Chapter 4

"Well, Professor, what's your answer? You ought to know your mind by this time, surely, and we want you bad, my boy."

"Cap, old man," began the Freshman, his voice a little husky, for he was sorely troubled, "you must know how I appreciate the way you fellows have treated me, and that I want you particularly for a friend." He stopped, but Smith kept silent. The fraternity had had refusals before; they usually began this way.

"I don't know just what I ought to say," went on the luckless Walt. "I really did think you were the crowd I should join, but something has come up and I can't say yes."

"What is it? Is it because you think we don't study enough? We do, though, a great deal more than it looks. This has been rushing season and we had to do the entertaining stunt a lot, and Pellams would give any crowd the look of bumming. We really do work hard the rest of the year."

"Oh, no," said Walt, "it isn't anything like that, Cap."

"There's somebody in the gang that you don't like, then; somebody that you don't know well and don't understand. Isn't that so? Who is it? You ought to tell me."

"I would, Cap, if that were the reason, but it isn't. I like every man of them all."

"What is it then?"

"Nothing that I can tell you." Poor Walt, he was ashamed of his uncle; Lyman at the Hall had told him that the whole Beta Phi fraternity was as scrubby as their Stanford chapter.

Cap's eyes had an angry gleam. "Somebody has been throwing mud," he said, kicking up a splinter from the bridge floor. "There are plenty of them to do it."

"It isn't that at all. I wouldn't be influenced that way," protested Haviland. "It's another matter."

"Well, I suppose this is final," said Smith, struggling hard with his disappointment. The Freshman's past attitude had paved the way for a different answer.

"Let's not say that," Walt began slowly. "Give me a while longer, Cap; things may change. I had hoped--" He broke off;--he could never tell Smith--he had not until that very moment told himself--how much he had looked forward to being a Rho.

"Things may change," he said again as Smith turned savagely and started back. He was trying to compromise, but he had no idea how any change was to come about. He brooded over it in his room that night, and the more he pondered the more clearly he realized that the debt to his uncle stood in his way. Plainly, he was up against it. He made the foot of his iron bedstead jingle with a petulant kick, and, muttering the Phi yell in a savage tone, went off to sleep.

At luncheon the next day at the Phi house, the Freshman was so friendly and so gracious that two of the Chapter went out into the kitchen and shook hands. Had he not inquired solicitously about the fraternity's position in Amherst, had he not expressed great pleasure at learning of their high political standing back there? Never a word had they heard of his uncle, however. The Freshman who is in his own neighborhood does not donate additional arguments.

The Phi house was shaken to its foundations. This was the greatest piece of work for years. Walt was immediately invited to stay for dinner and to spend the night and the next day, but although it was Saturday, he declined. Even the tempting bait of a Populist campaign rally moved him not.

The days passed and Walter Olcott Haviland was an unhappy child. His sudden intimacy with the Phis could not escape the astonished Rhos; he was sensitive to the change in their manner, slight as it was. He would have been glad enough to have stayed out of fraternities altogether if it would have helped matters. There was a very jolly set in the Hall, men who had refused far better bids than the Phis. Jimmie Mason and Frank Lyman, "Peg" Langdon and Blake, the fullback; these fellows, as prominent as any in College, were in the dormitory crowd; they used one another's rooms and tobacco and clothes with the utmost good nature. Walt had been fond of the big building from his first day there; he could have had a happy time with this independent set.

He was not made any happier by Lyman's saying, "Whatever you do, don't join the Phis. They've no standing here, and you won't help yourself any." Freshmen usually listened to what Lyman said. But Haviland had thought and reasoned and struggled with himself, and had come to a conclusion. To write to his uncle, "I have joined the Phis because you are one," would be worth any sacrifice. Perhaps he could work to improve the crowd a little after he was one of them. At least there was no reason why they need be his only friends.

He went to the lab one afternoon with his decision made. If the Phis asked him to dinner, he would go and put his head on the block.

As he came along toward the main entrance he saw Andrew Higgins, the longest, lankiest Phi of them all, bearing down upon him. His heart sank, but his resolution was firm, and he looked his fate in the face. When his executioner had almost reached him, somebody touched his shoulder; it was Smith.

"Before your frat brother gets hold of you," muttered Cap, drawing Walt aside, "I want to speak to you. The boys must have your final answer to-day."

The "frat brother" was not to be turned down. He loomed up steadily in their direction. Walt was miserable. It was the beginning of the end.

"I'll give it to-night," he said hurriedly, as the Phi reached them.

"Will you come to dinner?"

Haviland wanted one sunbeam before the darkness.

"Yes, I'll come, Cap," and turned to shake hands with the Phi, whose invitation was frozen half-way in his throat. Now the Beta Phis were not of the people who let to-morrow get anything while to-day lasts, so Higgins asked Walt to come down after dinner for the night, and the unhappy boy, half-hearing, promised.

It was a gloomy dinner for the Freshman, baked funeral meats and he the corpse. Mrs. Perkins gave him a motherly smile and told him in a careful undertone that she was glad he was going to be one of her boys, after which he felt childishly close to tears. He sat out-doors with the others and smoked and joined weakly in the singing. The roses clinging to the porch had never been so sweet; the Rho dog had never nosed so affectionately against his shoulder. There was to be no substitute for this. He wished he had never seen the campus. His mood communicated itself to the others and things grew slow. One by one the fellows slipped away with various excuses. Finally Cap said:

"Come up to the room," and Haviland went up stairs with the emotions one carries to the dentist.

Smith threw himself on the bed and motioned Walt to a chair at his study table. They tried a little general conversation, but failed mournfully. The Freshman had a wretched feeling that this room was home to him. He had slept here so often and he knew every athletic picture and trophy around it. There had been something said about his living here with Cap after Christmas. The clock ticked spitefully at him.

Smith's voice, deep and quiet, broke the pause.

"What's the good word, Professor?"

Walt swallowed a lump, nervously opened a book that lay on the table, then looked at the big red sweater on the bed, and said:

"I can't do it, Cap."

Smith kicked a pillow of which he thought a great deal almost into the grate, and said with fine scorn:

"When do you join the Phis?"

"I don't know," said Van, drearily.

"Well, I think you're nutty; it's the cheesiest gang in College."

The battle had begun. Walt might as well practice his defense at once, so he said with a little dignity:

"My uncle is a Phi, and it is his wish."

"So that is it!" Such a reason was no discredit to the Rhos; therefore it was the harder to accept. "You give me a jolt, Walt. Just because your uncle is in a rotten fraternity you must crawl into the heap, too. I'd see him hanged first before I'd queer myself with those yaps."

Cap went on even more impatiently, but the Freshman heard not a word. He was staring at the book open before him.

"Cap, what book is this?"

"The fraternity catalogue."

"What fraternity?"

"Ours, of course; whose did you think it was, the--"

Walt gave a hysterical whoop and flung himself over the footboard upon the astonished Smith. He rolled him over the bed and sent him to join the pillow on the floor; then, sitting up on the bed with tousled hair and shining eyes, he said:

"Cap, if you still want me, I say yes!"

"What's the matter with you?" asked the amazed Sophomore from the rug.

"Nothing!" shouted Walt. "I see the whole thing; uncle's awful writing--mother got it Phi instead of Rho--she doesn't know one from the other--his name's in your book. Hoo!" and he sprang on Smith again and lifted him bodily.

The Chapter had been waiting. Hearing propitious sounds, they came stringing in, and Haviland's explanation, with the celebration that followed it, took such a length of time that the longest, lankiest Phi fell asleep in the parlor and his lamp burned out about two.

THE INITIATION OF DROMIO.

The Initiation of Dromio.

"I know a prof.,--not much to see,-- Take care! Mistakes are made here frequently, Beware!"

The Rho fraternity called Walter Haviland "professor." Haviland was one of their pledged Freshmen. In rushing, a good nickname, gracefully used, is a great thing. It puts a Freshman considerably at his ease, and impresses him with the feeling that he belongs to the set.

The first day that Haviland came over to dinner, Bob Duncan, a Senior, spoke up from his end of the table: "Are you a relative of Lamb, the botany professor?"

"I have never heard that I am," answered the Freshman.

"Are you in any of his classes?"

"No; I'm not going to take botany."

"If you were, I don't believe the class could tell you apart. Doesn't he look like Lamb to beat the band, fellows?"

"He's a little heavier than the prof.," suggested Smith.

"Oh, perhaps he is a little," admitted Duncan, "but their height is the same to an inch, and the facial resemblance is great."

"He can't look much like a professor," laughed the Freshman.

"He doesn't," said Duncan, "they've got him down in the register as an associate professor in botany, but that's all he has to his credit. He gets taken for a Freshman right along. New students ask him if he is registered and what his major is--sure they do."

"They say there was a big farmer who went in to register in botany and wouldn't do business with poor Lamb at all," said Perkins. "He said he wasn't so green as he looked, and he knew all about these students who make believe they're professors and give fake examinations. The professor was as red as a beet."

"I don't blame him," said Duncan. "Why, the man is married and has two children."

"Are you sure they're his," said Pellams, seriously. "I've seen them with him on the Quad, but I thought perhaps he'd borrowed them for effect, to keep off the Senior girls."

"The year he came here the Beta Phis tried to rush him, didn't they?" asked Smith. Duncan scowled across the table at the Sophomore. This was Haviland's first day at the house; they could josh other frats later, if he came their way; just now it was a break.

Ted Perkins interrupted tactfully. "Have some of this Spanish goo? The English department here is crazy on theatricals. They will probably want you for a grand revival of the Comedy of Errors."

"If I were you," came in Smith, to cover up his slip, "I would go over and draw his salary some day. They would pay it all right if they didn't look twice and ask questions."

"Better look out," added Pellams, in his solemn drawl, "those babies of his will be claiming you in the Quad in front of all Roble some sunny day, and then you might just as well leave college!"

This table-talk gave the men an idea for a nickname, and so, when they knew the Freshman a little better, they slipped an arm through his and called him "Professor." It was really the most civilized nickname in the house.

One Thursday, at football practice, about two weeks after Haviland had agreed to join, Pellams spoke to him.

"Professor, on Saturday night you are to be initiated. Bring over your suit-case with a change of under-clothes and a pair of old shoes."

"I was going up to San Francisco on Saturday," murmured Haviland, his heart beating a bit faster, "but----"

"You have changed your mind," finished Pellams, quietly. "We will have dinner as usual, and you will be on time, please. So long, Professor."

Haviland was not wholly at peace as he walked back to the dormitory. A Freshman never becomes especially hilarious in anticipating his initiation night; there is an uncertain certainty about it that he cannot entirely laugh away, however much natural bravery he may have, however hoary he may be in high school fraternity experience. At the chapter house, where things have been made so pleasant, careless remarks are dropped, full of sinister meaning. It is not nearly so comfortable there now, and Freshman Damocles wishes the suspense were over.

When the fateful Saturday dawned, Walter had a strong impulse to go to the city as he had originally planned. Pellams had explained to him that his having held out so long before agreeing to join would probably mean his "getting it unusually hard." He knew that of all the fraternities, the Rhos were the most severe in their initiations--one of the Rhos had told him so.

At the post-office that morning he met Professor Lamb starting for a day's botanizing in the foothills. He did not know the instructor, but he envied him as he leaned on his wheel and watched the botany man take the fence and start off across the brown pastures toward the hills beyond the lake. There certainly was a strong resemblance.

"Oh," groaned the candidate for fraternity privileges, "I wish it was a case of his resembling me instead of my looking like him. I only wish I was the prof, now, I'd change places quickly enough. I'm afraid I'm a coward."

He wondered if they guessed how scared he was; he hoped not. He pedaled around to the courts, where Cap. Smith was waiting to play tennis, and he put on an infant bravado which secretly pleased the Sophomore. After a few sets Cap. put his racket under his arm.

"No more tennis, Professor," he said, with meaning; "you'd better rest most of the day. Get out your work for Monday, you won't feel much like studying to-morrow, you know, and don't forget to be at the house at six sharp." Then, since the Freshman had visibly wilted, Smith grinned all the way across the field.

Haviland suspected two other fellows in the Hall of being in a state of mind similar to his own, but as he had been instructed to keep the matter absolutely secret, he could not turn to them for relief. He worried through the long Saturday, making futile attacks on the work prescribed for Monday, strumming in an aimless way on his banjo, and finally writing his mother a letter between the lines of which she at once read malaria.

Dinner at the Rho house was the most miserable meal he had ever choked his way through. A half-dozen graduates were present, and some men from the Berkeley chapter. These visitors seemed a solemn lot, and conversation included the candidates only now and then. During the lulls in the talk, the Freshmen made audible sounds trying to swallow their food; this was so embarrassing that they gave up the effort to eat, only gulping water now and then during talk. It was a relief when some one touched each Freshman quietly, and the condemned youngsters followed upstairs, their faces wearing pitiful dumb-victim-at-the-altar expressions, or trying with ghastly smiles to show how little they cared.

The young moon, sloping toward the shaggy rim of the Palo Alto hills soon after eight o'clock, looked down into the pasture lands back of the campus. There she saw Walter Haviland, blindfolded and with a rope about his waist. Three other Freshmen were in a similar condition in different parts of the field. Haviland had been intrusted to the tender mercy of Cap. Smith, a 'Varsity man, and Pellams Chase, greatest of all joshers. This was indeed a high honor. Two of the less distinguished members hovered about them, eager to add their services. Their objective point was a fence skirted by a gully through which water ran in the winter time; into this gully they flung the luckless Walt and left him there while they took their ruthless course to a part of the field where another group of men had gathered.

The moon touched delicately the redwood trees upon the western ridge, then slipped down beyond them. With her last look into the field she saw Haviland lying on his face at the bottom of the gulch. She saw also Professor Lamb, of the botany department, hurrying home cross-country from the day's collecting on upper San Francisquito Creek, tired, dusty, bedraggled, thinking with an unscientific enthusiasm of the hot dinner awaiting his homecoming. The lingering moon, peering over the mountain edge, saw the instructor clear the fence and plunge into the shadowy gulch. Then, before she could see what happened next, the stern law of the solar system drew her reluctant down.

The four men who had charge of Haviland came back from their consultation with the others. When they were near the place where they had left their victim, a man appeared, climbing out. This called for investigation; they bounded along through the gulch and came up with the fellow. To their surprise it was Haviland with his bandage off and the rope nowhere. It was the first time a man had ever tried to give them the slip. He should pay for it! Cap. Smith threw himself on the Freshman at the first glimpse of his face. In a jiffy there was a new bandage over his eyes and another rope coiled around his waist; this time it included his hands. He struggled resolutely, but in silence, for his breath had left him when he struck the ground with Smith on top.

They seized him firmly and ran him at breakneck speed over a terrible course, heading for an old well which waters a back pasture. Here they stopped, spent with running.

"On your knees, Professor!" gasped Pellams, with as much authority as his lack of breath would allow.

The panting victim remained standing.

"Down!" accompanied by a resounding blow of a barrel stave.

Still no movement, but a gurgle was heard as though speech was being labored for.

Biff!

The unfortunate creature sprawled beside the well, but struggled up again to a half-kneeling posture.

"This--must--stop!" he gasped, painfully. "It--is--an--outrage. I--am----"

"No levity, sir!" said Smith. "You've got to do what we say, Professor, or you won't get in at all."

"I don't--want--to--get--in," panted the poor wretch in desperate protest. "It's--a--mistake--I----"

"See here, Professor; where's your nerve? Be a man! You'll never make a Rho at this rate. Brace up, for Heaven's sake! Rise, Neophyte."

They gave the rope a cruel wrench, which brought their captive to his feet.

"Let's kill him," whispered one of the men. Never before had there been so shameful a display of the white feather.

"We'll duck him."

They brought their Freshman to the brink of the well. They tightened the rope under his arms, and, before he could divine their intentions, they were lowering him down the slippery side. When his feet struck the cold water he struggled violently, shouting something which his splashing and the echo of the well made unintelligible. Presently they hoisted him, dripping and speechless with rage.

"Thou hast now been cleansed of thy sin and cowardice, O Neophyte," declaimed Pellams. "Forward to the joys that await thee!"

They dragged him home on the run, taking the road this time and making all haste to the house. The half-dead initiate had to be carried upstairs. Smith took off the rope and told him to strip for a bath. The victim sat on the edge of the Sophomore's bed and shook his head feebly. He was evidently exhausted.

"Come, hurry up, Haviland," said Cap. He felt a brutal impatience to see what the barrel staves had done to the fellow's back. "Get bathed and put on your dry clothes and be ready for the feed."

The initiate raised his hands slowly and untied the bandage. He blinked a moment at Smith, then he said huskily, "I am not Haviland, Mr. Smith, nor do I want any 'feed.' I want to know what this means." There was no anger in his voice, only great weariness.

The freezing truth dawned on the horrified student. His first impulse was to rush out of the house and to keep running. He managed to stammer:

"Where's Haviland?"

"I don't know where Haviland is," muttered the tired instructor. "I don't know who Haviland is. If I have taken his place I am ready to change again." He looked down upon his clothes, stuccoed with tarweed burrs and wet mud.

Then Jack Smith laughed aloud.

"Professor, when we've found Haviland, and you've seen him, you'll understand the whole horrible mistake, and----"

"There was no mistake," said the other, coldly, "you called me Professor while you were beating me."

This only set Smith off again.

"That's our name for Haviland. You see he looks like you--oh, I can't explain it to you, Professor; but when you've seen the man you'll forgive us, I know you will. And you've simply got to stay to our feed now, if we have to tie you up again to keep you here."

Professor Lamb, of the botany department, smiled wanly.

"I think I will take a bath, anyway," he sighed.

THE SUBSTITUTED FULLBACK.

The Substituted Fullback.

"Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain! I know not, faith, not I; Is it more strange the dead should walk again Than that the quick should die?" ALDRICH.

"Frank Lyman, Football Manager, Stanford University:

"Blake died three forty-five. Body going East. I return five train. DIEMANN."

When he had sent this message to the University, the instructor in Psychology went gloomily down to the Third and Townsend Street station.

There was nothing more to be done just then. He had telegraphed to the dead athlete's parents; the undertakers had their instructions about shipping the body to Ohio, and the hospital bills would be arranged for later. He slipped into a single seat at the back of the car to avoid the chance of a travelling acquaintance. Now that the business part of it was over, he could not talk to anyone.

The whole thing had been so sudden that it was hard to feel the truth. Barely a week ago he had stood on the practice field at the University, following Blake's splendid play and listening to the shouting of the crowded bleachers, who idolized their great fullback with the absolute idolatry of a college crowd. It was not easy to believe that all this physical manhood, all this intellectual promise, had been snuffed out like a candle before their very eyes.

Diemann pressed his face against the car window and stared out at the terraced produce gardens slipping dimly by in the early November dusk. Between him and the dead fullback there had been such companionship as comes now and then to an instructor under thirty and a man nearing the end of his college course. When Diemann, just home from Germany, came West to teach Psychology, he found young Blake the college hero. The new instructor had himself been a noted back; he still hovered somewhere between enthusiast and fiend. At Stanford he at once identified himself with the football men, and they welcomed him gladly as assistant coach. During that first season, two years ago, he had come to know and like Fred Blake. Later, the fullback took Diemann's course in Psychology, and to the elder man's gratification, developed a passion for the subject. The instructor recognized the quality of the athlete's mind, and before long the two were working together, reading and discussing along the line of the teacher's special interest.