Part 9

“You know good and well why I want to. Underhill’s smashed every rule and every tradition of Old Sheddon ever since he first hit the campus last fall. He’s not only a boozer and a gambler――he’s a cheat. I stood in for him and his crowd that time when the police caught us, and mighty nearly got canned for it. But now I’m going to tell everything I know!”

“You’re not going to do anything you say you will,” Larry put in, decisively. “As I told you a minute or so ago, I can fight my own battles.”

“Not with that kind of carrion, you can’t,” Dick denied; “you’re too open and aboveboard. He’ll do you up if you don’t let me kill him off.”

Any further talk about the Underhill come-back had to stop just here, because Welborn came in, wishful to know at what place in the book the English assignment for the next day paused; and shortly afterward Dick took his leave.

Like a regular fellow, Larry tried to forget the Underhill-Shubrick incident; tried, also, to keep from watching his team-mates to see if the lies had spread to the extent of making any difference, so far as he could determine, but he was wise enough to understand that a practice field would be exactly the place in which a bunch of fellows wouldn’t draw any hard-and-fast social lines.

But the dirt-throwing bobbed up again early in May on a Saturday when the newly organized ’Varsity was to put on a practice game with the Sophomores, and this was the way of it.

As everybody knows, visitors are not usually invited to witness the spring training games, but on this particular day there were two outsiders, a middle-aged gentleman and a girl, in the grand stand, guests of a Senior named MacClay, and at sight of the girl Larry was carried swiftly back to a day in the year-before summer; to a mountain canyon scarred and shattered in spots by the ripping of dynamite blasts, and to the foot-board of a big locomotive gingerly towing two Pullmans up the heavy grade.

“Remember ’em?” asked Dick, who was by this time far enough along in his make-up work to take an occasional Saturday afternoon off on the field.

“Sure,” Larry nodded. “Vice-president Holcombe of our line and his daughter――the girl who wanted to know if my last name wasn’t German.”

Dick grinned.

“You’ve got a long memory――for little pin-pricks,” he laughed. “Mr. Holcombe is MacClay’s uncle. He and Bess were passing through in the V-P’s private car, and Mac got ’em to stop over. You haven’t met ’em yet, I take it?”

Larry shook his head. “No; and I’m not likely to. I’m out here to play foot-ball.” And, as Coach Brock put him in just here, he did play foot-ball; played it so well that the scattering of more or less enthusiastic student spectators in the stands gave him ear-splitting credit by name every time he scored.

It was after the practice game that MacClay invited some of his friends and the members of the ’Varsity to come around to the little college inn, “At the Sign of the Samovar,” to meet his uncle and cousin; and Dick, who was watching things like a hawk hovering over a chicken yard, noticed that the team invitation was given to the various members individually, and that MacClay dodged Larry. Dick’s suspicions were aroused at once, but all he did at the time was to ask Larry to come over to the Samovar later in the afternoon; did this without saying anything about the impromptu reception for MacClay’s guests――and without saying anything to MacClay.

At the appointed time there was a gathering of the invited ones in the club room of the little inn, with Dick――who had naturally been included in the bidding, since his father was the general manager of the railroad of which Mr. Holcombe was the vice-president――among them. Apart from this, however, Dick knew the Holcombes well from having spent part of a summer with them at a mountain resort in Colorado.

It was rather early in the reception affair that Bess Holcombe got Dick aside to ask him a question.

“Tell me, Dickie,” she said; “who was the ‘Donovan’ who was playing at right half and scored so many times. Surely he isn’t our Donovan, is he?”

Dick knew quite well what she meant by the personal pronoun possessive. On that never-to-be-forgotten day in the mountain canyon less than a year before, the Pullman car, holding only Miss Holcombe, four women and the porter, had slipped its brakes for a runaway down the grade, and it was Larry’s quick wit and cool courage in chasing it with one of the construction engines that had saved the lives of the imperilled ones.

“He is our Larry, all right,” Dick replied. “Didn’t you know that he came here to Old Sheddon with me?”

“There are lots of things I don’t know about him,” was the quick rejoinder. “For one thing, I never could find out why he ran away that day last summer and wouldn’t let us even so much as thank him for saving our lives.”

“Bashful,” Dick laughed, though he knew very well that it was grouchiness and workingman prejudice rather more than bashfulness that had made Larry take to the woods on that memorable afternoon.

“Where is he?” the girl asked. “I think I’ve met all the other members of the team, haven’t I?”

“He’ll be over, after a little,” said Dick; and just then MacClay butted in and took his cousin away to meet another group of his classmates.

It was shortly after this that MacClay took his turn at drawing Dick Maxwell aside.

“You were talking to Bess a few minutes ago: it was about Donovan, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t I hear you say that he was coming here?”

Dick was beginning to be a trifle nettled.

“You might have, if you ‘listened in’ hard enough.”

“Who invited him?”

“I did.”

“Now see here, Maxie; you’re not a dead one, and you must have heard the stories that are going around about Donovan. For that matter, you come from the same town, and you must know what sort of a fellow he is.”

Dick straightened himself belligerently.

“You’re just the man I’ve been looking for, MacClay; somebody who can tell me precisely the sort of fellow Larry Donovan is. It’s just possible that I don’t know; I haven’t been acquainted with him more than ten or a dozen years.”

MacClay looked embarrassed. He was a very decent fellow in the main, though somewhat inclined to take himself and his own little world a trifle too seriously.

“I’ll just ask you one question, Maxie: have you any sisters?”

“Yes; two of ’em.”

“Would you be willing to have Donovan meet them?”

“Rats! They’re only kids, but, barring the difference in ages, he’s known them as long and as well as he has me.”

“And he’s accepted by your people――in your home?”

“Of course he is. Why shouldn’t he be?”

MacClay looked still more embarrassed.

“There’s a mistake out, somewhere,” he said. “Shubrick was telling me――”

“Who told Shubrick?” Dick cut in.

“Underhill, I believe. The story goes that Underhill lived for some time in your home town and knew all about the Donovans.”

“Exactly,” snapped Dick. “Just after the Rockford Poly game last fall, Bry Underhill took occasion to black-list Larry to a bunch of the fellows for no better reason than that his father was a workingman. Larry happened to overhear what he said and was going to lick him, but the other fellows got in and stopped it. Bry bragged then that he’d run Larry out of Old Sheddon, and he tried to do it, using Snitty Crawford for a cat’s-paw. Now he is trying, in another way, to get him shoved off the team. There isn’t a single word of truth in the stories he’s telling around about Larry and his people, and I’d be willing to bet my next year’s allowance that he never so much as heard of Larry until he came here to Sheddon.”

MacClay spread his hands.

“Of course, I’m taking your word for it, Maxie, straight from the shoulder,” he said, heartily enough. “I didn’t want to believe this mess of gossip about Donovan; but at the same time, Bess is my only girl cousin, and――well, you know how a fellow feels about such things.”

“Sure I do,” Dick acceded cheerfully. “All I’ll say is that you owe Larry something for singling him out as the only man on the team that you didn’t invite here this afternoon; also, you owe him something for saving Bess’s life last summer. You can make a payment on both debts by giving Underhill’s lies a bash in the face every time you get a chance.”

“I’ll do it,” MacClay promised, and then Dick went to the door to watch for Larry’s coming, knowing pretty well the Donovan disposition to break and run at the most remote first view of anything like a social function.

For the purpose Dick had in mind, it was lucky that he was waiting at the door when Larry turned in from the street. Having been so carefully ignored in the invitation-giving, Larry knew nothing about the small “informal” at the Samovar. But like the war horse in the Bible, he scented the battle from afar just about as soon as he left the sidewalk, and Dick’s unworded prophecy that he would duck and run would have had its fulfilment if the watcher at the door hadn’t chased out and grabbed him.

“No, you don’t,” Dick laughed; “I was laying for you, you old dodger.”

“But what is it?” Larry wanted to know. “And where do I come in?”

“By the front door, if you’re asking me. I was afraid you’d forget and not come at all.”

“If it’s some social doings, I wish I had forgotten. You know well enough that I’m no earthly good at that sort of thing.”

“I know you’re going to be good at this one. Come on in and take your medicine like mamma’s little man.” And Larry had to go, because Dick had such a firm grip on him that a frantic wrestling match was about the only thing that offered any chance of escape.

Now, with Richard Maxwell, junior, a purpose usually held much more than was suffered to appear on the surface. From the moment at the close of the foot-ball practice when he had discovered that Larry was left out of the invitation list, he had been plotting like the villain in a play, and thus far there had been no hitch. What was particularly needed was an audience of sufficient size, and this he had secured by taking it upon himself to add handsomely to MacClay’s biddings, telling as many of the men as he could reach in the time afforded that they owed it to MacClay to come around and do honor to his guests.

Therefore and wherefore it was a pretty well crowded club-room that Larry was presently dragged into, and Dick didn’t give him a moment in which to cool his heels――or his courage. Almost before he knew what was happening, Larry found himself shaking hands with a tall, well-preserved gentleman with a mop of graying hair which looked as if it might once have belonged to a foot-ball captain, and the gentleman was saying, evidently following up something that Dick had said:

“So you’re _that_ Donovan, are you? Well, now――this is a pleasure that I’ve been promising myself ever since last summer. Why did you run away without giving us a chance to thank you for the splendid thing you and Dick did when our Pullman broke loose?”

Larry said, “I don’t know, Mr. Holcombe,” which was about as near the fact as he could come without going into an explanation a mile long, and that probably wouldn’t be understood after it was made.

“I believe you are right,” smiled the tall man; and then he was wise enough, or kindly enough, to steer away from that subject and start another upon which Larry was much more at home. “I was watching your play this afternoon with a great deal of interest. We used to play a sort of game that we called foot-ball in my college days, and there was a time when I thought I was something of a dabster at it myself. Do you play on the ’Varsity next year?”

“If I can make good in the practice.”

“I guess there is no fear but what you’ll do that,” and while the visitor went on talking about foot-ball and the tremendous improvements――“differences,” he called them――which the game had taken on since his own time, the second layer in Dick’s purpose uncovered itself. With a deft cleverness all his own, he was contriving to get just as many of those present as possible to observe the cordial footing upon which the vice-president of the Nevada Short Line (no inconsiderable railroad, if you please!) was meeting Larry Donovan. And the cap-sheaf to that was placed when the great man finally called his daughter and turned Larry over to her.

“I think it is high time you were letting me say ‘Thank you,’ Mr. Donovan,” was the way Miss Bessie began on him; and there was a dog-like plea in his eyes when he blurted out:

“Oh, say――please don’t ‘Mister’ me; I――I’m just ‘Larry’ to my friends, and――and――――”

“And we are your friends; you can certainly count upon that. But tell me, how did you _ever_ have the nerve to chase that runaway car?”

“Why-ee, I don’t know. I guess it didn’t take so very much nerve. You see, it had to be done. The car was running away.”

“Oh! So things that have to be done don’t require extra courage. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? It’ll take more than the bare saying so to convince me. Let’s go somewhere and sit down.”

Again Dick uncovered that purposeful second layer. “You see,” he said to one of the fellows who he knew had been carelessly spreading Underhill’s calumnies; “you see how people who really know Donnie appreciate him. Bess Holcombe met him last summer out in Colorado, you know, and, incidentally, he saved her life on a runaway car――no, not an auto――a Pullman on the railroad. You couldn’t tell the Holcombes anything against him, and get away with it.”

Oddly enough, after the first few minutes, Larry found himself getting along very well indeed with the daughter of, perhaps, the richest man he had ever shaken hands with. Which was something to Miss Holcombe’s credit, too, for she was rather fond of taking “rises” out of bashful young fellows. Most naturally, their talk went back to that day in the Tourmaline Canyon at first, but it got around to more modern things after a bit.

“You are taking the Mechanical course in Sheddon?” the girl asked, when things present had been given a chance.

“Taking at it,” said Larry modestly.

“And Dickie Maxwell’s in Civil?”

“He is. His father is a C. E., you know.”

“Mr. Maxwell is a Sheddon old-grad., isn’t he?”

“Yes; that is how Dick and I come to be here. It’s a good old dump.”

The girl laughed.

“If you go on playing foot-ball the way you did this afternoon, you’ll put Sheddon on the map,” she said. “Where did you learn?”

“Brewster High. We had a corking team for a bunch of kids. I’ll say that much for it if it did have to count me in as right half.”

“That is where you’ll play on the ’Varsity, isn’t it?”

“Surest thing you know――if Coach Brock doesn’t find a better man.”

If any one had told Larry one short hour earlier that at half-past five that same afternoon he would be talking thus chummily with a girl――any girl, let alone Miss Elizabeth Holcombe――he would have taken a chance and called that person a hopeless pipe-dreamer. More than that, he went on talking with her, and still more, when the time came for the guests to go to the eastbound train to which their private car was to be attached, he made one of a group of Dick’s and MacClay’s intimates who went to the station to see them off.

It was while they were walking together back to the college side of the river over the reconstructed Main Street bridge that Larry said to Dick: “Did you hear what Miss Bess said to me as I was putting her on her car?”

“Asked you to come to see her if you ever came to New York, didn’t she?”

“That was it. I wonder if you could tell me if she really meant it.”

“Meant it? Of course she did. Why shouldn’t she?”

Larry’s answer was no answer at all, but what he said marked a distinct milestone in his changing――and broadening――attitude toward the moneyed minority.

“The Holcombes seem to be just ‘folks’ like the rest of us,” was his summing up of the plunge into the social amenities; and Dick was wise enough to let the remark stand just as it was made.

That evening Larry went over to the Omeg house to help Dick “bone” a little more against some tests that were coming. After the work session was over, Dick sat back with a quizzical smile and said: “I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with the Underhill lies now, Larry――after what happened this afternoon.”

“Ump,” said Larry. “I’ve been thinking: I guess it wasn’t so much of a ‘happening’ as it might have been. Didn’t you know that I was the only member of the team that wasn’t invited to the Samovar?”

“Maybe I did.”

“And you ‘framed’ it so I’d have to meet the Holcombes anyway, even if MacClay didn’t want me to?”

Dick’s smile broadened into a mischievous grin.

“What you don’t know won’t ever hurt you one little bit,” he replied banteringly; adding, as Larry got up to go: “I owe you more than I can ever pay, anyhow. Let’s let it go at that. But there’s one other little thing I’d like to say. I happen to know that Bry Underhill is perfectly savage about the thing you let out on him――stealing those mottoes from the flooded house. The next time he takes a lick at you he’s going to make it count, if he can. Just thought I’d mention it so you could watch out. Night-night.”

XI

IN WHICH LARRY HAS A HEADACHE

Schools of journalism are doubtless excellent things in their way, but many a bright young newspaperman has had his start in helping to keep a college daily “functioning,” so to speak. Beginning with the athletic reporter’s job on the _Micrometer_ by writing copious columns which the editor usually cut to paragraphs, Larry was learning, and Havercamp, who was slated for editor-in-chief for the next college year, kept a weighing-and-measuring eye on the big, curly-headed Freshman who was slowly but surely learning the lesson of what ought, and what ought not, to be printed in a college newspaper.

“Ever been in Yellowstone Park, Larry?” Havercamp asked, one night in May when Larry had stayed over in town to help put the paper to bed.

“Not yet,” said Larry. “Why?”

“You remind me of one of the geysers――Old Faithful. Goes off at regular intervals and never misses a lick. That’s what counts in the long run――even more than the brilliant intellect you read about――and don’t often see. You can’t write much yet, but you have the knack of being able to tell when the other fellow writes right. Do you get me?”

“I guess so,” Larry laughed. “You’re trying to feed me up a bit, aren’t you?”

“Something of the sort, yes. In a few weeks we’ll be electing the editorial staff of the ‘_Mike_’ for next year. Some of the fellows think you ought to run for athletic editor. The ‘_Mike’s_’ going to need a ‘steady’ or so next year, and you’d fill the bill.”

“Not good enough,” Larry objected decisively.

“That’s for the other fellows to say. I think you are.”

“You ought to have a frat man,” was Larry’s next objection. “The fraternities have taken a good deal of interest in athletics this year and they ought to be encouraged.”

Havercamp grinned. He was one of the most enthusiastic fraternity men in Sheddon, and it amused him hugely to have a barbarian pointing out that the fraternities ought to be “encouraged.”

“Think we need ‘hoping up’ some, do you?” he laughed. “I like your cheek. Is that the best you can offer?”

“The best, but not all,” Larry went on. “I’m willing to do what comes my way to keep any of the Sheddon activities going. Just the same, though I don’t know where I’m going to land at the end of my four years, I’m reasonably sure it won’t be on a newspaper job. Another thing is, if I don’t fall down, I expect to be on the team next year.”

“That wouldn’t make any difference,” said Havercamp. “Anything else?”

Larry looked down.

“Yes. You know it as well as I do, Havvy, that I’m not ‘popular’ in any big sense. Fellows on the _Micrometer_ staff ought to be popular.”

The managing editor sat back in his chair with his eyes half closed.

“That little thing has puzzled me more than a few, Donnie,” he admitted.

“But you know it’s so,” Larry persisted.

“I know that some of the fellows seem to be always trying to put you in bad, yes; and I’ve never seen any reason for it.”

Larry thought he knew the reason, but he was close-mouthed enough about his own affairs not to wish to talk about this particular one. He knew he had earned the enmity of Bryant Underhill and his following, and that meant the enmity of whatever proportion of the student body Underhill and his cronies could influence.

“I guess maybe there’s reason enough――for the fellows who do it,” was all he said in reply to Havercamp’s implied question; and just then the first copies of the paper came up, and they both fell to work scanning these preliminary “pulls” for last-minute correction of errors.

“Bry Underhill is one of the fellows who has it in for you,” Havercamp resumed, after the “go ahead” order had been ’phoned down to the press room.

“I know it,” said Larry. “At first he was sore at me because my father happens to be a railroad man working for day-pay instead of a salary. And now he’s got a bigger grudge――since Dick and I caught him and Crawford looting a house for ‘souvenirs’ on the night of the flood, and I was brash enough to talk about it.”

Havercamp shook his head.

“Underhill’s a bad actor. But because he flings his dad’s money around with an open hand and drives a sporty auto and poses as a ‘free and easy,’ he has a following――such fellows always do have. What I can’t understand is how he gets by with the Registrar in his classroom record. Nobody ever hears of his doing any real work.”

“There are others, as well,” said Larry; and as he was leaving the little editorial den on the top floor of the _Chronicle_ Building to go home: “There are times when a fellow is tempted to believe that money――enough of it――will buy most anything in this world, Havvy. So long. Got to mog over to the shack and get down to brass tacks; couple of tests coming to-morrow.”

Now, as every one who is familiar with the town of which Old Sheddon is an over-the-river part knows, the _Chronicle_ Building is well up the hill on the left-hand side of the main street, not quite out of the business district, but well over in the edge of it farthest from the river. Turning west at the newspaper corner, Larry glanced up at the clock in the dome of the court-house. Its hands were pointing to eleven.

At the moment the streets were nearly deserted, though in the “booze block,” as a certain square well down toward the river was called, the saloons (now happily a thing of the past) were all open and doing, or so it seemed to Larry, an unusual amount of late-hour business.

Since he passed that way nearly every evening on his way to and from the _Micrometer_ office, he went on toward the bridge without paying any attention either to the lighted dives on one hand, or to the groups of late-hour loafers cluttering the sidewalk on the other. But just as he was passing the last of the saloons a man stepped out of a group of three, followed him and touched him on the shoulder. Larry wheeled quickly, with his muscles hardening themselves; but the man, a rather burglarish-looking fellow with a week-old beard blackening the lower half of his face and a workman’s cap pulled well down over a pair of beady eyes, spoke him fair, as they used to say in our grandfathers’ time.

“Name’s Donovan, ain’t it?” said the man, shifting the stub of his cigar from one corner of his hard mouth to the other, and talking out of the corner thus vacated.

“It is,” said Larry briefly. Then, quite as briefly, “What do you want?”

The man ignored the question.

“Young fellow named Maxwell’s a pal o’ yours, ain’t he?”

“He’s my friend, yes. What about him?”

“Li’l’ too much bug-juice, I reckon,” was the half-leering reply. “Somebody ought to knock ’im down an’ run ’im off home. Thought mebbe youse’d like to know.”