Part 6

That evening, when there were half a dozen fellows in the room, Larry noticed again a thing he had been noticing for a week or more; which was the fact that little Purdick had stopped coming to the Man-o’-War――that he hadn’t shown up since that evening when he had outstayed the others to say his say about the frats and the classes and masses.

Also, Larry, trying to hammer the proper method of working a trig. problem into Ollie McKnight’s not any too mathematical head, was conscious of a duty unfulfilled. He had been meaning to look Purdick up and had neglected doing it.

“Hey, Belcher!” he called to a fellow stretching himself lazily on the bed that used to be Dick’s, “have you seen anything of Purdy lately? He’s in your section.”

“Nary a rag,” said the lazy one. “Dried up and blown away, I guess.”

McKnight looked up from his figuring pad.

“Friend o’ yours, Donnie――this Purdy person?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Larry.

“Ump. He’s having one fine, large, tough time, so the fellows tell me. Flunked out last year Freshman and had to take the work over. Nothing much to him but grit, but he’s got a peak load o’ that. Works in Hassler’s to keep going, but I haven’t seen him there for a week or so. Darned shame a fellow like that can’t get a little boost over the humps, I’ll say. If Old Sheddon had any heart she’d have scholarships, or something, for ’em.”

Larry let Purdick drop for the remainder of the session; but the under-thought, that he’d been neglecting something, kept trotting along just the same; that, together with the “flop-around,” as he was calling it, of one Ollie McKnight. From something that had been mighty nearly a snob at the beginning of the year, the son of Consolidated Steel was actually thawing down into a human person with decencies and sympathies a good bit like those of other fellows. That word about the Purdicks just now, for example.

At the half-past-nine-o’clock dispersal, when the roomful went straggling out by ones and twos, McKnight was still working on his final trig. problem. When he finished it he stretched himself luxuriously in his chair and stuck his hands into his pockets.

“Once more I can face Old Figures without batting an eye,” he exulted. Then: “You’re all kinds of a decent chap, Donnie.”

“Don’t I know it?” Larry grinned. “But I’m not as decent as I might be. If I were, I’d have looked Purdick up before this time. Maybe he’s sick.”

“Still worrying about that poor little rat, are you? I don’t wonder at it, if he’s a friend of yours. He needs somebody to worry for him.”

“I wish I could worry to some good purpose, Ollie.”

“Money?” said McKnight.

“If I had it――yes. I’d like to stake him for his course. Some of the fellows can romp their way through on the work-out track and it doesn’t hurt ’em. Purdy’s got the nerve for it, but that’s about all he has got.”

For a long minute McKnight sat trying to balance his pencil, end up, on one finger and apparently giving his entire attention to the accomplishment of the impossible feat. When he spoke again it was to say: “Donnie, once upon a time I was low-down enough to call you a ‘mucker’: you’re not one, but I am.”

“I don’t get you,” said Larry, and he meant it.

“I can mighty nearly put it into words of one syllable. I’m nineteen years old, Donnie, and up to date I can’t remember that I’ve ever done one single thing for anybody but Ollie McKnight――that is, nothing that has cost me anything.”

“Well, perhaps you haven’t had to.”

“That’s it; I haven’t. It’s been Dad’s money, ever since I can remember. If I wanted to throw a few dollars to the birds, I threw ’em――and got some more where they came from. It didn’t cost me anything.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” said Larry, meaning only to save the confider from possible future embarrassment.

“Don’t you go and trig the wheels,” McKnight put in quickly. “I’m not often taken this way, and it’ll do me good to unload and get it out of my system. What you said about little Purdy a few minutes ago――that you’d boost him through if you had the money――snagged me good and hard.”

“How was that?”

McKnight dug into a pocket and fished out a letter. It was typewritten on a Consolidated Steel letterhead, and he folded it over until he came to a paragraph near the end.

“Listen to this, and you’ll see what I mean,” he said; and then he read from the letter: “‘So you want a new car to enable you to cut a dash with the college boys and girls, do you? I was sort of hoping, Son, that your break into Old Sheddon would make you understand that there are some other things in the world besides having a good time, but it seems it hasn’t. But it’s all right with me. I’ve put two thousand dollars to your account in the college town bank, and you may buy a car with it――if that’s what you want more than anything else. But I should have been a pretty proud Dad if you’d wanted the money for something besides a plaything that you’ll wear out in a year.’”

“Well?” said Larry, when McKnight refolded the letter and put it back in his pocket.

McKnight didn’t answer the implied query. Instead, he put one of his own.

“How far would two thousand dollars go toward boosting little Purdy through his four years, Donnie?”

“How far?――Great cats! it would take him all the way through. It’s as much as, or more than, I expect to spend in the four years!”

“All right,” said McKnight coolly. “I’ll write you a check for it when I get back to the house.”

“But see here――good goodness, Ollie, you can’t do anything like that!” Larry broke out. “In the first place, Purdy won’t take it――no fellow would; and in the next――”

“Let’s knock the pins down in one alley before they’re set up in another,” cut in the offhand maker of scholarships. “Of course, one of the conditions would have to be that Purdy doesn’t know where it comes from. We’ll call it the Red-Wagon Scholarship, and let it go at that.”

“But even then, he’d consider it a loan and want to pay it back.”

“You can’t pay a scholarship back. But that’ll be all right; if he ever gets fixed so he can, let him pass it along――boost some other fellow who needs it. You may as well quit chucking hurdles in the way, Donnie. This is the first time I’ve ever given anything that’s cost me something, and you can’t choke me off. Besides, I’d like to shock Dad――just this one time, you know. I’d give a hen worth fifty dollars if I could be there to see, when he gets the news.”

“Then you won’t buy a car?”

“Not so you could notice it――not this year, anyway. When you come to think of it, it isn’t good form for a Freshie to be daddlin’ around in a little red wagon anyhow. Which reminds me that it isn’t good form for me to stay daddlin’ around here and keeping you out o’ bed. So I’m gone.”

“Hold on a second and I’ll go with you,” said Larry, reaching for his cap and overcoat.

“Whichward ho, at this time o’ night?” questioned the son of much money, as they went out together.

“I’m going to see if I can find out what’s become of Charlie Purdick,” Larry returned. And at the parting moment: “Sure you won’t change your mind, Ollie, after you’ve slept on it?”

“Don’t you worry. I’ve got a lot of weaknesses, Donnie, but that isn’t one of ’em. You go find Purdy.”

“I’m gone,” said Larry; and he turned down the cross street, while McKnight swung off in the opposite direction.

VI

A NEW ROOM-MATE

Being well used to Colorado mountain winters, Larry had been finding the Middle-Western variety of the season rather a joke than a hardship thus far. But on the night when he parted from the founder of the Red-Wagon Scholarship at Mrs. Grant’s front gate, old Boreas was outdoing himself.

Down Maple Avenue, cutting across angling behind the athletic field, the wind came howling straight out of the shivery northwest, bringing with it a storm that was half snow and half a fine sleet to sting like needles on a bare face, and to make the sidewalk as uncertain underfoot as the bottom of a soapy bath-tub.

It was only two squares down to the main street of the college suburb, and then one more to Hassler’s restaurant, where Larry made his first inquiry about Purdick. Here he learned nothing except the fact that Purdick hadn’t shown up for a week and more, and that another student waiter had been put on in his place. The big, puffy-lipped German didn’t know where Purdick roomed, but he thought it was over Heffelfinger’s grocery, two squares farther down.

Thither Larry posted, slipping and sliding over the treacherous sidewalks, and was lucky enough to find Heffelfinger just closing his grocery shop. Yes, Purdick had a room “oop-shtairs”――two flights up. Larry blundered into the box hall beside the grocery entrance and climbed――in darkness so thick that it was almost sticky. But there was a window in the second floor hall, and enough light from the street electrics filtered through its grimy panes to enable him to find the second stair.

Groping along on the third floor, which seemed to be a sort of junk room, Larry made his way toward a thin thread of light coming from the crack under a door. The barn-like third floor was cold with the deadly chill of a shut-up space that has never been heated, and Larry had all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering. At the door with the chink of light under it he rapped, and a hoarse voice that he hardly recognized said: “Come in.”

Larry wasn’t any more impressionable than he had to be, and wasn’t at all troubled with the sort of imagination that adds frills and furbelows to make a thing you remember grow into a sort of cold horror the more it is dwelt upon. Yet he thought he should never forget the desolate cheerlessness of the cubbyhole into which the opening door admitted him.

It was a bare little place, roughly board-partitioned off from the storehouse attic and lighted――in daytime――by a single window which was now rattling in its frame and letting a thin sifting of fine snow blow through the cracks. For furniture there was a pine packing box for a table, another which had been made into a sort of chair, and a third for a light stand on which stood a guttering candle. In a corner, with its head beside the light-stand box, was a cot, and propped up in the narrow bed, with a coat over his shoulders, the blanket pulled up to his chin, and his copy of “Hun and MacInnes” held so that the light of the candle would fall upon the page, was Purdick.

“Hello, Donovan!” he croaked in the same hoarse voice that had said “Come in.” “Dug me up, did you? Pull up the easy-chair and sit down”――this last with a grin that was more than half ghastly.

Larry dragged out the box chair and sat by the cot. But he didn’t take off his overcoat, or even unbutton it.

“Been meaning to dig you up for a week or more,” he said. “Why didn’t you let some of us know you were sick?”

“Didn’t want to be a nuisance. I’m getting over it all right, now.”

“What was it?”

“Touch of the grippe, I guess. I had it last winter. I don’t mind it so much, only I’m afraid it’s cost me my job at Hassler’s.”

Larry looked around at the cheerless, unheated cubbyhole.

“Gee!” he shuddered, “this is no place to be sick in. Why didn’t you report to the hospital?”

Little Purdick’s smile was another of those half-ghastly grins.

“I don’t mind telling you, Donovan. Your three-dollar-per-semester hospital fee, that you have to pay when you register, entitles you to two days sick-a-bed in a ward. If you stay over that time it’s a dollar a day extra. I didn’t have the dollar a day.”

“Well, you’ve got to get out of this,” said Larry; and he said it gruffly because the pitifulness of Purdick’s case was getting next to him. “You’re going to room with me for the rest of the year. Dick’s gone over to the Omeg house and I’m needing a bunkie.”

Purdick wagged his head on the blanket pillow.

“I know you don’t mean to stick a knife into me and twist it round, Donnie, but you know very well that I can’t afford to go to Mother Grant’s. Let it slide and help me out a bit on this trig.――if you can stand the cold. I’ve lost a week on the stuff, and if I can’t make it up I’ll go bust on it.”

“You chuck that book and listen to me,” growled Larry. “I say you’re going to room with me in the Man-o’-War, and what’s more, you’re going to begin it to-night――if I can find a night-owl auto hack anywhere this side of Chicago.”

“But I tell you I can’t, Donnie. It’s as much out of my reach as――as――”

“That’s all fixed,” Larry put in brusquely. “Your room rent’s paid, and your board, too; or they will be.”

“But listen, you good old scout; I can’t take charity that way――you know I can’t. It――it would break me, world without end!”

“It isn’t charity; it’s a――scholarship,” Larry stammered.

“Sheddon hasn’t any first-year scholarships, Donnie. You know that as well as I do.”

“Maybe it hasn’t had; but it’s got one now――just――er――founded. One of the fellows――er――knew of it so he nailed it for you.”

“Donnie, you’re lying to me; you know good and well you are,” protested the sick one. “You’re meaning to put up for me yourself――out of money that you told me yourself was borrowed money. Isn’t that the truth?”

Larry managed to force a sort of donkey-bray laugh.

“Much obliged for the compliment, Purdy, but I’m not so generous as all that amounts to. I told you it wasn’t charity, and it isn’t. It’s a sure-enough scholarship, and it runs for four years. After that, if you make a go of your profession, you’re to pass it on to some other fellow that needs it. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”

Purdick turned his face to the wall and for a long minute there was silence in the freezing little room. When he spoke again there was something more than the grippy hoarseness in his voice.

“I――I can’t take it in, Donnie,” he stammered brokenly. “I’m a perfect fool about this engineering course. I’ve wanted it ever since I knew what engineering was――wanted it so bad that I could taste it. The――the home doctor said I could never stand it to work my way through, and I guess maybe he was right. And now――” again he turned his face to the wall, and because it is a shame for one fellow to see another one cry, Larry jumped up and went to shiver at the rattling window.

When he thought he had given Purdick time enough to sort of get a grip on himself, he went on to the business part of his errand.

“Think you’re not too sick to stand the trip over to the house if I get a flivver and wrap you up good?”

By this time the little fellow was able to grin again.

“If it’s any colder out doors than it is up here, it must be going some,” he replied.

“It’s a rough night, just like it listens,” said Larry, “but we’ll make it, all right.” After which he groped his way out and down the two pairs of stairs and went to look for an auto cab.

That proved to be some hunt. There wasn’t a vehicle of any kind in sight on the college-suburb side of the river, and he had to go creeping and slipping over the bridge and into the town proper before he could find one. He discovered one at last, and had a wrangle with the driver because the man said he didn’t need tire chains and Larry insisted that he did; kept on insisting until the hackman grumblingly consented to put them on――with Larry to help.

When he got back to the cubbyhole under the Heffelfinger flat roof he found Purdick dressed and sitting on the edge of the cot. The sick one got up and wabbled around as if he were going to strike right out by himself, but Larry said: “Nothing doing; mamma’s baby hasn’t learned to walk yet,” and without more ado, wrapped the invalid in a blanket, stuck the candle in his hand so that he could light the way, and then gathered him up and carried him, catching his breath when he found what a feather-weight Purdick was, either from the sickness or from not getting enough to eat.

After Larry had bundled his arm-load into the hack, the short trip was made safely, though the machine skidded some, even with the chains on. Larry had taken time, while he was over in town looking for the auto, to telephone Mrs. Grant what he was meaning to do, so when he staggered up the steps with his burden, the good house-mother was at the door to meet him and help him get Purdick upstairs and into the bed that had been Dick’s.

A few minutes later she came trotting up with a pitcher of hot milk and made the new room-mate drink two glasses of it. After she went away, Purdick wanted to talk; wanted to know more about the scholarship, and who the fellow was who had grabbed it off for him, and if it was really true that he didn’t have to work for wages any more during the three-and-a-half years he hoped to stay in Old Sheddon. But Larry resolutely squelched him and told him to go to sleep, threatening to turn the lights off and run away to Welborn’s room to study if he wasn’t obeyed. So once more little Purdick turned his face to the wall; and a half-hour later, when Larry went to bed, the grippe patient was sleeping peacefully, and Larry, giving him the once over before he put the lights out, could fancy that a good half of the strained look had already gone out of the thin, colorless face.

This was the beginning of Larry’s experience with a substitute for Dickie Maxwell in the big upper room at Mrs. Grant’s. With the best of care, and plenty of good food, Purdick was soon up and around and at work in his section. Naturally, it took a good bit of boning to make up for the lost time, but since he didn’t have anything else to do, didn’t have to worry about rent and board and such things, he soon worked off the temporary handicap.

Matters went along quietly for three or four weeks before anything more was said about the “scholarship.” On the day following Purdick’s transfer to the Man-o’-War, Ollie McKnight had given Larry a check for the two thousand dollars, and with it Larry had opened an account in the college bank in the name of Charles Purdick, got a pass-book and a check-book and put both of them where Purdick could find them.

So far, so good. After Purdick got up and out, he paid his few debts and his delayed second semester dues, moved his scanty belongings over to Mrs. Grant’s, and apparently settled down to the new order of things without trying to find out anything more about his miraculous windfall. But Larry knew that the day of reckoning was only postponed, and it came one evening after the room had been cleared of the latest stragglers and its two occupants were left alone together.

“Now, then, Donnie,” Purdick began, “I want to know something more about this ‘scholarship’ thing. And first let me say that I know now that it _isn’t_ a scholarship.”

“But it is, in a way,” Larry insisted.

“Not officially,” said Purdick. “There’s no record of any such thing in the books. I’ve asked the Registrar.”

“Good gracious!” Larry exclaimed, seeing trouble ahead; “why can’t you let well enough alone?”

“Because, as I said that night when you came to hunt me up, I can’t take anybody’s charity.”

“Poor but proud, eh?” said Larry, knowing well enough that he would have felt exactly the same way in Purdick’s place.

“You can call it that if you want to; I guess it’s the truth. But I want to know; I’ve _got_ to know.”

“I’ll tell you all I can――which isn’t so very much,” Larry temporized. “The money was given to one of the fellows here to――er――do as he pleased with. He didn’t need it for himself, so he took a notion to give it to you――lend it to you, if you’d rather have it that way. Only instead of paying it back to him, he wants you to boost some other fellow, by and by, when you’re able to do it.”

“That’s all right, as far as it goes. But who is the fellow?”

“I can’t tell you. I’ve promised.”

Little Purdick twisted himself in his chair and seemed to be looking out of the window, though the panes presented nothing but a blank wall of darkness. Finally he said:

“I guess I’m up against it pretty hard, Donnie.”

“How so?”

“Can’t you see? You know the way I’ve always talked; what I’ve been thinking and saying about rich people. Nobody but some one of the rich fellows could do what’s been done to me. Can I take a bone that’s been thrown to a dog?”

Larry grinned.

“That depends, doesn’t it? Of course, if you’re calling yourself a dog――――”

“Say it all,” Purdick prompted.

“I don’t know how to say it so as to make anybody understand it. But this is the way it looks to me. If you do something for somebody that needs to have it done for ’em, you get a whole lot of satisfaction out of it, don’t you? Makes you feel sort of warm and comfortable all over, doesn’t it?”

“Of course; everybody knows that.”

“Well, if you’re going to be able to jolly yourself over the giving part of it, somebody else will have to do the taking, won’t he?”

Purdick took time to think about it. Trying to be perfectly honest with himself, he had to admit that he had never looked at it in just that way before. But poverty pride――especially when it is backed up by a lot of prejudice――is a pretty stubborn thing.

“If you won’t tell me anything, how am I going to know that this isn’t rotten money I’m spending?” he demanded.

“What do you mean by ‘rotten money’?”

“Money that’s been sweated out of a lot of poor people who couldn’t help themselves.”

Larry shook his head.

“I can’t go back that far, Purdy――and I don’t think you ought to. The money’s doing a good job now, whatever it did before it came to you.”

“But I think you might at least tell me who gave it. Supposing it happens to be somebody that I’d rather die than take it from? There’s a bunch of just such fellows here in Sheddon.”

“Don’t you lose any sleep about that. When the thing was put up to me, I asked myself just one question, and that was if I’d take it if that same fellow offered it to me and I needed it. That question sort of answered itself. I’ve got a lot of that same poverty pride myself, Purdy, but I’d have done it in a minute, if only for one reason; I could see that it was going to be the best thing that ever happened to that fellow to give it.”

“And you won’t tell me his name?”

“I can’t; that was the one thing he made me promise.”

“Am I never going to know it?”

“That’s up to him. And he’s right about that, too. What you don’t know needn’t worry you, and you don’t have to feel under any obligations. Now, let’s get to work on this descrip. It’s pretty stiff for to-morrow.”

It was perhaps a week beyond this talk, one evening when Larry was putting on his coat to go over to the _Micrometer_ office with his athletic notes, that Purdick looked up from his book to say:

“Seeing much of Dickie Maxwell these days, Donnie?”

Larry shook his head. As a matter of fact, he had been seeing far too little of Dick since the Zeta Omegas had taken him in. For the first week or two Dick had dropped in at the Man-o’-War every evening or so. But the “drop-ins” had grown farther and farther apart as time went on, until now they had stopped altogether.

“No, I don’t see him very often, except on the campus,” Larry admitted. “What makes you ask?”

“It’s none of my business,” Purdick went on rather hesitantly, “but he’s running with a pretty rapid bunch. Did you ever hear of the ‘Mixers’?”

“No; what is it?”

“It’s a private club, and it meets over in town. That ought to tell you all you need to know about it.”

“It doesn’t.” Apart from athletics and his job on the _Micrometer_, Larry knew little of what went on outside of his classroom work.

Little Purdick was staring at the darkened window; a habit he had when he had to say something that he didn’t want to say. And what he said didn’t explain much――except by inference.

“We can give the frats credit for one thing, anyway,” he remarked. “They don’t allow card-playing for money in the houses.”

“Gee!” said Larry, with a gasp; “are you trying to tell me that this ‘Mixer’ thing is a gambling club?”

“That’s what you hear whispered about it.”

“And Dick Maxwell belongs to it?”

“I’m afraid he does. Anyway, he runs with that sort of a crowd.”