clamp, which would have let the work fall out when the lathe was started. Lastly, it was a “cut-in” on the wiring of the lathe motor, which would probably have burned out the motor if the current had been switched on.

Larry, seething inwardly like a pot ready to boil over, corrected the sabotage in each case before any harm was done, held on grimly, and said nothing. Before the shop period was over, the psychological reaction had begun to set in. Now that he knew that the fault wasn’t his own; hadn’t been his own at all; he was able to take a fresh grip upon himself. Gorman, the shop instructor, gave him the final little upward boost when he came around to examine and stamp the work of the period.

“Now, that is something like it, Donovan,” he said, in warm approval. “Glad to see that you’re getting back to your old form. You get ‘tens’ all around, this time. Keep it up and you’ll work off some of the discredits you’ve been earning.”

It was on the tip of Larry’s tongue to tell the instructor the real reason for the discredits, but again he held himself in. The matter, as it stood, lay between himself and Crawford――and possibly Underhill――and he set his teeth upon a frowning resolve to make the plotters answer to him and not to the faculty.

With the mystery of his stumblings thus completely solved, he went to his other assignments for the day with the handicap lifted. Straight “A’s” were his grades for that day, and his various instructors marveled as much over his sudden “come-back” as they had over his equally sudden slump.

It was at the close of the gymnasium half-hour, late in the afternoon, that he caught Crawford. The spoiler of records was on his way to his room, which was in a street reached most easily by cutting across a field lying back of the campus. Larry tried to keep cool; meant to keep perfectly cool; but his hand shook a little when he laid it on Crawford’s shoulder. “I’ll walk a piece with you,” was all he permitted himself to say; and as if some inner sense was telling him that something was about to happen, the big-bodied, hulking culprit kept step in silence.

After they had crossed the stile into the field, and were thus off the university grounds, Larry wheeled short upon the sham “lame dog.”

“You’ve been doing me dirt, Crawford, and this is payday,” he snapped, trying to say it calmly. “Will you peel your coat?”

A frenzied outburst of denial was the answer to this. Like any fellow who would stoop to the things he had been doing, Crawford was a shrinking coward at heart; this though he would have tipped the scale at twelve or fifteen pounds more than Larry.

“Oh, good gosh!――hold on――somebody’s been lying to you!” he protested. “I――――”

“Cut it out,” said Larry. “I caught you at it in the shop this morning, and I’ve got Dowling for a witness. You did everything you could think of to make me get a goose-egg marking, and you’ve been doing it right along for two weeks. What did you put into my fire in the blacksmith shop so that I couldn’t make a weld? Tell the truth!”

Crawford hung his head. “It was only a joke,” he mumbled. “I just put a li’l’ pinch of sulphur in the fire, to see what you’d do.”

“A joke, was it? And I suppose it was a joke to knock my flasks down in the foundry, and to nick my planes and chisels on the pattern bench. Now, one question more: who put you up to all this?”

For some little while Crawford wouldn’t answer this direct question, filling the air with shrill protestations of his innocence of any malicious motive, and the like. But Larry pinned him down savagely.

“Out with it! I want to know whom you were working for.”

It came out at last――because it had to.

“Bry Underhill――and some of the other fellows――said you were a ‘mucker’ and oughtn’t to be allowed to stay,” was the final hang-dog admission.

“So much for that part of it,” said Larry grittingly. “Now, I’m going to give you your choice. As I said, I’ve got a witness to what you did to me in the shop to-day. I can go before the faculty and get you canned. It’s up to you to say whether you’ll take that, or pull off your coat right here and stand up to me like the man you’ll never be.”

By this time Crawford was snarling――not like a man, but more like a trapped fox.

“If you make me fight, I――I’ll kill you!” he stormed; but he did take his coat off and fling it aside.

Then and there, in the dusk of the evening in Farmer Holdsworth’s stubble field, was staged the historic battle of the year. It is said that a cornered coward can always fight if he is driven to it, and Crawford made the saying good, hurling himself upon Larry in a mad-bull rush that was meant to end in a clinch in which his superior weight would give him the advantage. But when the clinch arrived, Larry was not there; there was nothing there but a stiff forearm with a fist at the end of it against which Crawford pushed his right eye vigorously.

In the next rush it was his nose with which he endeavored to push the hard fist aside. Larry hadn’t much “science,” but it doesn’t ask for any great amount of skill to let a frenzied maniac beat himself silly if he is sufficiently bent upon doing it. One thorough and rather prolonged round settled it. At the end of the one-sided boxing match Crawford was down, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t get up; could――or would――do nothing but gasp out that he had enough.

Larry did the decent thing――and did it as reluctantly as he ever did anything in his life――hauled the thrashed coward to his feet, took him across the field to his boarding-house, helped him get rid of such of the battle marks as the bath-room appliances could remove. All this in grimmest silence. But as he was leaving he claimed the victor’s privilege of having the last word.

“You go to the fellow whose boots you’ve been licking and tell him what you got from the ‘mucker.’ And when you do it, you may tell him from me that he can have the same, or a little better, any time he’s man enough to ask for it. And one other thing, Crawford. You stay out from under my feet from this time on. If you don’t, you’ll get it again.”

One of the problems that has never been satisfactorily solved, and perhaps never will be, is how the news of a thing done in privacy gets wings of the wind to scatter it abroad. Larry thought that the brief and brittle mix-up, staged in the growing dusk in Farmer Holdsworth’s wheat field, had been wholly without witnesses. But that same evening, after supper, Dickie Maxwell leered knowingly at him across the study table.

“So you chased up my little hint and whaled the daylights out of Snitty Crawford, did you?” he laughed.

Larry glanced up frowning.

“Who told you anything about that?” he demanded.

“Gee! everybody knows,” Dick crowed. “I don’t know who started the little news item on its rounds. But you ought to have the thanks of every decent fellow in Sheddon. Crumb-catchers like Snitty make me sick.”

Larry nodded soberly.

“Yes, Crawford got his; but, after all, he was only a poor tool in Underhill’s hands. It runs in my mind, Dick, that I’m still in debt――to Underhill and the whole money-rotten gang that he runs with. After the foot-ball game I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to draw any more rich-and-poor lines, or let them be drawn against me; that I’d stand for Old Sheddon as a whole. But if these gambling, betting, money-spenders want a fight, they can have it. It’s the old battle, and I guess it’s got to be fought out――here and everywhere else.”

For a little while Dick was silent. When he spoke again it was to say: “I suppose my father is what you’d call a rich man. Does that mean that you’re against us all, Larry?”

“Not against you, Dick; but I’ve got to stand with my kind. And that brings on more talk. In a way, I’m little better than Crawford; he’s a hanger-on of the rich fellows, and I’m a pensioner on your father. I know he has consented to call the money he is advancing me a loan, but after what’s happened I can’t take it any more. I’ve got to be consistent. I can’t fight on both sides of the fence at the same time.”

“_Larry!_” Dick exclaimed.

“I know. It sounds ungrateful, and all that; but I’ve made up my mind――made it up this morning. Prof. Zippert will get me odd jobs of tutoring in Math. if I want them, and will put in a good word for me with Waddell and Gorman, so I can help out in the shops. I may have to live cheaper than I can here at Mrs. Grant’s; but that’s all right.”

“You――you’d break with me, Larry?”

Larry Donovan looked straight into his room-mate’s eyes.

“Never, Dick; not until you want me to. But I can’t hold with the hare and run with the hounds. You’ll have your friends, and maybe I’ll have mine. And they won’t be the same.”

Dickie Maxwell threw his head back and laughed――because it was the saving thing for him to do, just then.

“You’re crazy, Larry; as crazy as a loon! But I’ll not lay it up against you. To-morrow, after you’ve cooled down a bit from this run-in with Snitty Crawford, you’ll see things in a better light. You see, I know you of old.”

But college brings out a good many things that don’t envision themselves in a High School course; and Dick Maxwell had yet to learn how stubborn a mule――and how loyal a friend――Larry Donovan could be in a time of trial.

IV

DICK’S DROP-OUT

“You’ve made up your mind then, have you, Dick?”

Larry Donovan had his small drawing-board on the study table and was working out a tangled problem in “projections.” Dick Maxwell had just tossed his books aside and was walking the floor, hands in pockets; his habit when there was anything to be argued about.

“I don’t know why I shouldn’t fall all over myself to jump at the chance,” he returned. “Dad was a member of the Omegs, right here in Old Sheddon, and, as I’ve said, they’ve given me a bid. I think it’s mighty nice of the fellows.” Then: “I didn’t expect you’d give me the glad hand. You’ve been sort of prejudiced against the frats from the first, haven’t you?”

“Maybe some of it _is_ prejudice,” Larry admitted, wanting to be perfectly fair; “but to me the whole fraternity idea seems to take a wrong shoot. If any place in the world ought to be democratic it’s a college. When little bunches of the fellows pull off to one side and shut out the rest ... well, that’s bad enough; but when, on top of that, they try to run things――――”

“The fraternities don’t try to run anything but themselves,” Dick defended. “That’s only your idea, Larry.”

This was entirely true. When we look through the battered old telescope called Life, we see mostly what we are expecting to see; and with his workingman’s eye Larry wasn’t expecting to see much good in anything as exclusive as a fraternity.

“Maybe they don’t openly try to run things,” he countered. “But they stand together and hold themselves as being a lot better than us fellows on the outside. You know they do.”

“Well,” said Dick, grinning, “they get the pick of the fellows from each incoming class, or try to: why shouldn’t they be better than the leavings?”

Larry’s answering grin was perfectly good-tempered. They had threshed this matter out a good many times in the past.

“Present company excepted, I take it,” he put in, adding: “I’m one of the ‘leavings,’ you know.”

Dick sat down, chuckling delightedly.

“I just wanted to see how you’d take that,” he explained. “You have the one big necessary qualification――angelic humility. You’ll do, all right.”

“Do for what?”

Dick got up and put an arm across Larry’s shoulders.

“You hump-backed old greasy grind!” he chanted; “did you swallow the notion that I was going to duck out and leave you to wallow all alone in the mire of your own splendiferous conceit? It’s a dead secret yet, but I’m allowed to whisper it to you. You’re due to get a bid to the Omegs yourself!”