Part 7

“I don’t believe it――I can’t believe it, Purdy!” said Larry; but when he left the house a few minutes later to breast his way through a softly falling snow to the newspaper office on the other side of the river, he knew that his last word to Purdick had been more of a hope than a conviction.

VII

IN WHICH DICK MIXES IT

March at Old Sheddon, which had come in like a lion, was promising to go out like a lamb. By the middle of the month the snow was all gone and the athletic field was beginning to dry out enough to let the teams get a little outdoor work.

Keeping up his job as athletic reporter for the student daily, Larry was always on hand when there was anything doing on the field, and as soon as Coach Brock began to organize the teams and squads, he was given a chance to train for the next year’s ’Varsity foot-ball.

Ordinarily, you’d say, any fellow would jump at a chance like that, coming while he was still in his Freshman year, and Larry, who had all along been hoping he might make the team, was ready enough to jump.

“If you think I’m good enough,” was the way he took the bid; and after Brock, who never coddled any of his men, had said he would probably grow to be good enough if he worked hard, Larry left the field feeling about three inches taller than any self-respecting measuring machine would have recorded his stature. One of the ambitions he had begun to cherish, as soon as he had acquired a little of the “college spirit” that Dick Maxwell had tried so hard to hammer into him at the beginning of the year, was to make the ’Varsity foot-ball, and all through the year he had been hoping that Coach Brock wouldn’t forget the November game with Rockford Poly and the part in it that one Larry Donovan had taken.

Little Purdick, who had an almost uncanny knack of face-reading, knew instantly what had happened as soon as Larry entered their joint room in the Man-o’-War.

“So Brock has picked you, has he?” he said, as Larry flung his cap and dropped into a chair. “Where’s he playing you?”

“I don’t know,” said Larry; “I guess it will be right half. That’s the job I know best.”

“Tickled purple, I suppose?” put in Purdick with his queer little grin.

“You’ve said it, Purdy; hits me right where I live. It’s going to take a lot of time, but I’d rather sit up nights than miss it.”

“I’ll help you all I can in the ‘boning,’” Purdick offered, out of the depths of a loyalty to his big room-mate which had been steadily growing ever since the night when Larry had bundled him in blankets and carried him down two flights of stairs to chuck him into the hired auto. “You must turn all your copying and problem drawing over to me. I can do ’em just as well as not.”

“You’re a pretty good little old rat, Purdy, and I’ll lick the fellow that says you’re not. Has Dick been over?”

“Not since last night, after you’d gone to the ‘_Mike_’ office.”

“Did he say he wanted to see me for anything particular?”

“No, he didn’t say much of anything; just asked for you, and then mooned around a bit with his hands in his pockets and went away.”

Knowing well Purdick’s peculiar gift for reading faces, Larry pushed the inquiry farther.

“You’re pretty good at guessing what’s in the back part of a fellow’s head, Purdy. Was there anything the matter with Dick?”

“If you ask me, I’ll say there was. He looked mighty sober――for him.”

Larry hung upon his heel, so to speak. Though he had had a number of invitations, he had never yet set foot inside of the Zeta Omega house. Should he go and look Dick up? At this time in the evening he would probably be in the frat house. Larry thought he’d better go over. For old times’ sake, if for nothing else, he might take that much trouble.

It was just coming on to dusk when he left Mrs. Grant’s, and as he was unlatching the gate a slender figure with its head down and its hands in its pockets came along the sidewalk.

“Dick!” exclaimed Larry; “I was just going over to the Omegs’ to hunt you up.” Then, as he got his first good look at Dick’s face: “Great cats!――what under the sun have you been doing to yourself?”

Dick turned his face away.

“Would you――would you mind taking a little hike with me, Larry?” he asked.

“Sure I won’t; it’ll seem like old times. Which way?”

Dick set the direction and the pace without saying anything. The course led out Maple Avenue to the country road leading to the bridge whose portal arch bore in figures two feet high the numerals of their class. For the entire mile they tramped along side by side in silence. Dick did not speak, and Larry, borrowing something from that manhood which he was just touching on its hither side, respected his companion’s silence.

It was quite dark when they came to the bridge, though there was a slender sickle of a new moon hanging a few degrees above the western horizon. The bridge approach was guarded by a low concrete wall, and when they reached the wall Dick sat down on it.

“You haven’t had your supper yet, I know, and I won’t keep you very long,” he said in a sort of strained voice. Then he went on: “I――I’ve brought you out here to tell you good-bye, Larry. I’m canned――sent home.”

“What!” Larry almost shouted the word.

“It’s so. One of the profs.――Morton, he was kind of sorry for me, I guess――gave me a hint yesterday. That’s why I went around to Mother Grant’s last night to try to find you. I got the faculty letter to-day.”

“But, Dick――what on top of earth have you been doing?”

“The letter says it’s something I haven’t been doing――keeping up with my classroom work. But that’s only a part of it, and not the worst part, either. You see, Dad’s a Sheddon old-grad., and they’re trying to let him down easy.”

“What _is_ the worst part of it, Dick?”

“Don’t you know?” the canned one asked, in the same dull monotone.

“No more than the man in the moon.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of ‘The Mixers’?”

“Just the name; that’s all.”

“Well, you might as well know; it’s all out now. There was a bunch of us, with more money than was good for us, I guess. We’ve been going over the river to a room in the Brandon House to play cards. Night before last the town police raided us. The others all skipped through a window and down the fire-escape, but I was bonehead enough to stand my ground and try to bully it out. For the sake of the college it was kept out of the newspapers, and the police contented themselves with handing me over to the faculty.”

“And you’re the only one to be expelled?”

Dick nodded.

“They gave me a chance that I couldn’t take; said they’d make it suspension to the end of the semester if I’d tell who the others are. It’ll just about break Dad’s heart, Larry.”

“Don’t you know it,” said Larry, with a franker emphasis than he meant to put upon it. Then: “Have you told it all?”

“No; not quite all. I’ve lost money――lots of it. I owe pretty nearly everybody in sight. Worse than that, I’ve used up all my year’s allowance and I’m overdrawn at the bank. I’ll have to wire Dad for money to get home on.”

For a few minutes Larry was just about as badly crushed as Dick seemed to be. That Dick, the chum he loved almost as a brother of his own blood, should make such a frightful smash of himself and his prospects in just a few weeks or months seemed utterly unbelievable. Then there was Dick’s father.... Just here Dick broke in again.

“You mustn’t charge it up to the Omegs, Larry; that’s one of the things I got you out here to say to you. I know some of the fellows in my frat are pretty swift, but I was the only one that was in the ‘Mixers.’ It’s only fair to say that Carey Lansing and some of the others have done all they could to hold me down and keep me from getting tangled up with fellows of the Underhill sort. But it didn’t do any good. I was just an easy mark, all around the block.”

“_I_ could have held you down,” Larry maintained, with his jaw set.

“Yes, I guess you could have. But I never gave you a chance to try.”

Larry sat quietly for a few minutes, kicking his heels against the concrete wall. This was the time of day when, ordinarily, nothing would have kept him from thinking of his supper. But now he was not remembering that there were any such things as suppers.

“What will you do after you get home, Dick?” he asked, more to be saying something than for any cogent purpose behind the words.

“I don’t know; get Dad to give me a clerkship or something on the railroad, so that I can earn money enough to pay my debts. I’ve had my fling and I’m out of it for the rest of my life.”

If you are a little older than Dick you may smile at this, if you like, but it was the end of the world for him, or he thought it was――which amounts to the same thing.

“Does that mean that the fight’s all out of you?” Larry asked.

“Golly, I’d fight if I didn’t have just sense enough left to know that I’m down and out. I’ve taken the count, all right.”

“Let’s see if you have. What would you do if you had a chance to stay here and live it down, Dick?”

“What would I do? I’d black the shoes of the fellow who could tell me how it could be done. But it can’t be done. I’m fired, I tell you.”

“Wait a minute,” Larry put in. “Supposing the faculty could be persuaded to reconsider. Whereabouts would that leave you?”

Dick gave a wry little laugh.

“It would leave me wondering where I was going to get the next meal. Didn’t you hear me say that I’m broke, and head over ears in debt besides?”

“How much are you in debt?”

Dick named a figure which wasn’t so crushingly big, though it doubtless seemed as big as the National debt to a fellow with only a few silver coins left in his pocket.

Larry made a swift mental calculation. Without intending to be especially economical, he had lived well within the amount set apart for his first-year expenses, and he still had a comfortable balance in the college bank; in fact, there was something more than enough to pay Dick’s legitimate debts. But there were three months of the semester left, with board and lodging for two to be provided for.

“Supposing you didn’t have to quit and run for it, Dick,” he suggested, “would you stay on in the Omegs?”

“No; I’ve disgraced the fellows good and plenty, and the least I can do now is to get out.”

“I’ve just been thinking,” Larry went on, unconsciously using a phrase that he’d copyrighted the summer before on the railroad job in the Timanyoni Mountains. “I’ve money enough in the bank to pull you out of the hole, but there’ll be nothing left to live on.”

“Oh, good gorry, Larry――do you think I’d let you do a thing like that?” Dick burst out. “Besides, can’t you get it into your head that I’m fired, canned, sent home in disgrace?”

“Oh, yes; I’m remembering all that. But I’m still thinking. You said this thing would break your father’s heart, and we mustn’t lose sight of that. Here’s what comes next. Gorman, in Prac. Mechanics, has lost his assistant, and two weeks ago I was offered the job. So far as I know, the chance is still open. With that, I could earn enough money to――”

There was the best reason in the world why the sentence broke itself short off in the middle of things. Up to that moment Larry had clean forgotten the great event of the afternoon, when Coach Brock had backed him into a corner of the locker-room in the gymnasium to tell him that if he’d promise to work hard on the practice field there would be a place for him on the next-year ’Varsity. If he should become Gorman’s shop assistant for the remainder of the semester, that would settle foot-ball practice, and every other outside activity, for good and all. There would be time only for work, study, eating and sleeping. If he didn’t hesitate, it was chiefly because he was afraid to hesitate.

――“Could earn money enough to keep us both,” he finished, with a little gulp to come between. “We’ll call that part of it settled.”

“Like a fish we will!” Dick rapped out, jumping down from his place on the wall. “What do you take me for, anyway, you soft-hearted old geezer? Do you suppose I’d let you mortgage yourself that way when you’re booked for next year’s ’Varsity? Oh, yes; I knew all about it before it happened. Not in a month of Sundays, Larry Donovan, and don’t you forget it! Now then, climb down off that wall and let me walk you back to your supper. I’ve made my little bleat, and that’s all there is to it.”

In a silence that was even thicker than the outward-bound one, they retraced the mile of county road, and at Mrs. Grant’s gate Dick went straight on down the street with only a brief “Good-night” for his hike companion. But a little later that same evening a muscular, square-shouldered fellow with curly red hair might have been seen pressing the bell-push rather timidly at the door of the President’s house on the opposite side of the campus; pressing the button gently and looking a bit shocked or awed or something when the door swung suddenly open to admit him.

Some half-hour later the red-headed one was thinking most pointedly of this door again, only this time he was eager to pass through its portal the other way. A middle-aged, sober-faced gentleman in scholarly black had risen from behind a huge table littered with books, in a room that was walled and plastered with more books, to shake hands with him at parting.

“You’ve made out a strong case, Donovan,” the president was saying. “It was principally your friend’s stubbornness that made the faculty take drastic action, but you are quite right in suggesting that we should recognize a sense of honor, even when we find it in bad company. If Maxwell is really in earnest――and after what you have told me I can hardly doubt it――I think I can promise you that we shall be willing to review his case――with a recommendation to mercy. Come and see me again, when you have time and opportunity. You will always be welcome.”

So, when Larry left the big house in Chestnut Street, he was walking upon thin air, and the crisp, starlit, late-in-March night seemed to sing for him as he strode along. And at the western portal of the campus he did not go aside to take the short cut across to Mrs. Grant’s. Instead, he broke another precedent and turned his steps toward Main Street and the house of the Zeta Omegas.

VIII

HOW LARRY CHANGED HIS MIND

When an “outer barbarian” goes to a college fraternity house the first time, he is quite likely to be rehashing a lot of weird ideas about the secrecies, grips, passwords, gauntlets to be run at the door, and things of that sort. So Larry Donovan, ringing the bell at the door of the Zeta Omegas, had made up his mind that he wouldn’t try to break in; he’d just ask whoever might open the door to send Dick out to him.

But things didn’t break that way at all. It was Wally Dixon who did the door-opening, and when he saw who it was standing on the step he stuck out a ham-like hand.

“Donnie, you old knock-’em-out, put ’er there!” he bellowed. “Had to sneak around and get into a little good company, after all, didn’t you? Tumble in and be at home: fellows’ll all be glad to see you.”

“I want to see Dick Maxwell,” Larry began, when he was once safely within the sacred precincts.

“Private and personal?” Dixon queried; adding: “I suppose you know poor old Dickie’s in mourning just now?”

“I know all about it,” said Larry. “That’s why I’m butting in. I’ve grabbed off a bit of good news for him.”

“What’s it like?” Dixon asked. “The house is all broke up about Dick.”

“I’ve just been to see Prexy. Dick’s going to have another chance.”

“Why, you bully old stick-in-the-mud!” roared Dixon. “We sent a delegation to Prexy this morning, but it didn’t get anywhere, just because we’re Dick’s frat brothers, and it was expected that we’d leg for him as a matter of course. What did Prexy say?”

“Said the faculty would review Dick’s case――with a recommendation to mercy.”

“Glory be! that means that he won’t have to go home. Come on and I’ll chase you up to his room. He’s packing up, right now.”

Dixon was right. When Larry was pushed into an upstairs room of the fine old country-town mansion that had been remodeled into a fraternity house he found Dick on his knees before an open trunk. Dixon merely shoved Larry into the room and then backed out and disappeared. Dick squatted back on his heels and said, “So you broke in, did you? I thought maybe you’d come around to see me disappear over the horizon.”

“Hold up a minute,” gasped Larry breathlessly. “Have you wired your father?”

Dick shook his head.

“Not yet; I’ve been putting it off――like a coward. Wally Dixon has staked me to enough to get home on. I thought I’d rather tell Dad face to face, but I can’t do that, either. The faculty letter’ll get there before I do.”

“Dick,” said Larry, and he tried to say it casually, and couldn’t, “the faculty letter isn’t going to your father. You’re to have another chance.”

For a time Dick didn’t speak or move; just squatted there on the floor with his hands locked over his knees and with queer little twitches coming and going at the corners of his mouth. After a bit he managed to say: “How do you mean?――another chance.”

Rapidly, because he couldn’t trust himself to go at it deliberately, Larry told of his interview with the president, and of the president’s promise to “review” Dick’s case.

“You’ll be conditioned, and you’ll have to make up your classroom work,” he went on, “but we can pull you over that hill all right. And he told me that the letter hadn’t been sent to your father. I guess he was just as sorry about having to send it as you were about having it sent. They think a lot of your father here in Old Sheddon, Dick.”

Slowly Dick got upon his feet, crossed the room, and sat upon the edge of his bed.

“For a minute or so you got me all ‘hope up,’ Larry,” he said soberly. “Goodness knows, I want to stay bad enough, but I can’t. I won’t ask Dad for any more money, and it’s a cinch that I’m not going to let you go to work in Prac. Mechan. and lose out on foot-ball, just to put up for me.”

“Now see here,” Larry was beginning; but just then there was a rap at the door and half a dozen of Dick’s house brothers, Carey Lansing among them, came stringing into the room to drape themselves around on the different pieces of furniture.

“We know all about it, Dick,” said Lansing without preface. “Wally Dixon has spilled the beans all over the place. Here’s how――with the Sheddon series for this red-headed pal of yours.”

Dick rose to the occasion manfully.

“You fellows are all right; you always have been, to me. But I’ve got to go home, just the same.” And then, with his jaw set, he made a clean breast of everything, telling about his debts and winding up with Larry’s offer,――which he wasn’t going to accept――and with his own intention of kicking himself out of the Zeta Omegas.

“Like Zeke you will!” said Lansing. “Also like Zeke you’d let Donnie side-step his chance on the ’Varsity and take on as an instructor to split with you. What do you think you’re one of us for, anyhow? The house will organize a corporation and stake you――you ought to know that much, little as you know about other things. And next year you can bone down and save your nickels and pay it back. What’s the matter with that?”

Dick’s mouth was twitching again.

“There’s nothing the matter with it, except that you’re a lot of dad-beaned, inforgotten, turkey-trodden easy marks,” he said, hiding his real feelings under a mask of brotherly abuse. “I’m not worth saving.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Lansing, retorting in kind. “We all know that. We’re not doing it for you; we’re doing it for the sake of getting at least one good man on the ’Varsity next year. See?”

Larry Donovan’s emotions, as he sat by listening to this give-and-take, and Lansing’s offer, were considerably mixed. At first, you see, he had been charging Dick’s downfall chiefly to his association with the Zeta Omegas, and when Dick had wiped that charge off the slate, he had still managed to hang on to some of his old prejudice against the fraternities. He had even gone so far as to wonder if the bunch wouldn’t willingly turn its back upon a member discredited and kicked out of college in disgrace. But here was a spirit altogether human and beautiful; good, man-sized loyalty that didn’t seem to care a rap whether Dick’s father had a million or a mere pittance.

The occasion――and Dick’s evident balance on the raw edge of a breakdown――seemed to call for a diversion, and Larry made it.

“See here, Lansing――and the rest of you,” he broke in, making himself the target, instead of Dick, “I’ve been holding a pretty savage grudge against you Greek-Letter fellows all the way along, and I want to take it back. You’re just white folks, like the rest of us, after all.”

“Much obliged,” returned Lansing gravely; and then, to Larry’s utter astonishment: “You can’t put one over on me like that, Donnie, and get away with it. You know, and I know, why you’re not a member of the Omegs, right now. The name of the reason is Old Problem Seven-fifty-four. It was a low-down trick for me to swipe your demonstration sheet that night back yonder in January, and I’ve been ashamed of it ever since.”

For a minute Larry was too astounded to answer. That the head of a fraternity chapter and a Senior should make such open and frank amends to an outsider and a Freshman was almost incredible. But he contrived to find his tongue after a bit.

“I guess maybe I stood up so straight that I leaned over backwards,” he said. “Besides, I _was_ prejudiced, and I never was much of a ‘joiner.’ Let’s call it an even break and let it go at that. I’ve got to hand it to you fellows for the way you’re standing by Dick, and you can bet I’ll do my part. Now I must get out; I’ve got a whole descrip. assignment to work off before I turn in.” And he went while the going was good.

Partly because he thought Purdick needed it, Larry told the story of the evening’s happenings, after he got back to the upper room in the Man-o’-War. But little Purdick’s prejudices in the matter of the classes and masses were too deeply ingrained to be removed by a single instance on the other side of the ledger.

“Of course they’d back him to stay,” he offered. “It would give them a bad black eye if he had to get out in disgrace. What they’re going to do is only a matter of self-preservation.”

“Purdy,” said Larry, as he got out his drawing-board and settled down to his descriptive geometry, “there are times when you make my back ache, and this is one of them. Got your trig.? All right; you go to bed and get out of my way. I’m due to crowd about two days’ work into the next hour and a half.”

IX

IN TIME OF FLOOD

The spring which was approaching at the time when Dixie Maxwell so nearly fell over the edge of things was one which will be long remembered in the river valleys of the Middle West. During the winter there had been heavy snows, well distributed over vast areas, and after the winter was over, the storms continued, only they turned into soaking rains to patter incessantly upon all roofs and to flood the ditches on all roads, making each little ravine and hollow in the land contribute its small torrent to the rising rivers.

It was at the close of the third day of steady rain that Larry came back from his reportorial trip to the _Micrometer_ office dripping like a wet umbrella.

“Woosh! some little old spell of wet weather, I’ll say!” he exclaimed, stripping off his rain coat, and disappearing for a moment while he hung it over the tub in the bath-room.

“River still rising?” asked Purdick, when Larry came back.

“About a mile a minute, you’d say. It’s up within a few feet of the bridge deck right now. They’re saying, over town, that the railroad bridge won’t stand it.”

“The Main Street bridge will go first,” Purdick predicted. “Last year, one time when the water was low, you could see the bottom of the piers sticking out like toes out of a broken boot. Looked to me as if they weren’t founded upon anything but the sand and gravel.”