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Title: At Good Old Siwash

Author: George Fitch

Release date: April 25, 2008 [eBook #25163]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT GOOD OLD
SIWASH ***

AT
GOOD OLD SIWASH

BY GEORGE FITCH

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1916

Copyright, 1910, 1911,

By the Curtis Publishing Company.

Copyright, 1911,

By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Printers

S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

Twenty-five yards with four
Muggledorfer men hanging on his legs
Frontispiece. Page 19

AT GOOD OLD SIWASH
PREFACE

Little did I think, during the countless occasions on which I have skipped
blithely over the preface of a book in order to plunge into the plot, that I
should be called upon to write a preface myself some day. And little have I
realized until just now the extreme importance to the author of having his
preface read.
I want this preface to be read, though I have an uneasy premonition that it is
going to be skipped as joyously as ever I skipped a preface myself. I want
the reader to toil through my preface in order to save him the task of trying
to follow a plot through this book. For if he attempts to do this he will most
certainly dislocate something about himself very seriously. I have found it
impossible, in writing of college days which are just one deep-laid scheme
after another, to confine myself to one plot. How could I describe in one
plot the life of the student who carries out an average of three plots a day? It
is unreasonable. So I have done the next best thing. There is a plot in every
chapter. This requires the use of upwards of a dozen villains, an almost
equal number of heroes, and a whole bouquet of heroines. But I do not
begrudge this extravagance. It is necessary, and that settles it.
Then, again, I want to answer in this preface a number of questions by
readers who kindly consented to become interested in the stories when they
appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Siwash isn't Michigan in disguise. It
isn't Kansas. It isn't Knox. It isn't Minnesota. It isn't Tuskegee, Texas, or
Tufts. It is just Siwash College. I built it myself with a typewriter out of
memories, legends, and contributed tales from a score of colleges. I have
tried to locate it myself a dozen times, but I can't. I have tried to place my
thumb on it firmly and say, "There, darn you, stay put." But no halfback
was ever so elusive as this infernal college. Just as I have it definitely
located on the Knox College campus, which I myself once infested, I look
up to find it on the Kansas prairies. I surround it with infinite caution and
attempt to nail it down there. Instead, I find it in Minnesota with a strong

Norwegian accent running through the course of study. Worse than that, I
often find it in two or three places at once. It is harder to corner than a flea.
I never saw such a peripatetic school.
That is only the least of my troubles, too. The college itself is never twice
the same. Sometimes I am amazed at its size and perfection, by the
grandeur of its gymnasium and the colossal lines of its stadium. But at other
times I cannot find the stadium at all, and the gymnasium has shrunk until it
looks amazingly like the old wooden barn in which we once built up
Sandow biceps at Knox. I never saw such a college to get lost in, either. I
know as well as anything that to get to the Eta Bita Pie house, you go north
from the old bricks, past the new science hall and past Browning Hall. But
often when I start north from the campus, I find my way blocked by the
stadium, and when I try to dodge it, I run into the Alfalfa Delt House, and
the Eatemalive boarding club, and other places which belong properly to
the south. And when I go south I frequently lose sight of the college
altogether, and can't for the life of me remember what the library tower
looks like or whether the theological school is just falling down, or is to be
built next year; or whether I ought to turn to my right, and ask for directions
at Prexie's house, or turn to my left and crawl under a freight train which
blocks a crossing on the Hither, Yonder and Elsewhere Railroad. If you
think it is an easy task to carry a whole college in your head without getting
it jumbled, just try it a while.
Then, again, the Siwash people puzzle me. Professor Grubb is always a
trial. That man alternates a smooth-shaven face with a full beard in the most
startling manner. Petey Simmons is short and flaxen-haired, long and black-
haired, and wide and hatchet-faced in turns, depending on the illustrator. I
never know Ole Skjarsen when I see him for the same reason. As for Prince
Hogboom, Allie Bangs, Keg Rearick and the rest of them, nobody knows
how they look but the artists who illustrated the stories; and as I read each
number and viewed the smiling faces of these students, I murmured,
"Goodness, how you have changed!"
So I have struggled along as best I could to administer the affairs of a
college which is located nowhere, has no student body, has no endowment,
never looks the same twice, and cannot be reached by any reliable route.
The situation is impossible. I must locate it somewhere. If you are

interested in the college when you have read these few stories, suppose you
hunt for it wherever college boys are full of applied deviltry and college
girls are distractingly fair; where it is necessary to win football games in
order to be half-way contented with the universe; where the spring weather
is too wonderful to be wasted on College Algebra or History of Art; and
where, whatever you do, or whoever you like, or however you live, you
can't forget it, no matter how long you work or worry afterward.
There! I can't mark it on the map, but if you have ever worried a college
faculty you'll know the way.
George
Fitch.
July, 1911.

CONTENTS

Chapter Page
I Ole Skjarsen's First 1
Touchdown
II Initiating Ole 28
III When Greek meets Grouch 50
IV A Funeral that Flashed in the 78
Pan
V Colleges While You Wait 105
VI The Greek Double Cross 135
VII Taking Pace from Father Time 169
IX Cupid—that Old College Chum 223
X Votes from Women 253
XI Sic Transit Gloria All- 284
America

ILLUSTRATIONS

Page
Twenty-five yards with four Frontispiece
Muggledorfer
men hanging on his legs
"Aye ent care to stop," he said. 20
"Aye kent suit
you, Master Bost"
He pulled himself together and 26
touched Ole gently
There wasn't a college anywhere 33
around us that
didn't have Ole's hoofmarks all
over its pride
Martha caused some mild 63
sensation
My, but that girl was a wonder! 74
"Har's das spy!" he yelled. "Kill 120
him, fallers;
he ban a spy!"
We spent another five minutes 125
hoisting him aboard
a prehistoric plug
He may have been fat, but how he 132
could run!
Naturally I was somewhat dazzled 147

He was so bashful that his voice 151
blushed when he
used it
With our colors on and four 167
particularly wicked-looking
chair legs in our hands
Our peculiar style of pushing a 205
football right
through the thorax of the whole
middle west
"If you don't like that beanbag, eat 220
it"
He invited Miss Spencer to go 246
street-car riding
with him
You can always spot these family 252
friends
It was a blow between the eyes 264
"How are all the other good old 270
chaps?" she said
Why, they even made us cut chapel 280
to go walking
with them

AT GOOD OLD SIWASH

CHAPTER I
OLE SKJARSEN'S FIRST TOUCHDOWN

Am I going to the game Saturday? Am I? Me? Am I going to eat some more
food this year? Am I going to draw my pay this month? Am I going to do
any more breathing after I get this lungful used up? All foolish questions,
pal. Very silly conversation. Pshaw!
Am I going to the game, you ask me? Is the sun going to get up to-morrow?
You couldn't keep me away from that game if you put a protective tariff of
seventy-eight per cent ad valorem, whatever that means, on the front gate. I
came out to this town on business, and I'll have to take an extra fare train
home to make up the time; but what of that? I'm going to the game, and
when the Siwash team comes out I'm going to get up and give as near a
correct imitation of a Roman mob and a Polish riot as my throat will stand;
and if we put a crimp in the large-footed, humpy-shouldered behemoths
we're going up against this afternoon, I'm going out to-night and burn the
City Hall. Any Siwash man who is a gentleman would do it. I'll probably
have to run like thunder to beat some of them to it.
You know how it is, old man. Or maybe you don't, because you made all
your end runs on the Glee Club. But I played football all through my
college course and the microbe is still there. In the fall I think football, talk
football, dream football, even though I haven't had a suit on for six years.
And when I go out to the field and see little old Siwash lining up against a
bunch of overgrown hippos from a university with a catalogue as thick as a
city directory, the old mud-and-perspiration smell gets in my nostrils, and
the desire to get under the bunch and feel the feet jabbing into my ribs boils
up so strong that I have to hold on to myself with both hands. If you've
never sat on a hard board and wanted to be between two halfbacks with
your hands on their shoulders, and the quarter ready to sock a ball into your
solar plexus, and eleven men daring you to dodge 'em, and nine thousand
friends and enemies raising Cain and keeping him well propped up in the

grandstands—if you haven't had that want you wouldn't know a healthy,
able-bodied want if you ran into it on the street.
Of course, I never got any further along than a scrub. But what's the odds?
A broken bone feels just as grand to a scrub as to a star. I sometimes think a
scrub gets more real football knowledge than a varsity man, because he
doesn't have to addle his brain by worrying about holding his job and
keeping his wind, and by dreaming that he has fumbled a punt and
presented ninety-five yards to the hereditary enemies of his college. I
played scrub football five years, four of 'em under Bost, the greatest coach
who ever put wings on the heels of a two-hundred-pound hunk of meat; and
while my ribs never lasted long enough to put me on the team, what I didn't
learn about the game you could put in the other fellow's eye.
Say, but it's great, learning football under a good coach. It's the finest
training a man can get anywhere on this old globule. Football is only the
smallest thing you learn. You learn how to be patient when what you want
to do is to chew somebody up and spit him into the gutter. You learn to
control your temper when it is on the high speed, with the throttle jerked
wide open and buzzing like a hornet convention. You learn, by having it
told you, just how small and foolish and insignificant you are, and how well
this earth could stagger along without you if some one were to take a fly-
killer and mash you with it. And you learn all this at the time of life when
your head is swelling up until you mistake it for a planet, and regard
whatever you say as a volcanic disturbance.
I suppose you think, like the rest of the chaps who never came out to
practice but observed the game from the dollar-and-a-half seats, that being
coached in football is like being instructed in German or calculus. You are
told what to do and how to do it, and then you recite. Far from it, my boy!
They don't bother telling you what to do and how to do it on a big football
field. Mostly they tell you what to do and how you do it. And they do it
artistically, too. They use plenty of language. A football coach is picked out
for his ready tongue. He must be a conversationalist. He must be able to
talk to a greenhorn, with fine shoulders and a needle-shaped head, until that
greenhorn would pick up the ball and take it through a Sioux war dance to
get away from the conversation. You can't reason with football men. They're
not logical, most of them. They are selected for their heels and shoulders

and their leg muscles, and not for their ability to look at you with luminous
eyes and say: "Yes, Professor, I think I understand." The way to make 'em
understand is to talk about them. Any man can understand you while you
are telling him that if he were just a little bit slower he would have to be
tied to the earth to keep up with it. That hurts his pride. And when you hurt
his pride he takes it out on whatever is in front of him—which is the other
team. Never get in front of a football player when you are coaching him.
But this brings me to the subject of Bost again. Bost is still coaching
Siwash. This makes his 'steenth year. I guess he can stay there forever. He's
coached all these years and has never used the same adjective to the same
man twice. There's a record for you! He's a little man, Bost is. He played
end on some Western team when he only weighed one hundred and forty.
Got his football knowledge there. But where he got his vocabulary is still a
mystery. He has a way of convincing a man that a dill pickle would make a
better guard than he is, and of making that man so jealous of the pickle that
he will perform perfectly unreasonable feats for a week to beat it out for the
place. He has a way of saying "Hurry up," with a few descriptive adjectives
tacked on, that makes a man rub himself in the stung place for an hour; and
oh, how mad he can make you while he is telling you pleasantly that while
the little fellow playing against you is only a prep and has sloping shoulders
and weighs one hundred and eleven stripped, he is making you look like a
bale of hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when
he gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going
wrong, and stands up before them and sizes up their insect nerve and rubber
backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the
wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in that
queer nasal clack of his—well, I'd rather be tied up in a great big frying-pan
over a good hot stove for the same length of time, any day in the week. The
reason Bost is a great coach is because his men don't dare play poorly.
When they do he talks to them. If he would only hit them, or skin them by
inches, or shoot at them, they wouldn't mind it so much; but when you get
on the field with him and realize that if you miss a tackle he is going to get
you out before the whole gang and tell you what a great mistake the Creator
made when He put joints in your arms instead of letting them stick out stiff
as they do any other signpost, you're not going to miss that tackle, that's all.

When Bost came to Siwash he succeeded a line of coaches who had been
telling the fellows to get down low and hit the line hard, and had been
showing them how to do it very patiently. Nice fellows, those coaches.
Perfect gentlemen. Make you proud to associate with them. They could take
a herd of green farmer boys, with wrists like mules' ankles, and by
Thanksgiving they would have them familiar with all the rudiments of the
game. By that time the season would be over and all the schools in the
vicinity would have beaten us by big scores. The next year the last year's
crop of big farmer boys would stay at home to husk corn, and the coach
would begin all over on a new crop. The result was, we were a dub school
at football. Any school that could scare up a good rangy halfback and a line
that could hold sheep could get up an adding festival at our expense any
time. We lived in a perpetual state of fear. Some day we felt that the normal
school would come down and beat us. That would be the limit of disgrace.
After that there would be nothing left to do but disband the college and take
to drink to forget the past.
But Bost changed all that in one year. He didn't care to show any one how
to play football. He was just interested in making the player afraid not to
play it. When you went down the field on a punt you knew that if you
missed your man he would tell you when you came back that two stone
hitching-posts out of three could get past you in a six-foot alley. If you
missed a punt you could expect to be told that you might catch a haystack
by running with your arms wide open, but that was no way to catch a
football. Maybe things like that don't sound jabby when two dozen men
hear them! They kept us catching punts between classes, and tackling each
other all the way to our rooms and back. We simply had to play football to
keep from being bawled out. It's an awful thing to have a coach with a
tongue like a cheese knife swinging away at you, and to know that if you
get mad and quit, no one but the dear old Coll. will suffer—but it gets the
results. They use the same system in the East, but there they only swear at a
man, I believe. Siwash is a mighty proper college and you can't swear on its
campus, whatever else you do. Swearing is only a lazy man's substitute for
thinking, anyway; and Bost wasn't lazy. He preferred the descriptive; he sat
up nights thinking it out.
We began to see the results before Bost had been tracing our pedigrees for
two weeks. First game of the season was with that little old dinky Normal

School which had been scaring us so for the past five years. We had been
satisfied to push some awkward halfback over the line once, and then hold
on to the enemy so tight he couldn't run; and we started out that year in the
same old way. First half ended 0 to 0, with our boys pretty satisfied because
they had kept the ball in Normal's territory. Bost led the team and the
substitutes into the overgrown barn we used for a gymnasium, and while we
were still patting ourselves approvingly in our minds he cut loose:
"You pasty-faced, overfed, white-livered beanbag experts, what do you
mean by running a beauty show instead of a football game?" he yelled. "Do
you suppose I came out here to be art director of a statuary exhibit? Does
any one of you imagine for a holy minute that he knows the difference
between a football game and ushering in a church? Don't fool yourselves.
You don't; you don't know anything. All you ever knew about football I
could carve on granite and put in my eye and never feel it. Nothing to
nothing against a crowd of farmer boys who haven't known a football from
a duck's egg for more than a week! Bah! If I ever turned the Old Folks'
Home loose on you doll babies they'd run up a century while you were
hunting for your handkerchiefs. Jackson, what do you suppose a halfback is
for? I don't want cloak models. I want a man who can stick his head down
and run. Don't be afraid of that bean of yours; it hasn't got anything worth
saving in it. When you get the ball you're supposed to run with it and not sit
around trying to hatch it. You, Saunders! You held that other guard just like
a sweet-pea vine. Where did you ever learn that sweet, lovely way of falling
down on your nose when a real man sneezes at you? Did you ever hear of
sand? Eat it! Eat it! Fill yourself up with it. I want you to get in that line this
half and stop something or I'll make you play left end in a fancy-work club.
Johnson, the only way to get you around the field is to put you on wheels
and haul you. Next time you grow fast to the ground I'm going to violate
some forestry regulations and take an axe to you. Same to you, Briggs.
You'd make the All-American boundary posts, but that's all. Vance, I picked
you for a quarterback, but I made a mistake; you ought to be sorting eggs.
That ball isn't red hot. You don't have to let go of it as soon as you get it.
Don't be afraid, nobody will step on you. This isn't a rude game. It's only a
game of post-office. You needn't act so nervous about it. Maybe some of the
big girls will kiss you, but it won't hurt."

Bost stopped for breath and eyed us. We were a sick-looking crowd. You
could almost see the remarks sticking into us and quivering. We had come
in feeling pretty virtuous, and what we were getting was a hideous surprise.
"Now I want to tell this tea-party something," continued Bost. "Either
you're going out on that field and score thirty points this last half or I'm
going to let the girls of Siwash play your football for you. I'm tired of
coaching men that aren't good at anything but falling down scientifically
when they're tackled. There isn't a broken nose among you. Every one of
you will run back five yards to pick out a soft spot to fall on. It's got to stop.
You're going to hold on to that ball this half and take it places. If some little
fellow from Normal crosses his fingers and says 'naughty, naughty,' don't
fall on the ball and yell 'down' until they can hear it uptown. Thirty points is
what I want out of you this half, and if you don't get 'em—well, you just
dare to come back here without them, that's all. Now get out on that field
and jostle somebody. Git!"
Did we git? Well, rather. We were so mad our clothes smoked. We would
have quit the game right there and resigned from the team, but we didn't
dare to. Bost would have talked to us some more. And we didn't dare not to
make those thirty points, either. It was an awful tough job, but we did it
with a couple over. We raged like wild beasts. We scared those gentle
Normalites out of their boots. I can't imagine how we ever got it into our
heads that they could play football, anyway. When it was all over we went
back to the gymnasium feeling righteously triumphant, and had another
hour with Bost in which he took us all apart without anæsthetics, and
showed us how Nature would have done a better job if she had used a better
grade of lumber in our composition.
That day made the Siwash team. The school went wild over the score. Bost
rounded up two or three more good players, and every afternoon he lashed
us around the field with that wire-edged tongue of his. On Saturdays we
played, and oh, how we worked! In the first half we were afraid of what
Bost would say to us when we came off the field. In the second half we
were mad at what he had said. And how he did drive us down the field in
practice! I can remember whole cross sections of his talk yet:

"Faster, faster, you scows. Line up. Quick! Johnson, are you waiting for a
stone-mason to set you? Snap the ball. Tear into them. Low! Low! Hi-i! You
end, do you think you're the quarter pole in a horse race? Nine men went
past you that time. If you can't touch 'em drop 'em a souvenir card. Line up.
Faster, faster! Oh, thunder, hurry up! If you ran a funeral, center, the corpse
would spoil on your hands. Wow! Fumble! Drop on that ball. Drop on it!
Hogboom, you'd fumble a loving-cup. Use your hand instead of your jaw to
catch that ball. It isn't good to eat. That's four chances you've had. I could
lose two games a day if I had you all the time. Now try that signal again—
low, you linemen; there's no girls watching you. Snap it; snap it. Great
Scott! Say, Hogboom, come here. When you get that ball, don't think we
gave it to you to nurse. You're supposed to start the same day with the line.
We give you that ball to take forward. Have you got to get a legal permit to
start those legs of yours? You'd make a good vault to store footballs in, but
you're too stationary for a fullback. Now I'll give you one more chance—"
And maybe Hogboom wouldn't go some with that chance!
In a month we had a team that wouldn't have used past Siwash teams to
hold its sweaters. It was mad all the time, and it played the game
carnivorously. Siwash was delirious with joy. The whole school turned out
for practice, and to see those eleven men snapping through signals up and
down the field as fast as an ordinary man could run just congested us with
happiness. You've no idea what a lovely time of the year autumn is when
you can go out after classes and sit on a pine seat in the soft dusk and watch
your college team pulling off end runs in as pretty formation as if they were
chorus girls, while you discuss lazily with your friends just how many
points it is going to run up on the neighboring schools. I never expect to be
a Captain of Industry, but it couldn't make me feel any more contented or
powerful or complacent than to be a busted-up scrub in Siwash, with a team
like that to watch. I'm pretty sure of that.
But, happy as we were, Bost wasn't nearly content. He had ideals. I believe
one of them must have been to run that team through a couple of brick flats
without spoiling the formation. Nothing satisfied him. He was particularly
distressed about the fullback. Hogboom was a good fellow and took signal
practice perfectly, but he was no fiend. He lacked the vivacity of a real,
first-class Bengal tiger. He wouldn't eat any one alive. He'd run until he was

pulled down, but you never expected him to explode in the midst of seven
hostiles and ricochet down the field for forty yards. He never jumped over
two men and on to another, and he never dodged two ways at once and laid
out three men with stiff arms on his way to the goal. It wasn't his style. He
was good for two and a half yards every time, but that didn't suit Bost. He
was after statistics, and what does a three-yard buck amount to when you
want 70 to 0 scores?
The result of this dissatisfaction was Ole Skjarsen. Late in September Bost
disappeared for three days and came back leading Ole by a rope—at least,
he was towing him by an old carpet-bag when we sighted him. Bost found
him in a lumber camp, he afterward told us, and had to explain to him what
a college was before he would quit his job. He thought it was something
good to eat at first, I believe. Ole was a timid young Norwegian giant, with
a rick of white hair and a reënforced concrete physique. He escaped from
his clothes in all directions, and was so green and bashful that you would
have thought we were cannibals from the way he shied at us—though, as
that was the year the bright hat-ribbons came in, I can't blame him. He
wasn't like anything we had ever seen before in college. He was as big as a
carthorse, as graceful as a dray and as meek as a missionary. He had a
double width smile and a thin little old faded voice that made you think you
could tip him over and shine your shoes on him with impunity. But I
wouldn't have tried it for a month's allowance. His voice and his arms didn't
harmonize worth a cent. They were as big as ordinary legs—those arms,
and they ended in hands that could have picked up a football and mislaid it
among their fingers.
No wonder Ole was a sensation. He didn't look exactly like football
material to us, I'll admit. He seemed more especially designed for light
derrick work. But we trusted Bost implicitly by that time and we gave him a
royal reception. We crowded around him as if he had been a T. R. capture
straight from Africa. Everybody helped him register third prep, with
business-college extras. Then we took him out, harnessed him in football
armor, and set to work to teach him the game.
Bost went right to work on Ole in a businesslike manner. He tossed him the
football and said: "Catch it." Ole watched it sail past and then tore after it

like a pup retrieving a stick. He got it in a few minutes and brought it back
to where Bost was raving.
"See here, you overgrown fox terrier," he shouted, "catch it on the fly.
Here!" He hurled it at him.
"Aye ent seen no fly," said Ole, allowing the ball to pass on as he
conversed.
"You cotton-headed Scandinavian cattleship ballast, catch that ball in your
arms when I throw it to you, and don't let go of it!" shrieked Bost, shooting
it at him again.
"Oll right," said Ole patiently. He cornered the ball after a short struggle
and stood hugging it faithfully.
"Toss it back, toss it back!" howled Bost, jumping up and down.
"Yu tal me to hold it," said Ole reproachfully, hugging it tighter than ever.
"Drop it, you Mammoth Cave of ignorance!" yelled Bost. "If I had your
head I'd sell it for cordwood. Drop it!"
Ole dropped the ball placidly. "Das ban fule game," he smiled dazedly. "Aye
ent care for it. Eny faller got a Yewsharp?"
That was the opening chapter of Ole's instruction. The rest were just like it.
You had to tell him to do a thing. You then had to show him how to do it.
You then had to tell him how to stop doing it. After that you had to explain
that he wasn't to refrain forever—just until he had to do it again. Then you
had to persuade him to do it again. He was as good-natured as a lost puppy,
and just as hard to reason with. In three nights Bost was so hoarse that he
couldn't talk. He had called Ole everything in the dictionary that is fit to
print; and the knowledge that Ole didn't understand more than a hundredth
part of it, and didn't mind that, was wormwood to his soul.
For all that, we could see that if any one could teach Ole the game he would
make a fine player. He was as hard as flint and so fast on his feet that we
couldn't tackle him any more than we could have tackled a jack-rabbit. He
learned to catch the ball in a night, and as for defense—his one-handed
catches of flying players would have made a National League fielder

envious. But with all of it he was perfectly useless. You had to start him,
stop him, back him, speed him up, throttle him down and run him off the
field just as if he had been a close-coupled, next year's model scootcart. If
we could have rigged up a driver's seat and chauffeured Ole, it would have
been all right. But every other method of trying to get him to understand
what he was expected to do was a failure. He just grinned, took orders,
executed them, and waited for more. When a two-hundred-and-twenty-
pound man takes a football, wades through eleven frantic scrubs, shakes
them all off, and then stops dead with a clear field to the goal before him—
because his instructions ran out when he shook the last scrub—you can be
pardoned for feeling hopeless about him.
That was what happened the day before the Muggledorfer game. Bost had
been working Ole at fullback all evening. He and the captain had steered
him up and down the field as carefully as if he had been a sea-going yacht.
It was a wonderful sight. Ole was under perfect control. He advanced the
ball five yards, ten yards, or twenty at command. Nothing could stop him.
The scrubs represented only so many doormats to him. Every time he made
a play he stopped at the latter end of it for instructions.
When he stopped the last time, with nothing before him but the goal, and
asked placidly, "Vere skoll I take das ball now, Master Bost?" I thought the
coach would expire of the heat. He positively steamed with suppressed
emotion. He swelled and got purple about the face. We were alarmed and
were getting ready to hoop him like a barrel when he found his tongue at
last.
"You pale-eyed, prehistoric mudhead," he spluttered, "I've spent a week
trying to get through that skull lining of yours. It's no use, you field boulder.
Where do you keep your brains? Give me a chance at them. I just want to
get into them one minute and stir them up with my finger. To think that I
have to use you to play football when they are paying five dollars and a half
for ox meat in Kansas City. Skjarsen, do you know anything at all?"
"Aye ban getting gude eddication," said Ole serenely. "Aye tank I ban
college faller purty sune, I don't know. I like I skoll understand all das har
big vorts yu make."

"You'll understand them, I don't think," moaned Bost. "You couldn't
understand a swift kick in the ribs. You are a fool. Understand that,
muttonhead?"
Ole understood. "Vy for yu call me fule?" he said indignantly. "Aye du yust
vat you say."
"Ar-r-r-r!" bubbled Bost, walking around himself three or four times. "You
do just what I say! Of course you do. Did I tell you to stop in the middle of
the field? What would Muggledorfer do to you if you stopped there?"
"Yu ent tal me to go on," said Ole sullenly. "Aye go on, Aye gass, pooty
qveek den."
"You bet you'll go on," said Bost. "Now, look here, you sausage material,
to-morrow you play fullback. You stop everything that comes at you from
the other side. Hear? You catch the ball when it comes to you. Hear? And
when they give you the ball you take it, and don't you dare to stop with it.
Get that? Can I get that into your head without a drill and a blast? If you
dare to stop with that ball I'll ship you back to the lumber camp in a cattle
car. Stop in the middle of the field—Ow!"
But at this point we took Bost away.
The next afternoon we dressed Ole up in his armor—he invariably got it on
wrong side out if we didn't help him—and took him out to the field. We
confidently expected to promenade all over Muggledorfer—their coach was
an innocent child beside Bost—and that was the reason why Ole was going
to play. It didn't matter much what he did.
Ole was just coming to a boil when we got him into his clothes. Bost's
remarks had gotten through his hide at last. He was pretty slow, Ole was,
but he had begun getting mad the night before and had kept at the job all
night and all morning. By afternoon he was seething, mostly in Norwegian.
The injustice of being called a muttonhead all week for not obeying orders,
and then being called a mudhead for stopping for orders, churned his soul,
to say nothing of his language. He only averaged one English word in three,
as he told us on the way out that to-day he was going to do exactly as he
had been told or fill a martyr's grave—only that wasn't the way he put it.

The Muggledorfers were a pruny-looking lot. We had the game won when
our team came out and glared at them. Bost had filled most of the positions
with regular young mammoths, and when you dressed them up in football
armor they were enough to make a Dreadnought a little nervous. The
Muggleses kicked off to our team, and for a few plays we plowed along five
or ten yards at a time. Then Ole was given the ball. He went twenty-five
yards. Any other man would have been crushed to earth in five. He just
waded through the middle of the line and went down the field, a moving
mass of wriggling men. It was a wonderful play. They disinterred him at
last and he started straight across the field for Bost.
"Aye ent mean to stop, Master Bost," he shouted. "Dese fallers har, dey
squash me down—"
We hauled him into line and went to work again. Ole had performed so well
that the captain called his signal again. This time I hope I may be roasted in
a subway in July if Ole didn't run twenty-five yards with four Muggledorfer
men hanging on his legs. We stood up and yelled until our teeth ached. It
took about five minutes to get Ole dug out, and then he started for Bost
again.
"Honest, Master Bost, Aye ent mean to stop," he said imploringly. "Aye yust
tal you, dese fallers ban devils. Aye fule dem naxt time—"
"Line up and shut up," the captain shouted. The ball wasn't over twenty
yards from the line, and as a matter of course the quarter shot it back to Ole.
He put his head down, gave one mad-bull plunge, laid a windrow of
Muggledorfer players out on either side, and shot over the goal line like a
locomotive.
We rose up to cheer a few lines, but stopped to stare. Ole didn't stop at the
goal line. He didn't stop at the fence. He put up one hand, hurdled it, and
disappeared across the campus like a young whirlwind.
"He doesn't know enough to stop!" yelled Bost, rushing up to the fence.
"Hustle up, you fellows, and bring him back!"

"Aye ent care to stop," he said "Aye kent suit you, Master
Bost"
Page 24
Three or four of us jumped the fence, but it was a hopeless game. Ole was
disappearing up the campus and across the street. The Muggledorfer team
was nonplussed and sort of indignant. To be bowled over by a cyclone, and
then to have said cyclone break up the game by running away with the ball
was to them a new idea in football. It wasn't to those of us who knew Ole,
however. One of us telephoned down to the Leader office where Hinckley,
an old team man, worked, and asked him to head off Ole and send him
back. Muggledorfer kindly consented to call time, and we started after the
fugitive ourselves.
Ten minutes later we met Hinckley downtown. He looked as if he had had a
slight argument with a thirteen-inch shell. He was also mad.
"What was that you asked me to stop?" he snorted, pinning himself
together. "Was it a gorilla or a high explosive? When did you fellows begin
importing steam rollers for the team? I asked him to stop. I ordered him to
stop. Then I went around in front of him to stop him—and he ran right over

me. I held on for thirty yards, but that's no way to travel. I could have gone
to the next town just as well, though. What sort of a game is this, and where
is that tow-headed holy terror bound for?"
We gave the answer up, but we couldn't give up Ole. He was too valuable to
lose. How to catch him was the sticker. An awful uproar in the street gave
us an idea. It was Ted Harris in the only auto in town—one of the earliest
brands of sneeze vehicles. In a minute more four of us were in, and Ted was
chiveying the thing up the street.
If you've never chased an escaping fullback in one of those pioneer
automobiles you've got something coming. Take it all around, a good, swift
man, running all the time, could almost keep ahead of one. We pumped up a
tire, fixed a wire or two, and cranked up a few times; and the upshot of it
was we were two miles out on the state road before we caught sight of Ole.
He was trotting briskly when we caught up with him, the ball under his arm,
and that patient, resigned expression on his face that he always had when
Bost cussed him. "Stop, Ole," I yelled; "this is no Marathon. Come back.
Climb in here with us."
Ole shook his head and let out a notch of speed.
"Stop, you mullethead," yelled Simpson above the roar of the auto—those
old machines could roar some, too. "What do you mean by running off with
our ball? You're not supposed to do hare-and-hounds in football."
Ole kept on running. We drove the car on ahead, stopped it across the road,
and jumped out to stop him. When the attempt was over three of us picked
up the fourth and put him aboard. Ole had tramped on us and had climbed
over the auto.
Force wouldn't do, that was plain. "Where are you going, Ole?" we pleaded
as we tore along beside him.
"Aye ent know," he panted, laboring up a hill; "das ban fule game, Aye
tenk."
"Come on back and play some more," we urged. "Bost won't like it, your
running all over the country this way."

"Das ban my orders," panted Ole. "Aye ent no fule, yentlemen; Aye know
ven Aye ban doing right teng. Master Bost he say 'Keep on running!' Aye
gass I run till hal freeze on top. Aye ent know why. Master Bost he know, I
tenk."
"This is awful," said Lambert, the manager of the team. "He's taken Bost
literally again—the chump. He'll run till he lands up in those pine woods
again. And that ball cost the association five dollars. Besides, we want him.
What are we going to do?"
"I know," I said. "We're going back to get Bost. I guess the man who started
him can stop him."
We left Ole still plugging north and ran back to town. The game was still
hanging fire. Bost was tearing his hair. Of course, the Muggledorfer fellows
could have insisted on playing, but they weren't anxious. Ole or no Ole, we
could have walked all over them, and they knew it. Besides, they were
having too much fun with Bost. They were sitting around, Indian-like, in
their blankets, and every three minutes their captain would go and ask Bost
with perfect politeness whether he thought they had better continue the
game there or move it on to the next town in time to catch his fullback as he
came through.
"Of course, we are in no hurry," he would explain pleasantly; "we're just
here for amusement, anyway; and it's as much fun watching you try to catch
your players as it is to get scored on. Why don't you hobble them, Mr. Bost?
A fifty-yard rope wouldn't interfere much with that gay young Percheron of
yours, and it would save you lots of time rounding him up. Do you have to
use a lariat when you put his harness on?"
Fancy Bost having to take all that conversation, with no adequate reply to
make. When I got there he was blue in the face. It didn't take him half a
second to decide what to do. Telling the captain of the Siwash team to go
ahead and play if Muggledorfer insisted, and on no account to use that 32
double-X play except on first downs, he jumped into the machine and we
started for Ole.
There were no speed records in those days. Wouldn't have made any
difference if there were. Harris just turned on all the juice his old double-

opposed motor could soak up, and when we hit the wooden crossings on the
outskirts of town we fellows in the tonneau went up so high that we
changed sides coming down. It wasn't over twenty minutes till we sighted a
little cloud of dust just beyond a little town to the north. Pretty soon we saw
it was Ole. He was still doing his six miles per. We caught up and Bost
hopped out, still mad.
"Where in Billy-be-blamed are you going, you human trolley car?" he
spluttered, sprinting along beside Skjarsen. "What do you mean by breaking
up a game in the middle and vamoosing with the ball? Do you think we're
going to win this game on mileage? Turn around, you chump, and climb
into this car."
Ole looked around him sadly. He kept on running as he did. "Aye ent care to
stop," he said. "Aye kent suit you, Master Bost. You tal me Aye skoll du a
teng, den you cuss me for duing et. You tal me not to du a teng and you cuss
me some more den. Aye tenk I yust keep on a-running, lak yu tal me tu last
night. Et ent so hard bein' cussed ven yu ban running."
"I tell you to stop, you potato-top," gasped Bost. By this time he was fifteen
yards behind and losing at every step. He had wasted too much breath on
oratory. We picked him up in the car and set him alongside of Ole again.
"See here, Ole, I'm tired of this," he said, sprinting up by him again. "The
game's waiting. Come on back. You're making a fool of yourself."
"Eny teng Aye du Aye ban beeg fule," said Ole gloomily. "Aye yust keep on
runnin'. Fallers ent got breath to call me fule ven Aye run. Aye tenk das best
vay."
We picked Bost up again thirty yards behind. Maybe he would have run
better if he hadn't choked so in his conversation. In another minute we
landed him abreast of Ole again. He got out and sprinted for the third time.
He wabbled as he did it.
"Ole," he panted, "I've been mistaken in you. You are all right, Ole. I never
saw a more intelligent fellow. I won't cuss you any more, Ole. If you'll stop
now we'll take you back in an automobile—hold on there a minute; can't
you see I'm all out of breath?"

"Aye ban gude faller, den?" asked Ole, letting out another link of speed.
"You are a"—puff-puff—"peach, Ole," gasped Bost. "I'll"—puff-puff
—"never cuss you again. Please"—puff-puff—"stop! Oh, hang it, I'm all
in." And Bost sat down in the road.
A hundred yards on we noticed Ole slacken speed. "It's sinking through his
skull," said Harris eagerly. In another minute he had stopped. We picked up
Bost again and ran up to him. He surveyed us long and critically.
"Das ban qveer masheen," he said finally. "Aye tenk Aye lak Aye skoll be
riding back in it. Aye ent care for das futball game, Aye gass. It ban tu much
running in it."
We took Ole back to town in twenty-two minutes, three chickens, a dog and
a back spring. It was close to five o'clock when he ran out on the field
again. The Muggledorfer team was still waiting. Time was no object to
them. They would only play ten minutes, but in that ten minutes Ole made
three scores. Five substitutes stood back of either goal and asked him with
great politeness to stop as he tore over the line. And he did it. If any one
else had run six miles between halves he would have stopped a good deal
short of the line. But as far as we could see, it hadn't winded Ole.
Bost went home by himself that night after the game, not stopping even to
assure us that as a team we were beneath his contempt. The next afternoon
he was, if anything, a little more vitriolic than ever—but not with Ole.
Toward the middle of the signal practice he pulled himself together and
touched Ole gently.

He pulled himself together
and touched Ole gently
Page 26
"My dear Mr. Skjarsen," he said apologetically, "if it will not annoy you too
much, would you mind running the same way the rest of the team does? I
don't insist on it, mind you, but it looks so much better to the audience, you
know."
"Jas," said Ole; "Aye ban fule, Aye gass, but yu ban tu polite to say it."

CHAPTER II
INITIATING OLE

Were you ever Hamburgered by a real, live college fraternity? I mean, were
you ever initiated into full brotherhood by a Greek-letter society with the
aid of a baseball bat, a sausage-making machine, a stick of dynamite and a
corn-sheller? What's that? You say you belong to the Up-to-Date Wood-
choppers and have taken the josh degree in the Noble Order of Prong-
Horned Wapiti? Forget it. Those aren't initiations. They are rest cures. I
went into one of those societies which give horse-play initiations for
middle-aged daredevils last year and was bored to death because I forgot to
bring my knitting. They are stiff enough for fat business men who never do
anything more exciting than to fall over the lawn mower in the cellar once a
year; but, compared with a genuine, eighteen-donkey-power college frat
initiation with a Spanish Inquisition attachment, the little degree teams,
made up of grandfathers, feel like a slap on the wrist delivered by a young
lady in frail health.
Mind you, I'm not talking about the baby-ribbon affairs that the college
boys use nowadays. It doesn't seem to be the fashion to grease the
landscape with freshmen any more. Initiations are getting to be as safe and
sane as an ice-cream festival in a village church. When a frat wants to
submit a neophyte to a trying ordeal it sends him out on the campus to
climb a tree, or makes him go to a dance in evening clothes with a red
necktie on. A boy who can roll a peanut half a mile with a toothpick, or can
fish all morning in a pail of water in front of the college chapel without
getting mad and trying to thrash any one is considered to be lion-hearted
enough to ornament any frat. These are mollycoddle times in all
departments. I'm glad I'm out of college and am catching street cars in the
rush hours. That is about the only job left that feels like the good old times
in college when muscles were made to jar some one else with.
Eight or ten years ago, when a college fraternity absorbed a freshman, the
job was worth talking about. There was no half-way business about it. The

freshman could tell at any stage of the game that something was being done
to him. They just ate him alive, that was all. Why, at Siwash, where I was
lap-welded into the Eta Bita Pies, any fraternity which initiated a candidate
and left enough of him to appear in chapel the next morning was the joke of
the school. Even the girls' fraternities gave it the laugh. The girls used to do
a little quiet initiating themselves, and when they received a sister into
membership you could generally follow her mad career over the town by a
trail of hairpins, "rats" and little fragments of dressgoods.
Those were the days when the pledgling of a good high-pressure frat wrote
to his mother the night before he was taken in and telegraphed her when he
found himself alive in the morning. There used to be considerable rivalry
between the frats at Siwash in the matter of giving a freshman a good,
hospitable time. I remember when the Sigh Whoopsilons hung young Allen
from the girder of an overhead railroad crossing, and let the switch engines
smoke him up for two hours as they passed underneath, there was a good
deal of jealousy among the rest of us who hadn't thought of it. The Alfalfa
Delts went them one better by tying roller skates to the shoulders and hips
of a big freshman football star and hauling him through the main streets of
Jonesville on his back, behind an automobile, and the Chi Yi's covered a
candidate with plaster of Paris, with blow-holes for his nose, sculptured him
artistically, and left him before the college chapel on a pedestal all night.
The Delta Kappa Sonofaguns set fire to their house once by shooting
Roman candles at a row of neophytes in the cellar, and we had to turn out at
one A. M. one winter morning to help the Delta Flushes dig a freshman out
of their chimney. They had been trying to let him down into the fireplace,
and when he got stuck they had poked at him with a clothes pole until they
had mussed him up considerably. This just shows you what a gay life the
young scholar led in the days when every ritual had claws on, and there was
no such thing as soothing syrup in the equipment of a college.
Of all the frats at Siwash the Eta Bita Pies, when I was in college, were
preëminent in the art of near-killing freshmen. We used to call our initiation
"A little journey to the pearly gates," and once or twice it looked for a short
time as if the victim had mislaid his return ticket. Treat yourself to an
election riot, a railway collision and a subway explosion, all in one evening,
and you will get a rather sketchy idea of what we aimed at. I don't mean, of
course, that we ever killed any one. There is no real danger in an initiation,

you know, if the initiate does exactly as he is told and the members don't get
careless and something that wasn't expected doesn't happen—as did when
we tied Tudor Snyder to the south track while an express went by on the
north track, and then had the time of our young lives getting him off ahead
of a wild freight which we hadn't counted on. All we ever aimed at was to
make the initiate so thankful to get through alive that he would love Eta
Bita Pie forever, and I must say we usually succeeded. It is wonderful what
a young fellow will endure cheerfully for the sake of passing it on to some
one else the next year. I remember I was pretty mad when my Eta Bita Pie
brethren headed me up in a barrel and rolled me downhill into a creek
without taking the trouble to remove all the nails. It seemed like wanton
carelessness. But long before my nose was out of splints and my hide would
hold water I was perfecting our famous "Lover's Leap" for the next year's
bunch. That was our greatest triumph. There was an abandoned rock quarry
north of town with thirty feet of water in the bottom and a fifty-foot drop to
the water. By means of a long beam and a system of pulleys we could make
a freshman walk the plank and drop off into the water in almost perfect
safety, providing the ropes didn't break. It created a sensation, and the other
frats were mad with jealousy. We took every man we wanted the next fall
before the authorities put a stop to the scheme. That shows you just how
repugnant the idea of being initiated is to the green young collegian.
Of course, fraternity initiations are supposed to be conducted for the
amusement of the chapter and not of the candidate. But you can't always
entirely tell what will happen, especially if the victim is husky and
unimpressionable. Sometimes he does a little initiating himself. And that
reminds me that I started out to tell a story and not to give a lecture on the
polite art of making veal salad. Did I ever tell you of the time when we
initiated Ole Skjarsen into Eta Bita Pie, and how the ceremony backfired
and very nearly blew us all into the discard? No? Well, don't get impatient
and look in the back of the book. I'll tell it now and cut as many corners as I
can.

There wasn't a college anywhere around us
that didn't have Ole's hoofmarks all over
its pride
Page 33
As I have told you before, Ole Skjarsen was a little slow in grasping the real
beauties of football science. It took him some time to uncoil his mind from
the principles of woodchopping and concentrate it on the full duty of man in
a fullback's position. He nearly drove us to a sanitarium during the process,
but when he once took hold, mercy me, how he did progress from hither to
yon over the opposition! He was the wonder fullback of those times, and at
the end of three years there wasn't a college anywhere that didn't have Ole's
hoofmarks all over its pride. Oh, he was a darling. To see him jumping
sideways down a football field with the ball under his arm, landing on some

one of the opposition at every jump and romping over the goal line with
tacklers hanging to him like streamers would have made you want to vote
for him for Governor. Ole was the greatest man who ever came to Siwash.
Prexy had always been considered some personage by the outside world,
but he was only a bump in the background when Ole was around.
Of course we all loved Ole madly, but for all that he didn't make a frat. He
didn't, for the same reason that a rhinoceros doesn't get invited to garden
parties. He didn't seem to fit the part. Not only his clothes, but also his
haircuts were hand-me-down. He regarded a fork as a curiosity. His
language was a sort of a head-on collision between Norwegian and English
in which very few words had come out undamaged. In social conversation
he was out of bounds nine minutes out of ten, and it kept three men busy
changing the subject when he was in full swing. He could dodge eleven
men and a referee on the football field without trying, but put him in a forty
by fifty room with one vase in it, and he couldn't dodge it to save his life.
No, he just naturally didn't fit the part, and up to his senior year no
fraternity had bid him. This grieved Ole so that he retired from football just
before the Kiowa game on which all our young hearts were set, and before
he would consent to go back and leave some more of his priceless foot-
tracks on the opposition we had to pledge him to three of our proudest
fraternities. Talk of wedding a favorite daughter to the greasy villain in the
melodrama in order to save the homestead! No crushed father, with a
mortgage hanging over him in the third act, could have felt one-half so
badly as we Eta Bita Pies did when we had pledged Ole and realized that all
the rest of the year we would have to climb over him in our beautiful,
beamed-ceiling lounging-room and parade him before the world as a much-
loved brother.
But the job had to be done, and all three frats took a melancholy pleasure in
arranging the details of the initiation. We decided to make it a three-night
demonstration of all that the Siwash frats had learned in the art of imitating
dynamite and other disintegrants. The Alfalfa Delts were to get first crack at
him. They were to be followed on the second night by the Chi Yi Sighs,
who were to make him a brother, dead or alive. On the third night we of Eta
Bita Pie were to take the remains and decorate them with our fraternity pin

after ceremonies in which being kicked by a mule would only be considered
a two-minute recess.
We fellows knew that when it came to initiating Ole we would have to do
the real work. The other frats couldn't touch it. They might scratch him up a
bit, but they lacked the ingenuity, the enthusiasm—I might say the poetic
temperament—to make a good job of it. We determined to put on an
initiation which would make our past efforts seem like the effort of an old
ladies' home to start a rough-house. It was a great pleasure, I assure you, to
plan that initiation. We revised our floor work and added some cellar and
garret and ceiling and second-story work to it. We began the program with
the celebrated third degree and worked gradually from that up to the
twenty-third degree, with a few intervals of simple assault and battery for
breathing spells. When we had finished doping out the program we shook
hands all around. It was a masterpiece. It would have made Battenberg lace
out of a steam boiler.
Ole was initiated into the Alfalfa Delts on a Wednesday night. We heard
echoes of it from our front porch. The next morning only three of the
Alfalfa Delts appeared at chapel, while Ole was out at six A. M., roaming
about the campus with the Alfalfa Delt pin on his necktie. The next night
the Chi Yi Sighs took him on for one hundred and seventeen rounds in their
brand new lodge, which had a sheet-iron initiation den. The whole thing
was a fizzle. When we looked Ole over the next morning we couldn't find
so much as a scratch on him. He was wearing the Chi Yi pin beside the
Alfalfa Delt pin, and he was as happy as a baby with a bottle of ink. There
were nine broken window-lights in the Chi Yi lodge, and we heard in a
roundabout way that they called in the police about three A. M. to help
them explain to Ole that the initiation was over. That's the kind of a
trembling neophyte Ole was. But we just giggled to ourselves. Anybody
could break up a Chi Yi initiation, and the Alfalfa Delts were a set of
narrow-chested snobs with automobile callouses instead of muscles. We ate
a hasty dinner on Friday evening and set all the scenery for the big scrunch.
Then we put on our old clothes and waited for Ole to walk into our parlor.
He wasn't due until nine, but about eight o'clock he came creaking up the
steps and dented the door with his large knuckles in a bashful way. He
looked larger and knobbier than ever and, if anything, more embarrassed.

We led him into the lounging-room in silence, and he sat down twirling his
straw hat. It was October, and he had worn the thing ever since school
opened. Other people who wore straw hats in October get removed from
under them more or less violently; but, somehow, no one had felt called
upon to maltreat Ole. We hated that hat, however, and decided to begin the
evening's work on it.
"Your hat, Mr. Skjarsen," said Bugs Wilbur in majestic tones.
Ole reached the old ruin out. Wilbur took it and tossed it into the grate. Ole
upset four or five of us who couldn't get out of the way and rescued the hat,
which was blazing merrily.
"Ent yu gat no sanse?" he roared angrily. "Das ban a gude hat." He looked
at it gloomily. "Et ban spoiled now," he growled, tossing the remains into a
waste-paper basket. "Yu ban purty fallers. Vat for yu do dat?"
The basket was full of papers and things. In about four seconds it was all
ablaze. Wilbur tried to go over and choke it off, but Ole pushed him back
with one forefinger.
"Yust stay avay," he growled. "Das basket ent costing some more as my hat,
I gass."
We stood around and watched the basket burn. We also watched a curtain
blaze up and the finish on a nice mahogany desk crack and blister. It was all
very humorous. The fire kindly went out of its own accord, and some one
tiptoed around and opened the windows in a timid sort of way. It was a very
successful initiation so far—only we were the neophytes.
"This won't do," muttered "Allie" Bangs, our president. He got up and went
over to Ole. "Mr. Skjarsen," he said severely, "you are here to be initiated
into the awful mysteries of Eta Bita Pie. It is not fitting that you should
enter her sacred boundaries in an unfettered condition. Submit to the
brethren, that they may blindfold you and bind you for the ordeals to
come." Gee, but we used to use hand-picked language when we were
unsheathing our claws!
Ole growled. "Ol rite," he said. "But Aye tal yu ef yu fallers burn das har
west lak yu burn ma hat I skoll raise ruffhaus like deekins!"

We tied his hands behind him with several feet of good stout rope and
hobbled him about the ankles with a dog chain. Then we blindfolded him
and put a pillowslip over his head for good measure. Things began to look
brighter. Even a demon fullback has to have one or two limbs working in
order to accomplish anything. When all was fast Bangs gave Ole a
preliminary kick. "Now, brethren," he roared, "bring on the Macedonian
guards and give them the neophyte!"
Now I'm not revealing any real initiation secrets, mind you, and maybe
what I'm telling you didn't exactly happen. But you can be perfectly sure
that something just as bad did happen every time. For an hour we abused
that two hundred and twenty pounds of gristle and hide. It was as much fun
as roughhousing a two-ton safe. We rolled him downstairs. He broke out
sixty dollars' worth of balustrade on the way and he didn't seem to mind it
at all. We tried to toss him in a blanket. Ever have a two-hundred-and-
twenty-pound man land on you coming down from the ceiling? We got tired
of that. We made him play automobile. Ever play automobile? They tie
roller skates and an automobile horn on you and push you around into the
furniture, just the way a real automobile runs into things. We broke a table,
five chairs, a French window, a one-hundred-dollar vase and seven shins.
We didn't even interest Ole. When a man has plowed through leather-
covered football players for three years his head gets used to hitting things.
Also his heels will fly out no matter how careful you are. We took him into
the basement and performed our famous trick of boiling the candidate in oil.
Of course we wanted to scare him. He accommodated us. He broke away
and hopped stiff-legged all over the room. That wasn't so bad, but,
confound it, he hopped on us most of the time! How would you like to
initiate a bronze statue that got scared and hopped on you?
We got desperate. We threw aside the formality of explaining the deep
significance of each action and just assaulted Ole with everything in the
house. We prodded him with furnace tools and thumped him with cordwood
and rolling-pins and barrel-staves and shovels. We walked over him, a
dozen at a time. And all the time we were getting it worse than he was. He
didn't exactly fight, but whenever his elbows twitched some fellow's face
would happen to be in the way, and he couldn't move his knee without
getting it tangled in some one's ribs. You could hear the thunders of the
assault and the shrieks of the wounded for a block.

At the end of an hour we were positively all in. There weren't three of us
unwounded. The house was a wreck. Wilbur had a broken nose. "Chick"
Struthers' kneecap hurt. "Lima" Bean's ribs were telescoped, and there
wasn't a good shin in the house. We quit in disgust and sat around looking at
Ole. He was sitting around, too. He happened to be sitting on Bangs, who
was yelling for help. But we didn't feel like starting any relief expedition.
Ole was some rumpled, and his clothes looked as if they had been fed into a
separator. But he was intact, as far as we could see. He was still tied and
blindfolded, and I hope to be buried alive in a branch-line town if he wasn't
getting bored.
"Vat fur yu qvit?" he asked. "It ent fun setting around har."
Then Petey Simmons, who had been taking a minor part in the assault in
order to give his wheels full play, rose and beckoned the crowd outside. We
left Ole and clustered around him.
"Now, this won't do at all," he said. "Are we going to let Eta Bita Pie be
made the laughing-stock of the college? If we can't initiate that human
quartz mill by force let's do it by strategy. I've got a plan. You just let me
have Ole and one man for an hour and I'll make him so glad to get back to
the house that he'll eat out of our hands."
We were dead ready to turn the job over to Petey, though we hated to see
him put his head in the lion's mouth, so to speak. I hated it worse than any
of the others because he picked me for his assistant. We went in and found
Ole dozing in the corner. Petey prodded him. "Get up!" he said.
Ole got up cheerfully. Petey took the dog chain off of his legs. Then he
threw his sub-cellar voice into gear.
"Skjarsen," he rumbled, "you have passed right well the first test of our
noble order. You have faced the hideous dangers which were in reality but
shams to prove your faith, and you have borne your sufferings patiently,
thus proving your meekness."
I let a couple of grins escape into my sweater-sleeve. Oh, yes, Ole had been
meek all right.

"It remains for you to prove your desire," said Petey in curdled tones.
"Listen!" He gave the Eta Bita Pie whistle. We had the best whistle in
college. It was six notes—a sort of insidious, inviting thing that you could
slide across two blocks, past all manner of barbarians, and into a frat
brother's ear without disturbing any one at all. Petey gave it several times.
"Now, Skjarsen," he said, "you are to follow that whistle. Let no obstacle
discourage you. Let no barrier stop you. If you can prove your loyalty by
following that whistle through the outside world and back to the altar of Eta
Bita Pie we will ask no more of you. Come on!"
We tiptoed out of the cellar and whistled. Ole followed us up the steps. That
is, he did on the second attempt. On the first he fell down with melodious
thumps. We hugged each other, slipped behind a tree and whistled again.
Ole charged across the yard and into the tree. The line held. I heard him say
something in Norwegian that sounded secular. By that time we were across
the street. There was a low railing around the parking, and when we
whistled again Ole walked right into the railing. The line held again.
Oh, I'll tell you that Petey boy was a wonder at getting up ideas. Think of it!
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus, old Bill
Archimedes and all the rest of the wise guys had overlooked this simple
little discovery of how to make a neophyte initiate himself. It was too good
to be true. We held a war dance of pure delight, and we whistled some
more. We got behind stone walls, and whistled. We climbed embankments,
and whistled. We slid behind blackberry bushes and ash piles and across
ditches and over hedge fences, and whistled. We were so happy we could
hardly pucker. Think of it! There was Ole Skjarsen, the most uncontrollable
force in Nature, following us like a yellow pup with his dinner three days
overdue. It was as fascinating as guiding a battleship by wireless.
We slipped across a footbridge over Cedar Creek, and whistled. Ole missed
the bridge by nine yards. There isn't much water in Cedar Creek, but what
there is is strong. It took Ole fifteen minutes to climb the other bank, owing
to a beautiful collection of old barrel-hoops, corsets, crockery and empty
tomato cans which decorated the spot. Did you ever see a blindfolded man,
with his hands tied behind his back, trying to climb over a city dump? No?
Of course not, any more than you have seen a green elephant. But it's a fine

sight, I assure you. When Ole got out of the creek we whistled him
dexterously into a barnyard and right into the maw of a brindle bull-pup
with a capacity of one small man in two bites—we being safe on the other
side of the fence, beyond the reach of the chain. Maybe that was mean, but
Eta Bita Pie is not to be trifled with when she is aroused. Anyway, the bull
got the worst of it. He only got one bite. Ole kicked in the barn door on the
first try, and demolished a corn-sheller on the second; but on the third he hit
the pup squarely abeam and dropped a beautiful goal with him. We went
around to see the dog the next day. He looked quite natural. You would
almost think he was alive.
It was here that we began to smell trouble. I had my suspicions when we
whistled again. There was a pretty substantial fence around that barnyard,
but Ole didn't wait to find the gate.
He came through the fence not very far from us. He was conversing under
that mangled pillowslip, and we heard fragments sounding like this:
"Purty soon Aye gat yu—yu spindle-shank, vite-face, skagaroot-smokin'
dudes! Ugh—ump!"—here he caromed off a tree. "Ven Aye gat das
blindfold off, Aye gat yu—yu Baked-Pie galoots!—Ugh! Wow!"—barbed-
wire fence. "Vistle sum more, yu vide-trousered polekats. Aye make yu
vistle, Aye bet yu, rite avay! Up—pllp—pllp!" That's the kind of noise a
man makes when he walks into a horse-trough at full speed.
"Gee!" said Petey nervously. "I guess we've given him enough. He's getting
sort of peevish. I don't believe in being too cruel. Let's take him back now.
You don't suppose he can get his hands loose, do you?"
I didn't know. I wished I did. Of course, when you watch a lion trying to get
at you from behind a fairly strong cage you feel perfectly safe, but you feel
safer when you are somewhere else, just the same. We got out on the
pavement and gave a gentle whistle.
"Aye har yu!" roared Ole, coming through a chicken yard. "Aye har yu, you
leetle Baked Pies! Aye gat yu purty soon. Yust vait."
We didn't wait. We put on a little more gasoline and started for the frat
house. We didn't have to whistle any more. Ole was right behind us. We

could hear him thundering on the pavement and pleading with us in that
rich, nutty dialect of his to stop and have our heads pounded on the bricks.
I shudder yet when I think of all the things he promised to do to us. We
went down that street like a couple of Roman gladiators pacing a hungry
bear, and, by tangling Ole up in the parkings again, managed to get home a
few yards ahead.
There was an atmosphere of arnica and dejection in the house when we got
there. Ill-health seemed to be rampant. "Did you lose him?" asked Bangs
hopefully from behind a big bandage.
"Lose him?" says I with a snort. "Oh, yes, we lost him all right. He loses
just like a foxhound. That's him, falling over the front steps now. You can
stay and entertain him; I'm going upstairs."
Everybody came along. We piled chairs on the stairs and listened while Ole
felt his way over the porch. In about a minute he found the door. Then he
came right in. I had locked the door, but I had neglected to reënforce it with
concrete and boiler iron. Ole wore part of the frame in with him.
"Come on, yu Baked Pies!" he shouted.
"You're in the wrong house," squeaked that little fool, Jimmy Skelton.
"Yu kent fule me!" said Ole, crashing around the loafing-room. "Aye yust
can tal das haus by har skagaroot smell. Come on, yu leetle fallers! Aye bet
Aye inittyate yu some, tu!"
By this time he had found the stairs and was plowing through the furniture.
We retired to the third floor. When twenty-seven fellows go up a three-foot
stairway at once it necessarily makes some noise. Ole heard us and kept
right on coming.
We grabbed a bureau and a bed and barricaded the staircase. There was a
ladder to the attic. I was the last man up and my heart was giving my ribs
all kinds of massage treatment before I got up. We hauled up the ladder just
as Ole kicked the bureau downstairs, and then we watched him charge over
our beautiful third-floor dormitory, leaving ruin in his wake.

Maybe he would have been satisfied with breaking the furniture. But, of
course, a few of us had to sneeze. Ole hunted those sneezes all over the
third floor. He couldn't reach them, but he sat down on the wreck
underneath them.
"Aye ent know vere yu fallers ban," he said, "but Aye kin vait. Aye har yu,
yu Baked Pies! Aye gat yu yet, by yimminy! Yust come on down ven yu ban
ready."
Oh, yes, we were ready—I don't think. It was a perfectly lovely
predicament. Here was the Damma Yappa chapter of Eta Bita Pie penned up
in a deucedly-cold attic with one lone initiate guarding the trapdoor. Nice
story for the college to tell when the police rescued us! Nice end of our
reputation as the best neophyte jugglers in the school! Makes me shiver
now to think of it.
We sat around in that garret and listened to the clock strike in the library
tower across the campus. At eleven o'clock Ole promised to kill the first
man who came down. That bait caught no fish. At twelve he begged for the
privilege of kicking us out of our own house, one by one. At one o'clock he
remarked that, while it was pretty cold, it was much colder in Norway,
where he came from, and that, as we would freeze first, we might as well
come down.
At two o'clock we were all stiff. At three we were kicking the plaster off of
the joists, trying to keep from freezing to death. At four a bunch of
Sophomores were all for throwing Petey Simmons down as a sacrifice.
Petey talked them out of it. Petey could talk a stone dog into wagging its
tail.
We sat in that garret from ten P. M. until the year after the great pyramid
wore down to the ground. At least that was the length of time that seemed to
pass. It must have been about five o'clock when Petey stopped kicking his
feet on the chimney and said:
"Well, fellows, I have an idea. It may work or it may not, but—"
"Shut up, you mental desert!" some one growled. "Another of your fine
ideas will wreck this frat."

"As I was saying," continued Petey cheerfully, "it may not succeed, but it
will not hurt any one but me if it doesn't. I'm going to be the Daniel in this
den. But first I want the officers of the chapter to come up around the
scuttle-hole with me."
Five of us crept over to the hole and looked down. "Aye har yu, yu leetle
Baked Pies!" said Ole, waking in an instant. "Yust come on down. Aye ban
vaiting long enough to smash yu!"
"Mr. Skjarsen," began Petey in the regular dark-lantern voice that all secret
societies use—"Mr. Skjarsen—for as such we must still call you—the final
test is over. You have acquitted yourself nobly. You have been faithful to the
end. You have stood your vigil unflinchingly. You have followed the call of
Eta Bita Pie over every obstacle and through every suffering."
"Aye ban following him leetle furder, if Aye had ladder," said Ole in a
bloodthirsty voice. "Ven Aye ban getting at yu, Aye play hal vid yu Baked
Pies!"
"And now," said Petey, ignoring the interruption, "the final ceremony is at
hand. Do not fear. Your trials are over. In the dark recesses of this secret
chamber above you we have discussed your bearing in the trials that have
beset you. It has pleased us. You have been found worthy to continue
toward the high goal. Ole Skjarsen, we are now ready to receive you into
full membership."
"Come rite on!" snorted Ole. "Aye receeve yu into membership all rite. Yust
come on down."
"It won't work, Petey," Bangs groaned. Petey kicked his shins as a sign to
shut up.
"Ole Skjarsen, son of Skjar Oleson, stand up!" he said, sinking his voice
another story.
Ole got up. It was plain to be seen that he was getting interested.
"The president of this powerful order will now administer the oath," said
Petey, shoving Bangs forward.

So there, at five A. M., with the whole chapter treed in a garret, and the
officers, the leading lights of Siwash, crouching around a scuttle and
shivering their teeth loose, we initiated Ole Skjarsen. It was impressive, I
can tell you. When it came to the part where the neophyte swears to protect
a brother, even if he has to wade in blood up to his necktie, Bangs bore
down beautifully and added a lot of extra frills. The last words were spoken.
Ole was an Eta Bita Pie. Still, we weren't very sanguine. You might interest
a man-eater by initiating him, but would you destroy his appetite? There
was no grand rush for the ladder.
As Ole stood waiting, however, Petey swung himself down and landed
beside him. He cut the ropes that bound his wrists, jerked off the pillowslip
and cut off the blindfold. Then he grabbed Ole's mastodonic paw.
"Shake, brother!" he said.
Nobody breathed for a few seconds. It was darned terrifying, I can tell you.
Ole rubbed his eyes with his free hand and looked down at the morsel
hanging on to the other.
"Shake, Ole!" insisted Petey. "You went through it better than I did when I
got it."
I saw the rudiments of a smile begin to break out on Ole's face. It grew
wider. It got to be a grin; then a chasm with a sunrise on either side.
He looked up at us again, then down at Petey. Then he pumped Petey's arm
until the latter danced like a cork bobber.
"By ying, Aye du et!" he shouted. "Ve ban gude fallers, ve Baked Pies, if ve
did broke my nose."
"What's the matter with Ole?" some one shouted.
"He's all right!" we yelled. Then we came down out of the garret and made
a rush for the furnace.

CHAPTER III
WHEN GREEK MEETS GROUCH

It's a cinch that college life would be a whole lot more congested with
pleasure if it wasn't for the towns that the colleges are in. I don't mean that a
town around a college hasn't its uses. Wherever you find a town you can
find lunch counters and theaters with galleries from which you can learn the
drama at a quarter a throw, and street cars that can be tampered with, and
wooden sidewalks that burn well on celebration nights, and nice girls who
began being nice four college generations ago and never forgot how. All of
these things about a town are mighty handy when it comes to getting a
higher education in a good, live college where you don't have to tunnel
through three feet of moss to find the college customs. But even all this
can't reconcile me to the way a town butts into college affairs. It is
something disgusting.
You know it yourself, Bill. Didn't you go to Yellagain where the police
arrested the whole Freshman class for painting the Sophomores green?
Well, it's the same way all over. No sooner does a college town get big
enough to support a rudimentary policeman who peddles vegetables when
he isn't putting down anarchy than it gets busy and begins to regulate the
college students. And the bigger it gets the more regulating it wants to do.
Why, they tell me that at the University of Chicago there hasn't been a riot
for nine years, and that over in Washington Park, three blocks away, an
eleven-ton statue of old Chris. Columbus has lain for ages and no college
class has had spirit enough to haul it out on the street-car tracks. That's what
regulating a college does for it. There are more policemen in Chicago than
there are students in the University. If you give your yell off the campus
you have to get a permit from the city council. It's worse than that in
Philadelphia, they tell me. Why, there, if a college student comes downtown
with a flareback coat and heart-shaped trousers and one of those nifty little
pompadour hats that are brushed back from the brow to give the brains a
chance to grow, they arrest him for collecting a crowd and disturbing traffic.
No, sir, no big-town college for me. Getting college life in those places

reminds me of trying to get that world-wide feeling on ice-cream soda.
There's as much chance in one as in the other.
Excuse me for getting sore, but that's the way I do when I begin to talk
about college towns. They don't know their places. Take Jonesville, where
Siwash is, for instance. When Siwash College was founded by "that noble
band of Christian truth seekers," as the catalogue puts it, Jonesville was a
mud-hole freckled with houses. The railroad trains whistled "get out of my
way" to the town when they whooped through it, and when you went into a
merchant's store and woke him up he started off home to dinner from force
of habit. The only thing they ever regulated there was the clock. They
regulated that once a year and usually found that it was two or three days
behind time. Hadn't noticed it at all.
That's what Jonesville was when Siwash started. You can bet for the first
forty years they didn't do much regulating around the college. The students
just let the town stay there because it was quiet. The citizens used to elect
town marshals over seventy years old, so their gray hairs would protect
them from the students, and when the boys had won a debate or a ball game
and wanted to burn a barn or two to cheer up the atmosphere at evening,
nothing at all was said—at least out loud. Jonesville was meek enough, you
bet. Why, back in the seventies the students used to vote at town elections,
and once for a joke they all voted for old "Apple Sally" for president of the
village board. Made her serve, too. Talk about regulating! Did you ever see
a farmer's dog go out and try to regulate a sixty-horse-power automobile?
That's about as much as Jonesville would have regulated us thirty years ago.
But, of course, having a real peppery college in its midst, Jonesville couldn't
help but grow. People came and started boarding-houses. There had to be
restaurants and bookstores and necktie emporiums, too, and pretty soon the
railroad built a couple of branches into town and started the division shops.
Then Jonesville woke up and walked right past old Siwash. In ten years it
had street cars, paved streets, water-works, a political machine and a city
debt, as large as the law would allow. And worse than that, it had a police
force. It had nine officers in uniform, most of whom could read and write
and swing big clubs with a strictly American accent. Nice sort of a thing to
turn loose in a quiet college town. This was long before my time, but they
tell me that the students held indignation meetings for a week after the first

arrest was made. You see, the students at Siwash always had their own rules
and lived up to them strictly. The Faculty put them on their honor and that
honor was never abused. Students were not allowed to burn the college
buildings nor kill the professors. These rules were never broken, and
naturally the boys felt rather insulted when the city turned loose a horde of
blue-coated busybodies to interfere with things that didn't concern them.
Still, Siwash got along very well even after the police force was organized.
You see, after a town has had a college in its middle for about fifty years,
pretty much everybody in town has attended it at one time or another. None
of the police had diplomas, but it was no uncommon thing to see an ex-
member of a college debating society delivering groceries, or an ex-
president of his class getting up in an engine cab to take the flyer into the
city. For years every police magistrate was an old Siwash man, and, though
plenty of the boys would get arrested, there were never any thirty-day
complications or anything of the sort. Two classes would meet on the main
street and muss each other up. The police would arrest nine or ten of the
ringleaders. The next morning the prisoners would appear before Squire
Jennings, who climbed up on the old college building with his class flag in
'54 and kept a rival class away by tearing down the chimney and throwing
the bricks at them. Naturally, nothing very deadly happened. The good old
fellow would lecture the crowd and let them off with a stern warning.
Maybe two or three Seniors would come home late at night from their frat
hall and take a wooden Indian cigar sign along with them just for company.
One of those Indians is such a steady sort of a chap to have along late at
night. Of course, they would be arrested by old Hank Anderson on the
courthouse beat, but it wasn't anything serious. They would telephone Frank
Hinckley, who was editor of the city daily, and just convalescing from four
years of college life himself, and he would come down and bail them out,
and Squire Jennings would kick them out of court next morning. Frank was
the patron saint of the students for years when it came to bail. He used to
say he had all the fun of being a doctor and getting called out nights without
having to try to collect any fees. Frank was no Crœus those days and I've
seen him go bail for fifteen students at one hundred dollars apiece, when his
total assets amounted to a dress suit, three hundred and forty-five
photographs and his next week's salary.

By the time I had come to college, getting arrested had gotten to be a
regular formality. A Freshman would go up Main Street at night, trying to
hide a nine-foot board sign under his spring overcoat. Halvor Skoogerson, a
pale-eyed guardian of the peace, who was studying up to be a naturalized,
would arrest him for theft, riot, disorderly conduct, suspicious appearance
and intoxication, not understanding why any sober man would want to carry
a young lumber-yard home under his coat at night. The prisoner would
telephone for Hinckley, who would crawl out of bed, come downtown
cussing, and bail away in sleepy tones. The next morning the freshie would
go up before Squire Jennings, who would ask him in awful accents if he
realized that the state penitentiary was only four hours away by fast train,
and that many a man was boarding there who would blush to be seen in the
company of a man who had stolen a nine-foot sign and carried it down
Main Street, interfering with pedestrians, when there was a perfectly good
alley which ought to be used for such purposes. Then he would warn the
culprit that the next time he was caught lugging off a billboard or a wooden
platform or a corncrib he would be compelled to put it back again before he
got breakfast; after which he would tell him to go along and try studying for
a change, and the Freshman would go back to college and join the hero
brigade. It was a mighty meek man in Siwash who couldn't get arrested
those days. Even the hymn singers at the Y. M. C. A. had criminal records.
It got so, finally, that whenever we had a nightshirt parade in honor of any
little college victory the line of march would lead right through the police
station. We knew what was coming and would save the cops the trouble of
hauling us over in the hustle wagon.
Take it all in all, it was about as much fun to be regulated as it was to run
the town. But one night Squire Jennings put his other foot into the grave
and died entirely; and before any of us realized what was happening a
special election had been held and Malachi Scroggs had been elected police
magistrate.
Malachi Scroggs was a triple extract of grouch who lived on the north side
two miles away from college in a big white house with one of those old-
fashioned dog-house affairs on top of it. He was an acrimonious quarrel all
by himself. Sunlight soured when it struck him. I have seen a fox terrier
who had been lying perfectly happy on the sidewalk, get up after Scroggs
had passed him and go over and bite an automobile tire. He lived on gloom

and law-suits and the last time he smiled was 1878—that was when a small
boy fell nineteen feet out of a tree while robbing his orchard, and the doctor
said he would never be able to rob any more orchards.
This was the kind of mental astringent Malachi was. Naturally, he loved the
gay and happy little college boys. Oh, how he loved us! He had complained
to the police regularly during each celebration for twenty years and he had
expressed the opinion, publicly, that a college boy was a cross between a
hyena and a grasshopper with a fog-horn attachment thrown in free of
charge. He wasn't a college man himself, you see—never could find one
where the students didn't use slang, probably, and he just naturally didn't
understand us at all. Of course, we didn't mind that. It's no credit to carry an
interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept
in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on
Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian
Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate
we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we
went up against him in court.
Part of the Senior class had been having a little choir practice in one of the
town restaurants. It was a lovely affair and there wasn't a more cheerful
crowd of fellows on earth than they were when they marched down the
street at one A. M. eighteen abreast and singing one of the dear old songs in
a kind of a steam-siren barytone.
Now they had never attempted to regulate mere noise in Jonesville, but that
night a brand-new policeman had gone on the courthouse beat, and blamed
if he didn't arrest the whole bunch for disturbing the peace—when they
hadn't broken a single thing, mind you. They were pretty mad about it at
first; but after all it was only a joke, and when Hinckley got down to bail
them out they were singing with great feeling a song which Jenkins, the
class poet, had just composed, and which ran as follows:
"As we walked along
the street
Officer Sikes we
chanced to
meet,

And his shoes were
full of feet
As he prowled along
his beat.
He took us down and
locked us up;
Left us in charge of a
Norsky Cop,
And we didn't get
home till early
in the
morning."
Hold that "morning" as long as you can and tonsorialize to beat the band.
Even the desk sergeant enjoyed it.
When the bunch lined up the next morning in police court there was Judge
Scroggs. They felt as if they ought to treat him nicely, he being a newcomer
and all of them being very familiar with the ropes; and Emmons, the class
president, started explaining to him that it was all a mistake. Scroggs bit
him off with a voice that sounded like a terrier snapping at a fly.
"We're here to correct these mistakes," he said. "You were all singing on the
public street at one o'clock in the morning, weren't you?"
"We were trying to," said Emmons, still friendly.
"Ten days apiece," said the magistrate. "Call the next case."
If any one had removed the floor from under these Seniors and let them
drop one thousand and one feet into space they couldn't have felt more
shocked. Even the clerk and the desk sergeant were amazed. They tried to
help explain, but the human vinegar-cruet turned around and spat the
following through his clenched teeth:
"Gentlemen, I have been appointed to sit on this bench and I don't need any
help. Any more objections will be in contempt of court. Sergeant, remove
these young thugs and have them sent to the workhouse at once."

Maybe you don't think the college seethed when the news got out. There
were the leading lights of the school, including the president of the Senior
class, the chairman of the Junior promenade, two halfbacks, the pitcher on
the baseball team and the president of the Y. M. C. A., all on the works for
ten days, along with as choice an assortment of plain drunks and fancy
resters as you could find in ninety miles of mainline railroad. The students
fairly went mad and bit at the air. Even the Faculty got busy and Prexy
dropped over to the police court to square it. He came out a minute later
very white around the mouth. I don't know what Old Maledictions said to
him, but it was a great sufficiency, I guess. He seemed as insulted as Lord
Tennyson might have been if the milkman had pulled his whiskers.
There wasn't a thing to be done. The Faculty appealed to the mayor, but old
Scroggs had some regular Spanish-bit hold on him in the way of a short-
time note, I guess, and he washed his hands of the whole affair. Our college
great men were hauled out to the works and served their time. When they
got out they were sights. They weren't strong on sanitation in workhouses in
those days. Even their friends shook hands with them with tongs. Think of
sixteen proud monarchs of the campus making brick in striped suits, with a
cross foreman who used to haul ashes from the college campus lording it
over them and tracing their ancestry back through thirty generations of
undesirable citizens! Nice, wasn't it? Oh, very!
That was the beginning of a sad and serious year for Siwash. For the first
time Scroggs enjoyed college boys. Soaking students got to be his specialty.
We did our blamedest to behave, but you can't break off the habits of
generations in a week or two. Soon after the Seniors got out the Mock
Turtles, a Sophomore society, capacity thirty thousand quarts, absent-
mindedly tipped over a street car on their way home and were jugged for
thirty days. They had to enlarge the workhouse to take care of them, and
four of our best football players were retired from circulation all through
October. Think what that meant! The whole college went up, just before the
game with Hambletonian, and knelt on the sidewalk before Judge Scroggs'
house. He set the dog on us. Said afterwards he wished the dog had been
larger and hadn't had his supper. A month later four members of the glee
club tried to do our favorite stunt of putting the horse in the herdic and
hauling him home, and it cost them twenty-nine days—just enough to break
up the club. The whole basket-ball team got thirty days because they took

the bronze statue off the fountain in the public square one night, laid him on
the car tracks in some old clothes, and had the ambulance force trying to
resuscitate him. Nobody had ever objected to this little joke before, but it
cost us the state championship and two of the team left school when they
got out. Said they'd come to Siwash for a college education, not for a course
of etymology in a workhouse.
It was terrible. We scarcely dared to cut out our mufflers enough to whistle
to each other on the street. By spring we were desperate. We had lost the
basket-ball championship. The glee club was ruined. Muggledorfer had
bumped us in football—that was the year before Ole Skjarsen came to
school—and college spirit at Siwash had been gummed up until it could
have been successfully imitated by a four-thousand-year-old mummy. Our
college meetings resembled the overflow from a funeral around the front
steps. We used to shut down all the windows, say "shsh" nine times, and
then write out our college yell on curl papers and burn the papers. You
could have swapped Siwash off for a correspondence school without
noticing any difference in the reverberations. That was Petey Simmons' first
year in college—as a matter of fact, he was a Senior prep. I've told you
more or less about Petey before. He was the only son of one of these
country bankers who manage to get as much fun out of a half million as a
New Yorker could out of a whole railroad. Petey was a little chap who had
always had what he wanted and would cheerfully sit up all night thinking
up new things to want. He wasn't a Freshman yet, but he could give points
to all the college in the matter of explosive clothes and nifty ways of being
expensive to Dad. He couldn't get along without coat-cut underwear long
before we had heard of it, and you could tell by looking at his shoes just
what the rest of the school would be wearing in two years. That was Petey
all the way through. He was first and Father Time was nowhere, forty miles
back with a busted tire.

Martha caused some mild sensation
Page 63
Petey took to college life like a kid to candy and just soaked himself in
college spirit. He proposed his sixty-five-dollar banjo for membership in the
club and went in with it of course. He was elected yell-master before he had
been in school two weeks, and if you ever want to know how much noise
can come out of a comparatively small orifice you should have seen him
emitting riot and pandemonium in the second half of a lively football game.
Naturally, it worried Petey almost to death to see the dear old Coll.
disintegrating under the Scroggs Inquisition, and he used to sit around the
frat house with his head on his hands for hours, smoking his pipe, which
had the largest bowl in school, and combing his convolutions for a plan.
Then, along in March, he electrified the whole school by taking Martha
Scroggs to the college promenade.
Martha was old Malachi's daughter. We hadn't known it, but she had been in
school all that year. She was a quiet girl who was designed like a tall
problem in plane geometry. While it was possible for a clock to run in the
same room with her, still she was not what you might call a picnic to look
at. She was the kind of girl a man would look at once and then go off and
admire the scenery, even if it only consisted of a ninety-acre cornfield and a

grain elevator. Martha was only about eighteen, and I never could
understand how she got on to the styles of thirty-six years ago and wore
them as fluently as she did.
Naturally, Martha had gotten along in her studies without being pestered by
society to any extent. I sometimes think this helped old Scroggs to hate us.
She was his only child, and he had taken all the affection and interest that
most people distribute over their entire acquaintanceship and concentrated it
on her. They had grown up together since she became a motherless baby,
and they did say that while you could bombard the old man with gatling
guns without jarring his opinions he would lie down, jump through a hoop
or play dead whenever Martha wanted him to.
Naturally Martha caused some mild sensation when she appeared at the
biggest social spasm of the college year, with her sleeves bulging in the
wrong place, and nothing but her own hair on her head. But what caused the
real sensation was the fact that Petey had been released from the workhouse
the day before. Yes, sir—just turned out with seven more days to serve. He
had thrown a brick at a Sophomore who was trying to catch him and dye his
hair the Sophomore colors, and the brick had annihilated one of the city's
precious thirty-seven-cent street lights. Petey had gone to the works for ten
days, leaving a new dress suit that hadn't been dedicated and unlimited woe
among the girls, for he was a Class A fusser.
Petey was non-committal about his insanity. He had the best eye for beauty
in the college, and yet he had been taking Miss Scroggs around to church
socials and town affairs for two months. But college boys aren't slow,
whatever you want to say about them. We had faith in Petey and we backed
up his game. We gave Martha the time of her young life at the Prom.—
pulled off three imitation rows over her program—and then we turned in
that winter and gave her a good, hot rush—which is a technical college
expression for keeping a girl dated up so that she doesn't have time to wash
the dishes at home once a month.
I must say that it wasn't much of a punishment, either, when we got
acquainted with Martha. She was a good fellow clear through and had a
smile that illuminated her plain face like a torchlight parade. Of course,
after you get out of school you learn that beauty is only skin deep and

seldom affects the brain; but this is a wonderful discovery for a college boy
to make when there are so many raving beauties about him that he has to
take a nap in the afternoon in order to dream about all of them. At any rate,
we took Martha to everything that came along, one of us or another, and
before a month we didn't have to pretend very much to scrap for her dances,
even if you did have to lug her around the room by main strength—she was
as heavy on her feet as a motor-bus.
April came and the first baseball game with it, and Saunders, our pitcher,
managed to draw a thirty-day sentence for stealing a steam roller one noon
and racing off down the avenue with a fat cop in pursuit. We nearly fell
dead once more when Saunders came walking into chapel three days later.
He had been released by Judge Scroggs with a warning never under any
circumstances to do anything of any sort at any time any more, and been
assured that he was nothing more than hangman's meat. But he had been
released! That night he took Martha Scroggs to the Alfalfa Delt hop. And
the next day he held Muggledorfer down to two hits and no runs, with
Martha waving hurrahs at him from a tally-ho.
We wanted to elect Petey president of the college, for we laid the whole
affair to him. But he wouldn't talk at all. If anything, he seemed a little sore
about the whole thing. Martha didn't loosen up, either. She just smiled and
told those of us who knew her well enough to ask questions that Saunders
was a lovely boy and that she had had that date with him for ages—flies'
ages, I guess she meant, for Alice Marsters, one of the beauties of the
school, stayed home from the dance after announcing that she was going
with Saunders, and never seemed able to remember him by sight after that.
About a week afterward Maxwell, the college orator, a very solemn member
of the Siwash brain trust, was arrested for ever so little a thing. I believe he
so far forgot himself as to help give the college yell on Main Street the
night his literary society won a debate. Anyway, he got ten days, and he was
due in three days to orate for Siwash against the whole Northwest. It was
the biggest event of the school year—the oratorical contest. We'd won seven
of them—more than any other school in the sixteen states—and we stood a
good show with Maxwell. We were crazy to win. Of course nobody ever
goes to the contests; but we all stay up all night to hear the results, and
when we win, which we do once every other college generation, we try to

make the celebration bigger than the stories of other celebrations that have
been handed down. We'd been planning this celebration all winter and had
everything combustible in Jonesville spotted.
Some of us were for going out and burning up the workhouse, but before
we got around to it Maxwell appeared. It was the day before the contest.
He'd served only two days, but instead of rushing right off to rehearse his
oration, which he couldn't do in the workhouse, owing to an accountable
prejudice the tramps and other prisoners had against oratory, he took the
evening off and went driving with Martha Scroggs—about as queer a thing
for him to do as it would be for the Pope to take a young lady to the theatre.
But we didn't ask any questions. We cheered him off on the midnight train,
and the next night, when he won and we got the news, we turned out and
built a bonfire of everything that wasn't nailed down. And when the police
got done chasing us they had nineteen of the brightest and best sons of
Siwash bottled up in the booby hatch.
We didn't mind that on general principles. The bonfire was worth it,
especially since we managed to get a few palings from old Scroggs' fence
for it—but, as usual, the wrong men got pinched. There was the
intercollegiate track meet due in two weeks, and there, in the list of felons,
were Evans, our crack sprinter, Petersen, our hammer heaver, and yours
truly, who could pole vault about as high as they run elevators in Europe,
even if he was only a sub-Freshman with field mice in his hair.
Now, this was really serious. We could afford to lose an oratorical contest—
it just meant no bonfire for another year—but we had our hearts set on that
track meet. We were up against our lifelong rivals—Muggledorfer, the State
Normal, Kiowa, Hambletonian, and all the rest of them. We had to win—I
don't know why. Beats all how many things you have to do in college that
don't seem so absolutely necessary a few years afterward. Anyhow, if we
three point-gobblers had to spend the next ten days in the works instead of
rounding into form, the points Siwash would win in that meet could be
added up by a three-year-old boy who was a bad scholar. It was so
desperate that we hired a lawyer and laid the case before him that night as
we sat in our horrid cells—they wouldn't take Hinckley for bail any more.

"Get a continuance," said he. And the next morning he appeared with us
before the awful presence and demanded the continuance on the score of
important evidence, lack of time to perfect a defense, other engagements,
poor crops, Presidential election, and goodness knows what—regular
lawyer style, you know.
Old Scroggs glared at us the way an unusually hungry tiger might look at a
lamb that was being taken away to get a little riper. "I cannot object to a
reasonable continuance," he said sourly. "And I don't deny that you will
need all the defense you can get. The case is an atrocious one, and I propose
to do my small part toward putting down arson and riot in this unhappy
town. You will appear two weeks from this morning."
The field meet was two weeks from that afternoon! And we didn't have a
ghost of a defense!
We three scraped up the required bail and went back to college feeling
cheerful as a man who has been told that his hanging has been postponed
until his wedding morning. Of course we sent for Petey Simmons. He
arrived dejected. "No use, fellows," he remarked as he came in the door. "I
know what you all want. You all want engagements with Martha Scroggs.
It's no go. I've been over to see her and she's afraid to tackle it. The old
man's told her that if she runs around with any more of this disgraceful,
disgusting and nine other epitheted college bunch he'll show her the door.
Says he's been worked and he's through. Says he's going to give you the
limit and, if possible, he's going to give you enough to keep you in all
vacation instead of letting you loose on a defenseless world all summer.
That's how strong you are up at the Scroggs house."
There you were! Siwash College, the pride of six decades, mollycoddled by
an old parody on a gorilla with a grouch against the solar system! We
trained these two weeks in hopes that a chariot of fire would come up and
take the old man down, but there was nothing doing. He remained
abnormally healthy and supernaturally mad. On the morning before the fatal
day we all wrote letters home, explaining that we had secured elegant jobs
in various emporiums over the city and wouldn't be home until late in the
summer. Then we shivered a shake or two apiece and got ready to retire
from this vain world for somewhere between thirty and ninety days. Just

about that time Petey Simmons blew down to the college, bursting with
information. He demanded a meeting of the Athletic Council at once and of
us three sterling athletes as well. We were all in order in ten minutes.
"Fellows, it's this way," said Petey. "Martha Scroggs is very loyal to the
college, as you all know. She has done her very best with old Fireworks, but
it hasn't made a dent in him. No little old party or buggy ride is going to get
any one out this time. There's just one chance, she says, and she's taken it.
This morning she confessed to her father that she is engaged to one of the
men who is to come up for trial to-morrow morning. They think the old
man will be well enough to unmuzzle before noon, but he's been acting like
a bad case of dog-days all morning. He's given her twenty-four hours to
name the man—and Martha thinks that by night he'll be resting comfortably
enough to promise to let him off to-morrow. And she has given us the
privilege of choosing the man she's engaged to. Now, it's up to this council
to pick out the lucky chap. It's our only hope, fellows. We'll have one point-
winner anyway—unless the old man eats him alive to-morrow."
Evans and Petersen turned pale—they had real fiancées in college. But each
stepped forward nobly and offered himself for the sacrifice. I stepped out,
too, though I was so young at that time that I didn't know any more how to
go about being engaged to a girl than I did about my Greek lessons. Then
the council began to discuss the choice. And just there the trouble began.
It all came about through the frats, of course. Frats are a good thing all
right, but they stir up more trouble in a college than a Turk's nine wives can
make for him. Ashcroft was president of the council. He was an Alfalfa
Delt. So was Evans. Ashcroft hung out for Evans like a bulldog hanging to
a tramp. Beeman, a council member, was a Sigh Whoop and so was
Petersen. Beeman argued that Petersen could win more points than the rest
of the school put together and that it would be unpatriotic, unmanly,
disgraceful and un-Siwash-like not to select him. Bailey, the third member,
was an Eta Bita Pie, and while sub-Freshmen are not supposed to be
anything with Greek letters on, we understood each other, and I was to be
initiated the next fall. Bailey pointed out caustically that to imprison a sub-
Freshman would be to ruin his reputation, break his spirit and disgrace the
school—that one world's record was worth fifty points, and that, if allowed
to, I would pole-vault so high the next day that I would have to come down

in a parachute. The result was the council broke up in one big row and
Martha Scroggs spent the afternoon unengaged.
About five o'clock Bailey came over to the track, where we were going
through the last sad rites, and hauled me aside.
"Take off those togs, kid," he said. "I've got a stunt. These yaps are going to
hold another meeting to-night to decide on Martha Scroggs' fiancé. In the
meantime you're going out to ask the old man for her. Understand? You're
going to ask him and take what he gives you like a little man and beg off for
to-day, and then you're going to break the pole-vault record. See?"
Unfortunately, I did. I liked the job just as well as I would like getting
boiled in oil. But one must stand by one's frat, you know—Gee, how proud
I felt when I said that! I didn't have any idea how an engaged man ought to
look or act, but I went home, put on the happiest duds I had, and shinned up
the street about eight o'clock.
The man-eating dog of the Scroggses was somewhere else, gorging himself
on another unfortunate, and I got to the front door all right. I rang the bell.
Some one opened the door. It was Judge Scroggs. He looked at me as one
might look at a bug which had wandered on to the table and was trying to
climb over a fork.
"Young man," he said, "what do you want?"
Did you ever have your voice slink around behind your larynx and refuse to
come out? Mine did. I only wish I could have slunk with it. I started talking
twice. My tongue went all right, but I couldn't slip in the clutch and make
any sound.
"Well," roared Scroggs, "what is it?"
That jarred me loose. "Mr. Scroggs," I sputtered, "I am engaged to your
daughter. I want to marry her. I want your permission. I—I'll be good to her,
sir."
He glared at me for a minute. "Oh!" he said with a queer look. "Well, come
on in with the rest of them."

I followed him into the parlor. There sat Evans and Petersen. They were
older than I, but if I looked as scared as they did I wish somebody had shot
me. In the corner was another student. His name was Driggs. His specialty
was cotillons.
We four sat and looked at each other with awful suspicions. Something was
excessively wrong. I felt indignant. Can't a fellow go to see his fiancée
without being annoyed by a Roman mob? I noticed Petersen and Evans
looked indignant, too. We took it out by staring Driggs almost into the
collywobbles. Who was he anyway, and why was he billy-goating around?
Old Scroggs had called Martha. He sat and looked at us so peculiarly that I
got gooseflesh all over. Here I was, a Freshman so green that the cows
looked longingly at me, and up against the job of saving the college,
winning out for the frat and becoming engaged to a girl I didn't know before
a whole roomful of rivals. I wasn't up to the job. If only I had gone to the
works! They seemed a haven of sweet peace just then.
Martha Scroggs came into the room. She looked at the quartet. We looked at
her with hunted looks. Scroggs looked at all of us.
"Martha," he said at last, "each one of these four young idiots says he is
engaged to you. Which of them shall I throw out?"
The jig was up! The college was ruined! Each one of us had the same bright
thought!
For a moment I thought Martha was going to faint. She looked at the mob
with a dazed expression. You could almost see her brain grabbing for some
explanation. It was just for a moment, though. My, but that girl was a
wonder! She gulped once or twice. Then she smiled in an inspired sort of
way.
"None of them, Papa," she said ever so sweetly. "I am engaged to all of
them."
The eruption of Vesuvius was only a little sputter to what followed. For a
moment we had hopes that old Scroggs would explode. I think if he had had
us there alone he would have tried to hang us. But every tyrant has his
master, so before long we began to see the halter on old Scroggs. And his

daughter held the leading rope. She let him rave about so long and then she
retired into her pocket-handkerchief and turned on a regular equinoctial.
Scroggs looked more uncomfortable than we felt. He took her in his arms
and there was a family reconciliation. Every little while Martha would look
over his shoulder at us four hopefuls sitting up against the wall as lively as
wooden Indians, and then she would bury her face in her handkerchief
again and shake her shoulders and writhe with grief—or maybe it was
something else. Martha always did have a pretty keen sense of humor.

My, but that girl was a wonder!
Page 74
Suddenly Scroggs remembered us and we went out of the house like
projectiles fired from a very loud gun. We cussed each other all the way
home—we three athletes. We would have cussed Driggs, but he sneaked the
other way and we lost him.
The next morning we went up to police court in our old clothes. Judge
Scroggs looked at us sourly when our turn came.
"Young men," he said, "my daughter has admitted that she has been foolish
enough to engage herself provisionally to all of you, with the idea of
choosing the hero in this afternoon's games. I do not admire her taste. I
think she is indeed reckless to fall in love with collegians when there are so

many honest cab drivers and grocery boys to choose from. But I have, in
the interests of peace, consented to allow you to compete this afternoon.
You are discharged. I do this the more willingly because I have seen you
here before and shall again. You may go."
We did go, and when we got through that afternoon the knobby-legged
athletes from our rival schools looked like quarter horses plowing home just
ahead of the next race. Siwash won by an enormous lead and we three were
the stars of the meet. Why shouldn't we be when our fiancée sat in a box in
the grandstand and cheered us impartially? More than that, old Scroggs sat
with her and I have an idea that he got excited, too, in the breath-catching
parts.
I think that engagement business must have broken the old man's spirit, or
else so much association with college people began to waken dormant brain
cells in his head. The rest of the rioters got out of the workhouse right away,
and that fall he retired from the bench, declaring that if he was to have a
college student for a son-in-law, as looked extremely likely, he needed to
put in all of his time at home protecting his property. In honor of his
retirement we had a pajama parade which was nine blocks long and forty-
two blocks loud, and a platoon of six policemen led the way.
Of course that engagement business left all sorts of complications. Scroggs
pestered his daughter for about a month to make her decision. He seemed
somewhat relieved when she finally announced that she couldn't; but it
wasn't much relief, after all, for by this time he couldn't walk around his
own house without falling over Petey Simmons. Just two years ago I got
cards to Petey's wedding. He and Martha are living in Chicago in one of
those flats where you have seven hundred and eighty-nine dollars' worth of
bath-room, and eighty-nine cents' worth of living room, and which you have
to lease by measure just as you would buy a vest. If Petey hangs on long
enough he is going to be a big man in the banking business, too.
I forgot to clear up this Driggs mystery. The evening after the races, Martha
called up Petey Simmons. "Petey," said she, "I wish you would tell me who
this fourth man is that I'm engaged to. He doesn't seem to be on the track
team and I didn't catch his name. I don't mind having to make up an excuse

for being engaged to four men right on the spur of the moment if it is
necessary, but I'd at least like to know their names."
Petey was as puzzled as she was and lit out to find Driggs. He was gone,
but the next day he turned up and confessed all. He had a terrible affair with
a girl in the next town, it seems, and had a date to bring her to the games.
He was one of the nineteen criminals, and was so terror-stricken at the idea
of being compelled to desert his hypnotizer that when the news of the
engagement business leaked out he took a long chance and went up and
announced himself. It worked, but we caught him two nights later and
shaved his hair on one side as a gentle warning not to do it again.

CHAPTER IV
A FUNERAL THAT FLASHED IN THE PAN

Honest, Bill, sometimes when I sit down in these sober, plug-away days—
when we are kind to the poor dumb policemen and don't dare wear straw
hats after the first of September—and think about the good old college
times, I wonder how we ever had the nerve to imitate insanity the way we
did. Here I am, rubbing noses with thirty, outgrowing my belts every year,
and sitting eight hours at a desk without exploding. Am I the chap who
climbed up sixty feet of waterspout a few short years ago and persuaded the
clapper of the college bell to come down with me? Here you are all worn
smooth on top and proprietor of an overflow meeting in a nursery. In about
ten minutes you'll be tearing your coat-tails out of my hands because you
have to go back home before the eldest kid asks for a story. Are you the
loafer who spent all one night getting a profane parrot into the cold-air
pipes of the college chapel? Maybe you think you are, but I don't believe it.
If I were to tip this table over on you now you'd get mad and go home
instead of handing me a volume of George Barr McCutcheon in the watch-
pocket. You're not the good old lunatic you used to be, and neither am I.
Yes, times have changed. I don't feel as unfettered as I used to. There are a
few things nowadays that I don't care to do. When I come home at night I
take my shoes off and tiptoe to my room instead of standing outside and
trying to persuade my landlady that the house is on fire. When I visit a
friend in his apartments I do not, as a bit of repartee, throw all of his clothes
out of the window while he is out of the room, and it has been a long time
since I last hung a basket out of my window on Saturday night, expecting
some early-rising friend to put a pocketful of breakfast in it as he came past
from boarding-club. I am a slave to conventions and so are you, you slant-
shouldered, hollow-chested, four-eyed, flabby-spirited pill-roller, you! The
city makes more mummies out of live ones than old Rameses ever did out
of his obituary crop.

And yet it's no time at all since you and I were back at Siwash College,
making a dear playmate out of trouble from morning till night. I wonder
what it is in college that makes a fellow want to stick his finger into
conventions and customs and manners, to say nothing of the revised
statutes, and stir the whole mess 'round and 'round! When you're in college,
college life seems big and all the rest of the world so small that what you
want to do as a student seems to be the only important thing in life—no
matter if what you want to do is only to put a free-lunch sign over the First
Methodist Church. What does the college student care for the U. S. A., the
planet or the solar system? Why, at Siwash, I remember the biggest man in
the world was Ole Skjarsen. Next to him was Coach Bost, then Rogers,
captain of the football team, and then Jensen, the quarter. After him came
Frankling, of the Alfalfa Delts, whose father picked up bargains in railroads
instead of gloves; then came Prexy, and after him the President of the
United States and a few scattered celebrities, tailing down to the Mayor of
Jonesville and its leading citizens—mere nobodies.
That's how important the outside world seemed to us. Is it any wonder that
when we wanted to go downtown in pajamas and plug hats we paddled
right along? Or that when we wanted to steal a couple of actors and tie them
in a barn, while two of us took their places, we did not hesitate to do so? We
felt perfectly free to do just what we pleased. The college understood us,
and what the world thought never entered our heads.
Those were certainly nightmarish times for the Faculty of a small but husky
college filled with live wires who specialized in applied mischief. It beats
all what peculiar things college students can do and not think anything of it
at all; and it's funny how closely wisdom and blame foolishness seem to be
related. I remember after I had spent two hours putting my Polykon down
on a concrete foundation so that I could recite John Stuart Mill by the ream,
it seemed as if I couldn't live half an hour longer without a certain kind of
pie that was kept in captivity a mile away downtown at a lunch-counter.
And, moreover, I couldn't eat that pie alone. A college student doesn't know
how to masticate without an assistant or two. When I think of the hours and
hours I have spent traveling around at midnight and battering on the doors
of perfectly respectable houses, trying to drag some student out and take
him a mile or two away downtown after pie, I am struck with awe. When I
came to this town I walked two days for a job and then sat around with my

feet on a sofa cushion for three days. I'll bet I've walked twice as far hunting
up some devoted friend to help me go downtown and eat a piece of pie. And
that pie seemed three times as important as the easy lessons for beginners in
running the earth that I had been absorbing all the evening.
You needn't grin, Bill. You were just as bad. I remember you were the
biggest math. shark in college. You could do calculus problems that took all
the English letters from A to Z and then slopped over into the Greek
alphabet; and everybody predicted that you would be a great man if
anybody ever found any use for calculus. And yet the chief ambition of
your life was to find a way of tampering with the college clock so that it
would run twice as fast as its schedule. You used to sit around and figure all
evening over it and declare that if you could only do it once and watch the
profs. letting out classes early and going home to supper at one P. M. you
would consider your life well spent. Sounds fiddling now, doesn't it? But I
admired you for it then. I really looked up to you, Bill, as a man with a firm,
fixed purpose, while I was just a trifler who would be satisfied to steal the
hands of the clock or jolly it into striking two hundred times in a row.
There was Rearick, for instance. He was the smartest man in our class. Took
scholarship prizes as carelessly as a policeman takes peanuts from a Dago
stand. Since then he's gone up so fast that every time I see him I insult him
by congratulating him on getting the place he's just been promoted from.
But what was Rearick's hobby at Siwash? Stealing hatpins. He had four
hundred hatpins when he graduated, and he never could see anything wrong
in it. Guess he's got them yet. Perkins is in Congress already. He out-
debated the whole Northwest and wrote pieces on subjects so heavy that
you could break up coal with them. But I never saw him so earnest in
debate as he was the night he talked old Bill Morrison into letting him drive
his hack for him all evening. He told me he had driven every hack in town
but Bill's, and that Bill had baffled him for two years. It cost him four
dollars to turn the trick, but he was happier after it than he was when he
won the Siwash-Muggledorfer debate. Said he was ready to graduate now—
college held nothing further for him. Perkins' brains weren't addled, because
he has been working them double shift ever since. He just had the college
microbe, that's all. It gets into your gray matter and makes you enjoy things
turned inside out. You remember "Prince" Hogboom's funeral, don't you?

What year was it? Why, ninety-ump-teen. What? That's right, you got out
the year before. I remember they held your diploma until you paid for the
library cornerstone that your class stole and cut up into paper-weights. Well,
by not staying the next year you missed the most unsuccessful funeral that
was ever held in the history of Siwash or anywhere else. It was one of the
very few funerals on record in which the corpse succeeded in licking the
mourners. I've got a small scar from it now. You may think you're going
home to that valuable baby of yours, but you are not. You'll hear me out. I
haven't talked with a Siwash man for a month, and all of these Hale and
Jarhard and Stencilmania fellows give me an ashy taste in my mouth when I
talk with them. It's about as much fun talking college days with a fellow
from another school as it is to talk ranching with a New England old maid;
and when I get hold of a Siwash man you can bet I hang on to him as long
as my talons will stick. You just sit right there and start another Wheeling
conflagration while I tell you how we killed Hogboom to make a Siwash
holiday.
I helped kill him myself. It was my first murder. It was an awful thing to do,
but we were desperate men. It was spring—in May—and not one of us had
a cut left. You know how unimportant your cuts are in the fall when you
know that you can skip classes ten times that year without getting called up
on the green carpet and gimleted by the Faculty. Ten cuts seem an awful lot
when you begin. You throw 'em away for anything. You cut class to go
downtown and buy a cigarette. You cut class to see a dog fight. I've even
known a fellow to cut a class in the fall because he had to go back to the
room and put on a clean collar. But, oh, how different it is in May, when
you haven't a cut left to your name and the Faculty has been holding
meetings on you, anyway; when classroom is a jail and the campus just
outside the window is a paradise, green and sunshiny and fanned by warm
breezes—excuse these poetries. And you can sit in your class in Evidences
of Christianity—of which you knew as much as a Chinese laundryman does
of force-feed lubrication—and look out of the window and see your best
girl sitting on the grass with some smug oyster who has saved up his cuts.
How I used to hate these chaps who saved up their cuts till spring and then
took my girl out walking while I went to classes! Is there anything more
maddening, I'd like to know, than to sit before a big, low window trying to
follow a psychology recitation closely enough to get up when called on, and

at the same time watch five girls, with all of whom you are dead in love,
strolling slowly off into the bright distance with five job-lot male beings
who are dull and uninteresting and just cold-blooded enough to save their
cuts until the springtime? If there is I've never had it.
In this spring of umpty-steen it seemed as if only one ambition in the world
was worth achieving—that was to get out of classes. Most of us had used up
our cuts long ago. The Faculty is never any too patient in the spring,
anyhow, and a lot of us were on the ragged edge. I remember feeling very
confidently that if I went up before that brain trust in the Faculty room once
more and tried to explain how it was that I was giving absent treatment to
my beloved studies, said Faculty would take the college away from me and
wouldn't let me play with it never no more. And that's an awful distressing
fear to hang over a man who loves and enjoys everything connected with a
college except the few trifling recitations which take up his time and
interfere with his plans. It hung over five of us who were trying to plan
some way of going over to Hambletonian College to see our baseball team
wear deep paths around their diamond. We were certain to win, and as the
Hambletonians hadn't found this out there was a legitimate profit to be
made from our knowledge—profit we yearned for and needed frightfully. I
wonder if these Wall Street financiers and Western railroad men really think
they know anything about hard times? Why, I've known times to be so hard
in May that three men would pool all their available funds and then toss up
to see which one of them would eat the piece of pie the total sum bought.
I've known Seniors to begin selling their personal effects in April—a pair of
shoes for a dime, a dress suit for five dollars—and to go home in June with
a trunk full of flags and dance programs and nothing else. I've known
students to buy velveteen pants in the spring and go around with big slouch
hats and very long hair—not because they were really artistic and
Bohemian, but because it was easier to buy the trousers and have them
charged than it was to find a quarter for a haircut.
That's how busted live college students with unappreciative dads can get in
the spring. That's how busted we were; and there was Hambletonian, twenty
miles away, full of money and misguided faith in their team. If we could
scrape up a little cash we could ride over on our bicycles and transfer the
financial stringency to the other college with no trouble at all. But it was a

midweek game and not one of us had a cut left. That was why we murdered
Hogboom.
It happened one evening when we were sitting on the front porch of the Eta
Bita Pie house. That was the least expensive thing we could do. We had
been discussing girls and baseball and spring suits, and the comparative
excellence of the wheat cakes at the Union Lunch Counter and Jim's place.
But whatever we talked about ran into money in the end and we had to
change the subject. There's mighty little a poor man can talk about in spring
in college, I can tell you. We discussed around for an hour or two, bumping
into the dollar mark in every direction, and finally got so depressed that we
shut up and sat around with our heads in our hands. That seemed to be
about the only thing to do that didn't require money.
"We'll have to do something desperate to get to that game," said Hogboom
at last. Hogboom was a Senior. He ranked "sublime" in football, "excellent"
in baseball, "good" in mandolin, "fair" in dancing, and from there down in
Greek, Latin and Mathematics.
"Intelligent boy," said Bunk Bailey pleasantly; "tell us what it must be.
Desperate things done to order, day or night, with care and thoroughness.
Trot out your desperate thing and get me an axe. I'll do it."
"Well," said Hogboom, "I don't know, but it seems to me that if one of us
was to die maybe the Faculty would take a day off and we could go over to
Hambletonian without getting cuts."
"Fine scheme; get me a gun, Hogboom." "Do you prefer drowning or
lynching?" "Kill him quick, somebody." "Look pleasant, please, while the
operator is working." "What do you charge for dying?" Oh, we guyed him
good and plenty, which is a way they have at old Harvard and middle-aged
Siwash and Infant South Dakota University and wherever two students are
gathered together anywhere in the U. S. A.
Hogboom only grinned. "Prattle away all you please," he said, "but I mean
it. I've got magnificent facilities for dying just now. I'll consider a
proposition to die for the benefit of the cause if you fellows will agree to
keep me in cigarettes and pie while I'm dead."

"Done," says I, "and in embalming fluid, too. But just demonstrate this
theorem, Hoggy, old boy. How extensively are you going to die?"
"Just enough to get a holiday," said Hogboom. "You see, I happen to have a
chum in the telegraph office in Weeping Water, where I live. Now if I were
to go home to spend Sunday and you fellows were to receive a telegram
that I had been kicked to death by an automobile, would you have sense
enough to show it to Prexy?"
"We would," we remarked, beginning to get intelligent.
"And, after he had confirmed the sad news by telegram, would you have
sense enough left to suggest that college dismiss on Tuesday and hold a
memorial meeting?"
"We would," we chuckled.
"And would you have foresight enough to suggest that it be held in the
morning so that you could rush away to Weeping Water in the afternoon to
attend the funeral?"
"Yes, indeed," we said, so mildly that the cop two blocks away strolled
down to see what was up.
"And then would you be diplomatic enough to produce a telegram saying
that the report was false, just too late to start the afternoon classes?"
"You bet!" we whooped, pounding Hogboom with great joy. Then we sat
down as unconcernedly as if we were planning to go to the vaudeville the
next afternoon and arranged the details of Hogboom's assassination. As I
was remarking, positively nothing looks serious to a college boy until after
he has done it.
That was on Friday night. On Saturday we killed Hogboom. That is, he
killed himself. He got permission to go home over Sunday and retired to an
upper back room in our house, very unostentatiously. He had already
written to his operator chum, who had attended college just long enough to
take away his respect for death, the integrity of the telegraph service and
practically everything else. The result was that at nine o'clock that evening a
messenger boy rang our bell and handed in a telegram. It was brief and

terrible. Wilbur Hogboom had been submerged in the Weeping Water River
while trying to abduct a catfish from his happy home and had only just been
hauled out entirely extinct.
It was an awful shock to us. We had expected him to be shot. We read it
solemnly and then tiptoed up to Hogboom with it. He turned pale when he
saw the yellow slip.
"What is it?" he asked hurriedly. "How did it happen?"
"You were drowned, Hoggy, old boy," Wilkins said. "Drowned in your little
old Weeping Water River. They have got you now and you're all damp and
drippy, and your best girl is having one hysteric after another. Don't you
think you ought to throw that cigarette away and show some respect to
yourself? We've all quit playing cards and are going to bed early in your
honor."
"Well, I'm not," said Hogboom. "It's the first time I have ever been dead,
and I'm going to stay up all night and see how I feel. Another thing, I'm
going down and telephone the news to Prexy myself. I've had nothing but
hard words out of him all my college course, and if he can't think up
something nice to say on an occasion like this I'm going to give him up."
Hogboom called up Prexy and in a shaking voice read him the telegram. We
sat around, choking each other to preserve the peace, and listened to the
following cross section of a dialogue—telephone talk is so interesting when
you just get one hemisphere of it.
"Hello! That you, Doctor? This is the Eta Bita Pie House. I've some very
sad news to tell you. Hogboom was drowned to-day in the Weeping Water
River. We've just had a telegram—Yes, quite dead—No chance of a
mistake, I'm afraid—Yes, they recovered him—We're all broken up—Oh,
yes, he was a fine fellow—We loved him deeply—I'm glad you thought so
much of him—He was always so frank in his admiration of you—Yes, he
was honorable—Yes, and brilliant, too—Of course, we valued him for his
good fellowship, but, as you say, he was also an earnest boy—It's awful—
Yes, a fine athlete—I wish he could hear you say that, Doctor—No, I'm
afraid we can't fill his place—Yes, it is a loss to the college—I guess you

just address telegram to his folks at Weeping Water—That's how we're
sending ours—Good-night—Yes, a fine fellow—Good-night."
Hogboom hung up the 'phone and went upstairs, where he lay for an hour or
two with his face full of pillows. The rest of us weren't so gay. We could see
the humor of the thing all right, but the awful fact that we were murderers
was beginning to hang over our heads. It was easy enough to kill Hogboom,
but now that he was dead the future looked tolerably complicated. Suppose
something happened? Suppose he didn't stay dead? There's no peace for a
murderer, anyway. We didn't sleep much that night.
The next day it was worse. We sat around and entertained callers all day.
Half a hundred students called and brought enough woe to fit out a
Democratic headquarters on Presidential election night. They all had
something nice to say of Hoggy. We sat around and mourned and gloomed
and agreed with them until we were ready to yell with disgust.
Hogboom was the most disgracefully lively corpse I ever saw. He insisted
on sitting at the head of the stairs where he could hear every good word that
was said of him, and the things he demanded of us during the day would
have driven a stone saint to crime. Four times we went downtown for pie;
three times for cigarettes; once for all the Sunday newspapers, and once for
ice cream. As I told you, it was May, the time of the year when street-car
fare is a problem of financial magnitude. We had to borrow money from the
cook before night. Hoggy had us helpless, and he was taking a mean and
contemptible advantage of the fact that he was a corpse. Half a dozen times
we were on the verge of letting him come to life. It would have served him
right.
Old Siwash was just naturally submerged in sorrow when Monday morning
came. The campus dripped with sadness. The Faculty oozed regret at every
pore. We loyal friends of Hogboom were looked on as the chief mourners
and it was up to us to fill the part. We did our best. We talked with the soft
pedal on. We went without cigarettes. We wiped our eyes whenever we got
an audience. Time after time we told the sad story and exhibited the
telegram. By noon more particulars began to come in. Prexy got an answer
to his telegram of condolence. The funeral, the telegram said, would be on
Tuesday afternoon. There was great and universal grief in Weeping Water,

where Hogboom had been held in reverent esteem. Hoggy's chum in the
telegraph office simply laid himself out on that telegram. Prexy read it to
me himself and wiped his eyes while he did it. He was a nice, sympathetic
man, Prexy was, when he wasn't discussing cuts or scholarship.
Getting the memorial meeting was so easy we hated to take it. The Faculty
met to pass resolutions Monday afternoon, and when our delegation arrived
they treated us like brothers. It was just like entering the camp of the enemy
under a flag of truce. Many a time I've gone in on that same carpet, but
never with such a feeling of holy calm. "They would, of course, hold the
memorial meeting," said Prexy. They had in fact decided on this already.
They would, of course, dismiss college all day. It was, perhaps, best to hold
the memorial in the morning if so many of us were going out to Weeping
Water. It was nice so many of us could go. Prexy was going. So was the
mathematics professor, old "Ichthyosaurus" James, a very fine old ruin,
whom Hogboom hated with a frenzy worthy of a better cause, but who, it
seemed, had worked up a great regard for Hogboom through having him for
three years in the same trigonometry class.
We went out of Faculty meeting men and equals with the professors. They
walked down to the corner with us, I remember, and I talked with Cander,
the Polykon professor, who had always seemed to me to be the embodiment
of Comanche cruelty and cunning. We talked of Hogboom all the way to the
corner. Wonderful how deeply the Faculty loved the boy; and with what
Spartan firmness they had concealed all indications of it through his career!
When Monday night came we began to breathe more easily. Of course there
was some kind of a deluge coming when Hogboom appeared, but that was
his affair. We didn't propose to monkey with the resurrection at all. He
could do his own explaining. To tell the truth, we were pretty sore at
Hogboom. He was making a regular Roman holiday out of his demise. It
kept four men busy running errands for him. We had to retail him every
compliment that we had heard during the day, especially if it came from the
Faculty. We had to describe in detail the effect of the news upon six or
seven girls, for all of whom Hogboom had a tender regard. He insisted upon
arranging the funeral and vetoed our plans as fast as we made them. He was
as domineering and ugly as if he was the only man who had ever met a
tragic end. He acted as if he had a monopoly. We hated him cordially by

Monday night, but we were helpless. Hoggy claimed that being dead was a
nerve-wearing and exhausting business, and that if he didn't get the respect
due to him as a corpse he would put on his plug hat and a plush curtain and
walk up the main street of Jonesville. And as he was a football man and a
blamed fool combined we didn't see any way of preventing him.
However, everything looked promising. We had made all the necessary
arrangements. The students were to meet in chapel at nine o'clock in the
morning and eulogize Hogboom for an hour, after which college was to be
dismissed for the day in order that unlimited mourning could be indulged
in. There were to be speeches by the Faculty and by students. Maxfield, the
human textbook, was to make the address for the Senior class. We chuckled
when we thought how he was toiling over it. Noddy Pierce, of our crowd,
was to talk about Hogboom as a brother; Rogers, of the football team, was
to make a few grief-saturated remarks. So was Perkins. Every one was
confidently expecting Perkins to make the effort of his life and swamp the
chapel in sorrow. He was in the secret and he afterward said that he would
rather try to write a Shakespearean tragedy offhand than to write another
funeral oration about a man who he knew was at that moment sitting in a
pair of pajamas in an upper room half a mile away and yelling for pie.
As a matter of fact, there were so many in the secret that we were dead
afraid that it would explode. We had to put the baseball team on so that they
would be prepared to go over to Hambletonian at noon. The game had been
called off, of course, and Hambletonian had been telegraphed. But I was
secretary of the Athletic Club and had done the telegraphing. So I addressed
the telegram to my aunt in New Jersey. It puzzled the dear old lady for
months, I guess, because she kept writing to me about it. We had to tell all
the fellows in the frat house and every one of the conspirators let in a friend
or two. There were about fifty students who weren't as soggy with grief as
they should have been by Monday night.
I blame Hogboom entirely for what happened. He started it when he
insisted that he be smuggled into the chapel to hear his own funeral
orations. We argued half the Monday night with him, but it was no use. He
simply demanded it. If all dead men are as disagreeable as Hogboom was,
no undertaker's job for me. He was the limit. He put on a blue bath-robe and
got as far as the door on his promenade downtown before we gave in and

promised to do anything he wanted. We had to break into the chapel and
stow him away in a little grilled alcove in the attic on the side of the
auditorium where he could hear everything. Sounds uncomfortable, but
don't imagine it was. That nervy slavedriver made us lug over two dozen
sofa pillows, a rug or two, a bottle of moisture and three pies to while away
the time with. That was where we first began to think of revenge. We got it,
too—only we got it the way Samson did when he jerked the columns out
from under the roof and furnished the material for a general funeral, with
himself in the leading rôle.
By the time we got Hogboom planted in his luxurious nest, about three A.
M., we were ready to do anything. Some of us were for giving the whole
snap away, but Pierce and Perkins and Rogers objected. They wanted to
deliver their speeches at the meeting. If we would leave it to them, they
said, they would see that justice was ladled out.
The whole college and most of the town were at the memorial meeting. It
was a grand and tear-spangled occasion. There were three grades of
emotion plainly visible. There was the resigned and almost pleased
expression of the students who weren't in on the deal and who saw a
vacation looming up for that afternoon; the grieved and sympathetic sorrow
of the Faculty who were attempting to mourn for what they had always
called a general school nuisance; and there was the phenomenally solemn
woe of the conspirators, who were spreading it on good and thick.
The Faculty spoke first. Beats all how much of a hypocrite a good man can
be when he feels it to be his duty. There was Bates, the Latin prof. He had
struggled with Hogboom three years and had often expressed the firm
opinion that, if Hoggy were removed from this world by a masterpiece of
justice of some sort, the general tone of civilization would go up fifty per
cent. Yet Bates got up that morning and cried—yes, sir, actually cried. Cried
into a large pocket handkerchief that wasn't water-tight, either. That's more
than Hoggy would ever have done for him. And Prexy was so sympathetic
and spoke so beautifully of young soldiers getting drawn aside by Fate on
their way to the battle, and all that sort of thing, that you would have
thought he had spent the last three years loving Hogboom—whereas he had
spent most of the time trying to get some good excuse for rooting him out

of school. You know how Faculties always dislike a good football player. I
think, myself, they are jealous of his fame.
Maxfield made a telling address for the Senior class. He and Hoggy had
always disagreed, but it was all over now; and the way he laid it on was
simply wonderful. I thought of Hoggy up there behind the grilling, swelling
with pride and satisfaction as Maxfield told how brave, how tender, how
affectionate and how honorable he was, and I wished I was dead, too. Being
dead with a string to it is one of the finest things that can happen to a man if
he can just hang around and listen to people.
Pierce got up. He was the college silver-tongue, and we settled back to
listen to him. Previous speakers had made Hoggy out about as fine as Sir
Philip Sidney, but they were amateurs. Here was where Hoggy went up
beside A. Lincoln and Alexander if Pierce was anywhere near himself.
There is no denying that Pierce started out magnificently. But pretty soon I
began to have an uneasy feeling that something was wrong. He was
eloquent enough, but it seemed to me that he was handling the deceased a
little too strenuously. You know how you can damn a man in nine ways and
then pull all the stingers out with a "but" at the end of it. That was what
Pierce was doing. "What if Hogboom was, in a way, fond of his ease?" he
thundered. "What if the spirit of good fellowship linked arms with him
when lessons were waiting, and led him to the pool hall? He may have been
dilatory in his college duties; he may have wasted his allowance on billiards
instead of in missionary contributions. He may have owed money—yes, a
lot of money. He may, indeed, have been a little selfish—which one of us
isn't? He may have frittered away time for which his parents were spending
the fruit of their early toil—but youth, friends, is a golden age when life
runs riot, and he is only half a man who stops to think of petty prudence."
That was all very well to say about Rameses or Julius Cæsar or some other
deceased who is pretty well seasoned, but I'll tell you it made the college
gasp, coming when it did. It sounded sacrilegious and to me it sounded as if
some one who was noted as an orator was going to get thumped by the late
Mr. Hogboom about the next day. I perspired a lot from nervousness as
Pierce rumbled on, first praising the departed and then landing on him with
both oratorical feet. When he finally sat down and mopped his forehead the

whole school gave one of those long breaths that you let go of when you
have just come up from a dive under cold water.
Rogers followed Pierce. Rogers wasn't much of a talker, but he surpassed
even his own record that day in falling over himself. When he tried to
illustrate how thoughtful and generous Hogboom was he blundered into the
story of the time Hoggy bet all of his money on a baseball game at
Muggledorfer, and of how he walked home with his chum and carried the
latter's coat and grip all the way. That made the Faculty wriggle, I can tell
you. He illustrated the pluck of the deceased by telling how Hogboom, as a
Freshman, dug all night alone to rescue a man imprisoned in a sewer,
spurred on by his cries—though Rogers explained in his halting way, it
afterward turned out that this was only the famous "sewer racket" which is
worked on every green Freshman, and that the cries for help came from a
Sophomore who was alternately smoking a pipe and yelling into a drain
across the road. Still, Rogers said, it illustrated Hogboom's nobility of spirit.
In his blundering fashion he went on to explain some more of Hoggy's good
points, and by the time he sat down there wasn't a shred of the latter's
reputation left intact. The whole school was grinning uncomfortably, and
the Faculty was acting as if it was sitting, individually and collectively, on
seventeen great gross of red-hot pins.
By this time we conspirators were divided between holy joy and a fear that
the thing was going to be overdone. It was plain to be seen that the Faculty
wasn't going to stand for much more loving frankness. Pierce whispered to
Tad Perkins, Hogboom's chum, and the worst victim of his posthumous
whims, to draw it mild and go slow. Perkins was to make the last talk, and
we trembled in our shoes when he got up.
We needn't have feared for Perkins. He was as smooth as a Tammany orator.
He praised Hogboom so pathetically that the chapel began to show acres of
white handkerchiefs again. Very gently he talked over his career, his
bravery and his achievements. Then just as poetically and gently he glided
on into the biggest lie that has been told since Ananias short-circuited
retribution with his unholy tale.
"What fills up the heart and the throat, fellows," he swung along, "is not the
loss we have sustained; not the irreparable injury to all our college

activities; not even the vacant chair that must sit mutely eloquent beside us
this year. It's something worse than that. Perhaps I should not be telling this.
It's known to but a few of his most intimate friends. The saddest thing of all
is the fact that back in Weeping Water there is a girl—a lovely girl—who
will never smile again."
Phew! You could just feel the feminine side of the chapel stiffen—
Hogboom was the worst fusser in college. He was chronically in love with
no less than four girls and was devoted to dozens at a time. We had reason
to believe that he was at that time engaged to two, and spring was only half
over at that. This was the best of all; our revenge was complete.
"A girl," Perkins purred on, "who has grown up with him from childhood;
who whispered her promise to him while yet in short dresses; who sat at
home and waited and dreamed while her knight fought his way to glory in
college; who treasured his vows and wore his ring and—"
"'Tain't so, you blamed idiot!" came a hoarse voice from above. If the
chapel had been stormed by Comanches there couldn't have been more of a
commotion. A thousand pairs of eyes focused themselves on the grill. It
sagged in and then disappeared with a crash. The towsled head of Hogboom
came out of the opening.
"I'll fix you for that, Tad Perkins!" he yelled. "I'll get even with you if it
takes me the rest of my life. I ain't engaged to any Weeping Water girl. You
know it, you liar! I've had enough of this—" You couldn't hear any more for
the shrieks. When a supposedly dead man sticks his head out of a jog in the
ceiling and offers to fight his Mark Antony it is bound to create some
commotion. Even the professors turned white. As for the girls—great
smelling salts, what a cinch! They fainted in windrows. Some of us carried
out as many as six, and you had better believe we were fastidious in our
choice, too.
There had never been such a sensation since Siwash was invented. Between
the panic-stricken, the dazed, the hilarious, the indignant and the guilty
wretches like myself, who were wondering how in thunder there was going
to be any explaining done, that chapel was just as coherent as a madhouse.
And then Hogboom himself burst in a side door, and it took seven of us to
prevent him from reducing Perkins to a paste and frescoing him all over the

chapel walls. Everybody was rattled but Prexy. I think Prexy's circulation
was principally ice water. When the row was over he got up and blandly
announced that classes would take up immediately and that the Faculty
would meet in extraordinary session that noon.
How did we get out of it? Well, if you want to catch the last car, old man,
I'll have to hit the high spots on the sequel. Of course, it was a tremendous
scandal—a memorial meeting breaking up in a fight. We all stood to be
expelled, and some of the Faculty were sorry they couldn't hang us, I guess,
from the way they talked. But in the end it blew over because there wasn't
much of anything to hang on any one. The telegrams were all traced to the
agent at Weeping Water, and he identified the sender as a long, short, thick,
stout, agricultural-looking man in a plug hat, or words to that effect. What's
more, he declared it wasn't his duty to chase around town confirming
messages—he was paid to send them. Hogboom had a harder time, but he,
too, explained that he had come home from Weeping Water a day late,
owing to a slight attack of appendicitis, and that when he found himself late
for chapel he had climbed up into the balcony through a side door to hear
the chapel talk, of which he was very fond, and had found, to his
amazement, that he was being reviled by his friends under the supposition
that he was dead and unable to defend himself. Nobody believed Hogboom,
but nobody could suggest any proof of his villainy—so the Faculty gave
him an extra five-thousand-word oration by way of punishment, and
Hogboom made Perkins write it in two nights by threats of making a clean
breast. Poor Hoggy came out of it pretty badly. I think it broke both of his
engagements, and what between explaining to the Faculty and studying to
make a good showing and redeem himself, he didn't have time to work up
another before Commencement—while the rest of us lived in mortal terror
of exposure and didn't enjoy ourselves a bit all through May, though it was
some comfort to reflect on what would have happened if the scheme had
worked—for Hambletonian beat us to a frazzle that afternoon.
That's what we got for monkeying with a solemn subject. But, pshaw! Who
cares in college? What a student can do is limited only by what he can think
up. Did I ever tell you what we did to the English Explorer? Take another
cigar. It isn't late yet.

CHAPTER V
COLLEGES WHILE YOU WAIT

Mind you, old head, I'm not saying that a little education isn't a good thing
in a college course. I learned a lot of real knowledge in school myself that I
wouldn't have missed for anything, though I have forgotten it now. But
what irritate me are the people who think that the education you get in a
modern American super-heated, cross-compound college comes to you
already canned in neat little textbooks sold by the trust at one hundred per
cent profit, and that all you have to do is to go to your room with them, fill
up a student lamp with essence of General Education and take the lid off.
Honest, lots of them think that. It might have been so, too, in the good old
days when there was only one college graduate for each town and he had to
do the heavy thinking for the whole community. But, pshaw! the easiest job
in the world nowadays is to stuff your storage battery full of Greek verbs
and obituaries in English literature, and the hardest job is to get it hitched
up to something that will bring in the yellowbacks, the chopped-wood
furniture, the automobile tires and the large majorities in the fall elections.
I've seen brilliant boys at old Siwash go out of college knowing everything
that had ever happened in the world up to one hundred years ago, and try to
peddle hexameters in the wholesale district in Chicago. And I've seen boys
who slid through the course just half a hair's breadth ahead of the Faculty
boot, go out and do the bossing for a whole Congressional district in five
years. They hadn't learned the exact chemical formula of the universe, but
they had learned how to run the blamed thing from practicing on the college
during study hours.
Not that I 'm knocking on knowledge, you understand. Knowledge is, of
course, a grand thing to have around the house. But nowadays knowledge
alone isn't worth as much as it used to be, seems to me. A man has to mix it
up with imagination, and ingenuity, and hustle, and nerve, and the science
of getting mad at the right time, and a fourteen-year course of study in
understanding the other fellow. The college professors lump all this in one

course and call it applied deviltry. They don't put it down in the catalogue
and they encourage you to cut classes in it. But, honestly, I wouldn't trade
what I learned under Professor Petey Simmons, warm boy and official
gadfly to the Faculty, for all the Lat. and Greek and Analit. and Diffy. Cal.,
and the other studies—whatever they were—that I took in good old Siwash.
You remember Petey, of course. He went through Siwash in four years and
eight suspensions, and came out fresh—as fresh as when he went in, which
is saying a good deal. Every summer during his career the Faculty went to a
rest cure and tried to forget him. He was as handy to have around school as
a fox terrier in a cat show. There are two varieties of college students—the
midnight-oil and the natural-gas kind; and Petey was a whole gas well in
himself. Not that he didn't study. He was the hardest student in the college,
but he didn't recite much in classes. Sometimes he recited in the police
court, sometimes to his Pa back home, and sometimes the whole college
took a hand in looking over his examination papers. He used to pass
medium fair in Horace; sub-passable in Trig., and extraordinary mediocre in
Polikon. But his marks in Imagination, the Psychological Moment and
Dodging Consequences were plus perfect, extra magnificent, and
superlatively some, respectively.
I saw Petey last year. He is in Chicago now. You have to bribe a doorkeeper
and bluff a secretary to get to him—that is, you do if you are an ordinary
mortal. But if you give the Siwash yell or the Eta Bita Pie whistle in the
outside office he will emerge from his office out over the railing in one
joyous jump. He came to Chicago ten years ago equipped with a diploma
and a two-year tailor-bill back at Jonesville that he had been afraid to tell
his folks about. If he had been a midnight-oil graduate he would have worn
out three pairs of shoes hunting for a business house which was willing to
let an earnest young scholar enter its employ at the bottom and rise
gradually to the top as the century went by. But Petey wasn't that kind. He
had been used to running the whole college and messing up the universe as
far as one could see from the Siwash belfry if things didn't suit him. So he
picked out the likeliest-looking institution on Dearborn Street and offered it
a position as his employer. He was on the payroll before the president got
over his daze. Two weeks later he promoted the firm to a more responsible
job—that of paying him a bigger salary—and a year ago the general
manager gave up and went to Europe for two years; said he would take a

positive pleasure in coming back and looking at the map of Chicago after
Petey had done it over to suit himself.
Imagination was what did it. You can't take Imagination in any college
classroom, but you can get more of it on the campus in four years than you
can anywhere else in the world. You've got to have a mighty good
imagination to get into any real warm trouble—and by the time you have
gotten out of it again you have had to double its horse-power. That was
Petey's daily recreation. In the morning he would think up an absolutely air-
tight reason for being expelled from Siwash as a disturber, an anarchist, a
superfluosity and a malefactor of great stealth. That night he would go to
his room and figure out an equally good proof that nothing had happened or
that whatever had happened was an act of Providence and not traceable to
any student. Figuring out ways for selling bonds in carload lots was just
recreation to him after a four-year course of this sort.
But to back in on the main track. I whistled outside of Petey's office the
other day and went in with him past two magnates, three salesmen and a
bank president. I sat with my feet on a mahogany table—I wanted to put
them on an oak desk, but Petey declared mahogany was none too good for a
Siwash man—and we spent an hour talking over the time when Petey
manufactured excitement in wholesale lots at Siwash, with me for his first
assistant and favorite apprentice. Those are my proudest memories. I won
my track S. and got honorably mentioned in three Commencement
exercises; but when I want to brag of my college career do I mention these
things? Not unless I have a lot of time. When I want to paralyze an alumnus
of some rival college with admiration and envy, I tell him how Petey and I
manufactured a real Wild West college—buildings, Faculty, bad men and all
—for one day only, for the benefit of an Englishman who had gotten fifteen
hundred miles inland without noticing the general color scheme of the
inhabitants.
We met this chap accidentally—a little favor of Providence, which had a
special pigeonhole for us in those days. Our team had been using the Kiowa
football team as a running track on their own field that afternoon, and the
score was about 105 to 0 when the timekeeper turned off the massacre.
Naturally all Siwash was happy. I will admit we were too happy to be
careful. About two hundred of us made the hundred-mile trip home by local

train that night, and I remember wondering, when the boys dumped the
stove off the rear platform and tied up the conductor in his own bell-rope, if
we weren't getting just a little bit indiscreet; and when a college boy really
wonders if he is getting indiscreet he is generally doing something that will
keep the grand jury busy for the next few months.
I was in the last car, and had just finished telling "Prince" Hogboom that if
he poked any more window-lights out with his cane he would have to finish
the year under an assumed name, when Petey crawled over two mobs of
rough-housers and came up to me. He was seething with indignation. It was
breaking out all over him like a rash. Petey was excitable anyway.
"What do you suppose I've found in the next car?" he said, fizzing like an
escape valve.
"Prof?" said I, getting alarmed.
"Naw," said Petey; "worse than that. A chap that has never heard of Siwash.
Asked me if it was a breakfast food. He's an Englishman. I'm ag'in' the
English." He stopped and began kicking a water tank around to relieve
himself.
"How did he get this far away from home?" I asked.
"He's traveling," snorted Petey; "traveling to improve his mind. Hopeless
job. He's one of those quarter-sawed old beef-eaters who stop thinking as
soon as they've got their education. He's the editor of a missionary
publication, he told me, and he is writing some articles on Heathen
America. Honest, it almost made me boil over when he asked me if
anything was being done to educate the aborigines out here."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"Do?" said Petey. "Why, I answered his question, of course. I told him he
wasn't fifty miles from a college this minute, and he said, 'Oh, I say now!
Are you spoofing me?' What's 'spoofing'?"
"Kidding, stringing, stuffing, jollying along, blowing east wind, turning on
the gas," says I. "'Spoofing' is University English. They don't use slang over
there, you know."

"Well, then, I spoofed him," said Petey, grinning. "He said it was
remarkable how very few revolvers he had seen, and then he wanted to
know why there was no shooting on the train with so much disorder. He's
pretty well posted now. I'd go a mile out of my way to help a poor dumb
chap like him. I told him this was the Y. M. C. A. section of Siwash and that
the real rough students were coming along on horseback. I said they weren't
allowed on the trains because they were so fatal to passengers. I informed
him that all the profs at Siwash went armed, and that the course of study
consisted of mining, draw poker, shooting from the hip, broncho-busting,
sheep-shearing, History of Art, bread-making and Evidences of
Christianity."
"Did he admit by that time that you were a good, free-handed liar?" I asked.
"Admit nothing," said Petey; "he took it all down in his notebook and
remarked that in a wild country like this, remote from civilization, a
knowledge of bread-making would undoubtedly be invaluable to a man."
"He was spoofing you," says I.
"He wasn't," said Petey; "he thinks he's a thousand miles from a plug hat
this minute. He's so interested he is going to stop over for a day or two and
write up the college for his magazine. I've invited him to stay at the Eta Bita
Pie House with us, and we're going to show him a real Wild West school if
we have to shoot blank cartridges at the cook to do it."
"Petey," said I solemnly, "some day you'll bump an asteroid when you go up
in the air like this. This friend of yours will take one look at Siwash and ask
you if Sapphira is feeling well these days."
"Bet you five, my opera hat, a good mandolin and a meal ticket on Jim's
place against your dress suit," said Petey promptly. "And you better not take
it, either."
"Done!" says I. "I bet you my hunting-case suit against your earthly
possessions that you can't tow old Britannia-rules-the-waves around Siwash
for a day without disclosing the fact that you are the best catch-as-catch-can
liar in this section of the solar system."

"All right," said Petey. "But you've got to help me win the stuff. This is a
great big contract. It's going to be my masterpiece, and I need help."
"I'm with you clear to Faculty meeting, as usual," says I. "But what's the
use? He'll catch on."
"Leave that to me," said Petey. "Anyway, he won't catch on. When I told
him we had a checkroom for pappooses in the Siwash chapel he wrote it
down and asked if the Indians ever massacred the professors. He wouldn't
catch on if we fed him dog for dinner. Just come and see for yourself."
I agreed with Petey when I took a good look at the victim a minute later. We
found him in the car ahead, sitting on the edge of the seat and looking as if
he expected to be eaten alive, without salt, any minute. You could have told
that he was from extremely elsewhere at first glance. He was as different as
if he had worn tattoo-marks for trousers. He was a stout party with black-
rimmed eyeglasses, side whiskers that you wouldn't have believed even if
you had seen them, and slabs of iron-gray hair with a pepper-and-salt
traveling cap stuck on top of his head like a cupola. He was beautifully
curved and his black preacher uniform looked as if it had been put on him
by a paperhanger. I forgot to tell you that his name was the Reverend
Ponsonby Diggs. He had to tell it to me four times and then write it down,
for the way he handled his words was positively heartless. He clipped them,
beheaded them, disemboweled them and warped them all out of shape.
Have you ever heard a real ingrowing Englishman start a word in the roof
of his mouth and then back away from it as if it was red-hot and had
prickles on it? It's interesting. They seem to think it is indecent to come
brazenly out and sound a vowel.
The Reverend Ponsonby Diggs—as near as I could get it he called himself
"Pubby Daggs"—greeted Petey with great relief. He seemed to regard us as
a rescue brigade. "Reahly, you know, this is extraordinary," he sputtered. "I
have never seen such disorder. What will the authorities do?"
That touched my pride. "Pshaw, man!" I says; "we're only warming up.
Pretty soon we'll take this train out in the woods and lose it."
I meant it for a joke. But the Reverend Mr. Diggs hadn't specialized in
American jokes. "You don't mean to say they will derail the train!" he said

anxiously. Then I knew that Petey was going to win my dress suit.
I assured the Reverend—pshaw, I'm tired of saying all that! I'm going to
save breath. I assured Diggsey that derailing was the kindest thing ever
done to trains by Siwash students, but that as his hosts we would stand by
him, whatever happened. Then Petey slipped away to arrange the cast and I
kept on answering questions. Say! that man was a regular magazine gun,
loaded with interrogation points. Was there any danger to life on these
trains? Would it be possible for him to take a ride in a stage-coach? Were
train robbers still plentiful? Had gold ever been found around Siwash? Were
the Indians troublesome? Did we have regular school buildings or did we
live in tents? Had not the railroad had a distinctly—er—civilizing influence
in this region? Was it not, after all, remarkable that the thirst for learning
could be found even in this wild and desolate country?
And Siwash is only half a day from Chicago by parlor car!
I answered his questions as well as I could. I told him how hard it was to
find professors who wouldn't get drunk, and how we had to let the men and
women recite on alternate days after a few of the hen students had been
winged by stray bullets. I had never heard of Greek, I said, but I assured
him that we studied Latin and that we had a professor to whom Cæsar was
as easy as print. I told him how hard we worked to get a little culture and
how many of the boys gave up their ponies altogether, wore store clothes
and took 'em off when they went to bed all the time they were in college;
but, try as I would, I couldn't make the answers as ridiculous as his
questions. He had me on the mat, two points down and fighting for wind all
the time. His thirst for knowledge was wonderful and his objection to
believing what his eyes must have told him was still more wonderful. There
he was, half-way across the country from New York, and he must have
looked out of the car windows on the way; but he hadn't seen a thing. I
suppose it was because he wasn't looking for anything but Indians.
All this time Petey was circulating about the car, taking aside members of
the Rep Rho Betas and talking to them earnestly. The Rep Rho Betas were
the Sophomore fraternity and were the real demons of the college. Each
year the outgoing Sophomore class initiated the twenty Freshmen who were
most likely to meet the hangman on professional business and passed on the

duties of the fraternity to them. The fraternity spent its time in pleasure and
was suspected of anything violent which happened in the county. Petey was
highbinder of the gang that year and was very far gone in crime.
We were due home about ten P. M., and just before they untied the
conductor Petey hauled me off to one side.
"It's all fixed," he said; "it's glorious. We'll just make Siwash into a Wild
West show for his benefit. The Rep Rho Betas will entertain him days and
he'll stay at the Eta Pie House nights. I'm putting the Eta Bites on now.
You've got to get him off this train before we get to the station and keep him
busy while I arrange the program. Just give me an hour before you get him
there. That's all I ask."
Now I never was a diplomat, and the job of lugging a fat old foreigner
around a dead college town at night and trying to make him think he was in
peril of his life every minute was about three numbers larger than my size. I
couldn't think of anything else, so I slipped the word to Ole Skjarsen that
Diggs was a Kiowa professor who was coming over to get notes on our
team and tip them off to Muggledorfer College. I judged this would create
some hostility and I wasn't mistaken. Ole began to climb over his fellow-
students and I was just able to beat him to his prey.
"Come on," I whispered. "Skjarsen's on the warpath. He says he wants to
bite up a stranger and he thinks you'll do."
"Oh, my dear sir," said the Reverend Ponsonby, jumping up and grabbing a
hatbox, "you don't mean to tell me that he will use violence?"
"Violence nothing!" I yelled, picking up four pieces of baggage. "He won't
use violence. He'll just eat you alive, that's all. He's awful that way. Come,
quick!"
"Oh, my word!" said Diggsey, grabbing his other five bundles and piling
out of the car after me.
The train was slowing down for the crossing west of Jonesville, and I
judged it wouldn't hurt the great collector of Western local color to roll a
little. So I yelled, "Jump for your life!" He jumped. I swung off and went
back till I met him coming along on his shoulder-blades, with a procession

of baggage following him. He wasn't hurt a bit, but he looked interesting. I
brushed him off, cached the baggage—all but a suitcase and the hatbox
which he hadn't dropped for a minute—and we began to edge
unostentatiously into Jonesville.
For an hour or more we dodged around in alleys and behind barns, while up
on the campus the boys burned a woodshed, an old fruit-stand, half a
hundred drygoods boxes and half a mile of wooden sidewalk by way of
celebration. The glare in the sky was wild enough to satisfy any one, and
when some of the boys got the old army muskets that the cadets drilled with
out of the armory and banged away, I was happy. But how I did long to be
close up to that fire! It was a cold night in early November, and as I lay
behind woodsheds, with my teeth wearing themselves out on each other, I
felt like an early Christian martyr—though it wasn't cold they suffered from
as a rule. As for the Reverend Pubby, he wanted to creep away to the next
town and then start for England disguised as a chorus girl, or anything; but I
wouldn't let him. We sneaked around till nearly midnight and then crept up
the alley to the Eta Bita Pie House, wondering if we would ever get warm
again.
I've seen some grand transformation scenes, but I never saw anything more
impressive than the way the Eta Bita Pie House had been done over in two
hours. We always prided ourselves on our house. It cost fifteen thousand
dollars, exclusive of the plumber's little hold-up and the Oriental rugs, and
it was full of polished floors and monogram silverware and fancy pottery
and framed prints, and other bang-up-to-date incumbrances. But in two
hours thirty boys can change a whole lot of scenery. They had spread dirt
and sand over the floor, had ripped out the curtains and chased the pictures.
They had poked out a window-light or two, had unhung a few doors, and
had filled the corners with saddles, old clothes, flour barrels and dogs. You
never saw so many dogs. The whole neighborhood had been raided. They
were hanging round everywhere, homesick and miserable; and one of the
Freshmen had been given the job of cruising around and kicking them just
to keep them tuned up.
A dozen of the fellows were playing poker on an old board table in the
middle of the big living-hall when we came in. Their clothes were hand-me-
downs from Noah's time, and every one of them was outraging some

convention or other. Our boys always did go in for amateur theatricals
pretty strongly, and the way our most talented members abused the English
language that night when they welcomed the Reverend Pubby was as good
as a book.
"Proud ter meet you," roared Allie Bangs, our president, taking off his hat
and making a low bow. "Set right in and enjoy yourself. White chips is a
dime, limit is a dollar and no gunplay goes."
When Pubby had explained for the third time that he had never had the
pleasure of playing the game, Bangs finally got on to the curves in his
pronunciation and understood him.
"What! Never played poker!" he whooped. "Hell a humpin', where was you
raised? You sure ain't a college man? Any lop-eared galoot that didn't play
poker in Siwash would get run out by the Faculty. You ought to see our
president put up his pile and draw to a pair of deuces. What!—a Reverend!
I beg your pardon, friend. 'S all right. Jest name the game you're strong at
and we'll try to accommodate you later on. Here, you fellows, watch my
chips while I show the Reverend around our diggin's. You nip one like you
did last time, Turk Bowman, and there'll be the all-firedest row that this
shack has ever seed. Come right along, Reverend."

"Har's das spy'" he yelled "Kill him, fallers,
he ban a spy!"
Page 132
That tour was a great triumph for Bangs. We always did admire his acting,
but he outdid himself that night. The rest of us just kept quiet and let him
handle the conversation, and I must say it sounded desperate enough to be
convincing. Of course he slipped up occasionally and stuck in words that
would have choked an ordinary cow-gentleman, but Diggsey was that dazed
he wouldn't have suspected if they had been Latin. I thought it would be
more or less of a job to explain how we were living in a fifteen-thousand-
dollar house instead of dugouts, but Bangs never hesitated a minute. He
explained that the house belonged to a millionaire cattle-owner who had
built it from reading a society novel, and that he let us live in it because he

preferred to live in the barn with the horses. The boys had filled their rooms
full of junk and one of them had even tied a pig to his bed—while the way
Bangs cleared rubbish out of the bathtub and promised to have some water
heated in the morning was convincingly artless. He had just finished
explaining that, owing to the boiler-plate in the walls, the house was
practically Indian proof, when an awful fusillade of shots broke out from
the kitchen. Bangs disappeared for a moment, gun in hand, and I watched
our guest trying to make himself six inches narrower and three feet shorter.
I don't know when I ever saw a chap so anxious to melt right down into a
corner and be mistaken for a carpet tack.
"'S all right," said Bangs, clumping in cheerfully. "Jest the cook having
another fit. We've got a cook," he explained, "who gets loaded up 'bout
oncet a month so full that he cries pure alcohol, and when he gits that way
he insists on trying to shoot cockroaches with his gun. He ain't never killed
one, but he's gotten two Chinamen and a mule, and we've got to put a stop
to it. He's tied up in the cellar a-swearin' that if he gits loose he'll come
upstairs and furnish material for nineteen fancy funerals with silver name-
plates. But, don't you worry, Reverend. He can't hurt a fly 'less he gits loose.
Here's your room. That hoss blanket on the cot's brand new; towel's in the
hall and you'll find a comb somewheres round. Just you turn in if you feel
like it, and when you hear Wall-Eye Denton and Pete Pearsall trying to
massacre each other in the next room it's time to git up."
Pubby said he would retire at once, and we left him looking scared but
relieved. I'll bet he sat up all night taking notes and expecting things to
happen. We sat up, too, but for a different reason. You can't imagine how
much work it took to get that house running backward. And it was an awful
job to do the Wild West stunt, too. We sat and criticised each other's dialect
and actions until there were as many as three free fights going on at once.
One man favored the Bret Harte style of bad man; another adhered to the
Henry Wallace Phillips brand; while still another insisted on following the
Remington school. We compromised on a mixture and then spent the rest of
the night learning how to forget our table manners.
The result was magnificent. I shall never forget the Reverend Pubby's
pained but fascinated expression as he sat at breakfast the next morning and
watched thirty hungry savages shoveling plain, unvarnished grub into their

faces. The breakfast couldn't have gone better if we had had a dress
rehearsal. Our guest couldn't eat. He was afraid to talk. He just held on to
his chair, and we could see him stiffen with horror every time some eater
would rise up so as to increase his reach and spear a piece of bread six feet
away with his fork. The breakfast was a disgusting display of Poland-China
manners and was successful in every particular.
We confidently expected Petey Simmons to turn up during the meal and tell
us what to do next. He had spent the night with his odoriferous Rep Rho
Beta brothers cooking up the rest of the plot and had promised to run up at
breakfast. But no Petey appeared. We strung the meal along as far as we
could toward dinner and then took up the job of keeping the Reverend
Pubby contented and in the house until the life-saving crew arrived. Did
you ever try to lie all morning with a slow-speed imagination? That's what
we had to do. We explained to Pubby that the students caroused all night
and never came to college in the morning; we told him it was against the
rules for strangers to go on the campus in the morning; we told him it was
dangerous to go out-of-doors because of the Alfalfa Delta, who were
suspected of being cannibals; we told him forty thousand things, most of
which contradicted each other. If it hadn't been for the boys who kindly
started a fight whenever his reverence had tangled Bangs and me up
hopelessly on some question we couldn't have survived the inquisition. As it
was, I perspired about a barrel and my brain ached for a week.
We went to lunch and put on another exhibition of free-hand feeding,
getting more grumpy and disgusted every minute. We were all ready to yell
for mercy and put on our civilized clothes when we heard a terrific riot
from outside. Then Petey came in.
If there ever was a sure-enough Wild Westerner it was Petey that afternoon.
He had on the whole works—two-acre hat, red woolen shirt, spurs, and
even chaps—nice hairy ones. I discovered next day that he had swiped my
fine bearskin rug and cut it up to make them. In his belt he had a revolver
which couldn't have been less than two feet long. Petey was a little fellow,
with one of those nineteen-sizes-too-large voices, and when he turned the
full organ on you would have thought old Mount Vesuvius had wakened up
and rumbled into the room.

"Howdy, Reverend," he thundered. "We jest come along to take you on a
little ride over to college. Got a nice gentle cow-pony out here. She bucks
as easy as a rockin'-horse. Don't mind about your clothes. Just hop right on.
The boys is some anxious to get along, it being most classtime."
We followed the two of them out to the back yard. There were seven Rep
Rho Betas on seven moth-eaten ponies which they had dug up from
goodness knows where. The rigs they had on represented each fellow's idea
of what a cowboy looked like, and would have made a real cowpuncher
hang himself for shame. Petey confessed afterward that, of all the Rep Rho
Betas, only seven had ever been on a horse, and, of these, three kept him in
agony for fear they would fall off and compel him to explain that they were
on the verge of delirium tremens. They were a weird-looking bunch, but,
gee! they were fierce. Pirates would have been kittens beside them.

We spent another five minutes hoisting him aboard a
prehistoric plug
Page 125
I guess the Reverend Pubby had never done much in the Centaur line, for he
came very near balking entirely right there. It took us five minutes to
explain that there was no other way of getting out to Siwash and that the

Faculty would take it as a personal insult if he didn't come. We also had to
explain how disagreeable the Faculty was when it was insulted. And then
after he had consented we spent another five minutes hoisting him aboard a
prehistoric plug and telling him how to stick on. Then the line filed out
through the alley with a regular ghost-dance yell, while we detained Petey.
We were about to massacre him for leaving us to sweat all morning, but we
forgot all about it when Petey told us what he had been doing. He admitted
that, in order not to annoy the profs and cause unnecessary questions, he
had taken the liberty to build a temporary Siwash College for this special
occasion.
Yes, sir; nothing less than that. You remember Dillpickle Academy, the
extinct college in the west part of town? It had been closed for years
because the only remaining student had gotten lonesome. But most of the
equipment was still there, and Petey had borrowed it of the caretaker for
one day only, promising to give it back as good as new in the morning.
Petey could have borrowed the great seal away from the Department of
State. He and his Rep Rho Betas had let a lot of students into the deal, had
been working all morning, and Siwash was ready for business at the new
stand.
We wanted to measure Petey for a medal then and there, but he refused,
being needed on the firing-line. He rode off and we made a grand rush for
the new Siwash College—special one-day stand, benefit performance. We
got there before the escorting committee and had a fine view of the grand
entry. The Reverend Pubby had fallen off four times, and the last mile he
had led his horse. It was a sagacious scheme bringing him along, as none of
the others had a chance to exhibit their extremely sketchy horsemanship in
anything better than a mile-an-hour gait.
Old Dillpickle Academy was busier than it had ever been in real life when
we got there. Fully fifty students were on the scene. They were decked out
in cowboy clothes, hand-me-downs, big straw hats, blankets—any old
thing. One thing that impressed me was the number of books they were
carrying. At Siwash we always refused to carry books except when
absolutely necessary. It seemed too affected—as if you were trying to learn
something. But out there at near-Siwash every man had at least six books. I
saw geographies, spellers, Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems, Science and

Health, and the Congressional Record. Learning was just naturally rampant
out there. Students were studying on the fence. They were walking up and
down the campus "boning" furiously. They were even studying in the trees.
You get fifty college boys to turn actors for a day and you will see some
mighty mixed results. There was "Bay" Sanderson, for instance. "Bay's"
idea of being a wild and Western student was to sit on the front gate with a
long knife stuck in his belt and read detective stories. He did it all through
the performance, and whenever the guest was led past him he would turn
the book down carefully, pull the knife out of his belt and whoop three
times as solemn as a judge.
You never saw any one so interested as the Reverend Ponsonby Diggs. His
eyes stuck out like incandescent globes. He had been pretty well jolted up,
and he yelled in a low, polite way every time he made a quick movement,
but his thirst for information was still vigorous. As head host Petey was
pumpee, and he was always four laps ahead of the job.
"Eh, I say," said Pubby, after surveying the scene for a few minutes. "This is
all very interesting, you know. But what a little place!"
"Hell, Reverend," said Petey emphatically, "she's the biggest school in the
world."
The Reverend was a man of guile. He didn't bat an eye.
"How many students has the college?" he inquired.
"We've got a hundred, all studying books and learning things," said Petey
proudly.
"Reahly, now?" said the Reverend; "I say, reahly? And these cows! Might I
ask if these cows are a part of the college?"
"Sure thing," said Petey. "Sophomore roping class uses 'em. Great class to
watch."
"I say now, this is extraordinary," said the Reverend. "You don't mean to tell
me you tie up cows?"
"Rope 'em and tie 'em and brand 'em," said Petey. "What's college for if it
ain't to learn you things?"

"I say now, this is extraordinary," said the Reverend. I gave him four more
"extraordinaries" before I did something violent. He'd used two hundred
that morning. "Might I see the class at work?" he inquired.
Petey didn't even hesitate. "Sorry, Reverend," says he. "But the Professor of
Roping and Branding has been drunk for a week. Class ain't working now."
The college bell tapped three times. "That's cleaning-up bell," said Petey.
"Oh, I say now," said the Reverend, hauling out his notebook. "What's
cleaning-up bell?"
"Why, to clean up the college," said Petey. "We clean it up once a week.
With the fellows riding their horses into class and tracking mud and clay in,
and eating lunches and stuff around, it gets pretty messy before the end of
the week. We make the Freshmen clean it out. There they go now."
A dozen "supes" filed slowly into the building with brooms and shovels.
Pubby couldn't have looked more interested if they had been crowned heads
of Europe.
Just then a fine assortment of sounds broke out in the old building. The
doors burst open and a young red-headed Mick from the seventh ward near
by rode a pony down the steps and away for dear life. Behind him came a
double-sized gent with yard-wide mustaches. He was dressed in a red shirt,
overalls and firearms. He was a walking museum of weapons. Petey told
me afterward that he had borrowed him from the roundhouse near by, and
that for a box of cigars he had kindly consented to play the part of an
irritable arsenal for one afternoon only.
"That's the janitor," said Petey in an awestruck whisper. "Get behind a tree,
quick. He's sure some vexed. He hates to have the boys ride their ponies
into classroom."
We got a fine view of the janitor as he swept past. He was a regular volcano
in pants. Never have I heard the English language more richly embossed
with profanity. Firing a fat locomotive up the grades around Siwash with
bad coal gives a man great talent in expression. We listened to him with
awe. Pubby was entranced. He asked me if it would be safe to take anything

down in his notebook, and when I promised to protect him he wrote three
pages.
By this time the campus was filling up. Word had gotten around the real
college that the big show of the season was being pulled off up at
Dillpickle, and the students were arriving by the dozen. We were getting
pretty nervous. The new arrivals weren't coached, and sooner or later they
were bound to give the snap away. We decided to introduce our guest to the
president. If we could keep things quiet another half hour all would be safe,
Petey assured us.
We took the Reverend up to the main entrance, Petey's thinker working like
a well-oiled machine all the way. He pointed out the tree where they hanged
a horse thief, and Pubby made us wait till he had gotten a leaf from it. The
Senior classes at Dillpickle had had the custom of hauling boulders on to
the campus as graduation presents. Petey explained that each boulder
marked the resting place of some student whose career had been
foreshortened accidentally, and he described several of the tragedies—
invented them right off the reel. Pubby was so interested he didn't care who
saw his notebook. When Petey told him how a pack of timber wolves had
besieged the school for nine days and nights, four years before, he almost
cried because there was no photograph of the scene handy. We had to
promise him a wolf skin to comfort him.
Dillpickle Academy was a plain old brick building, with one of those
cupolas which were so popular among schools and colleges forty years ago.
I don't know just what mysterious effect a cupola has on education, but it
was considered necessary at that time. In front of the building was a wide
stone porch. Inside we could see half a dozen dogs and a horse. Pubby
looked a bushel of exclamation points when Petey explained that they
belonged to the president. He looked a lot more when he saw a counter with
a fine assortment of chewing tobacco and pipes on it. That, Petey whispered
to me, was his masterpiece. He had borrowed the whole thing from a corner
grocery store.
Petey had just put his eye to the window of the president's room, ostensibly
to find out whether Prexy was in a good humor and in reality to find out

whether Kennedy, an old grad who had consented to play the part, was on
duty, when one of the boys hurried up and grabbed me.
"Just evaporate as fast as you can," he whispered; "there are six cops on the
way out. They're going to pinch the whole bunch of us."
Now this was a fine predicament for a young and promising college—to be
arrested by six lowly cops on its own campus, in the act of showing a
distinguished visitor how it ran the earth, and was particular Hades with the
trigger-finger! Bangs was showing Pubby the window through which the
Professor of Arithmetic had thrown him the term before, and I told Petey.
He sat down and cried.
"After all this work and just as we had it cinched!" he moaned. "I'll quit
school to-morrow and devote my life to poisoning policemen. This has
made an anarchist of me."
There was nothing to do. We couldn't very well explain that the college
would now have to run away and hide because some enthusiastic Freshman
had fired a horse-pistol on the streets of Jonesville. I looked at the crowd of
fantastic students getting ready to bolt for the fence. I looked at our victim,
fairly punching words into his notebook. It was the brightest young dream
that was ever busted by a fat loafer in brass buttons. Then I saw Ole
Skjarsen and had my one big inspiration.
"Excuse me," I said, rushing over to Pubby, "but you'll have to mosey right
out of here. There's Ole Skjarsen, and he looks ugly."
"Oh, my word!" said Pubby; he remembered Ole from the night before.
"Right around the building!" yelled Petey, grabbing the cue. Naturally Ole
heard him and saw those whiskers. "Har's das spy!" he yelled. "Kill him,
fallers; he ban a spy!" We dashed around the building, Ole following us.
And then, because the cops had arrived at the front gate, the whole mob
thundered after us.

He may have been fat, but how he could run!
Page 132
Well, sir, you never saw a more successful race in your life. There were no
less than a hundred Siwash students behind us, and, though no one but Ole
Skjarsen had any interest in us, they were all trying to break the sprint
record in our direction, it being the line of least resistance. And, say! We
certainly had misjudged the Reverend Ponsonby Diggs. He may have been
fat, but how he could run! His work was phenomenal. I think he must have
been on a track team himself at some earlier part of his career, for the way
he steamed away from the gang would have reminded you of the Lusitania
racing the Statue of Liberty. He lost his cap. He shed his long black coat.
He rolled over the fence at the rear of the campus without even hesitating,
and the last we saw of him he was going down the road out of Jonesville
into the west, his legs revolving in a blue haze. Even if we had wanted to
stop him, we couldn't have caught him. And besides, Ole caught Petey and
me just outside of the campus and we had to do some twenty-nine-story-tall
explaining to keep from getting punched for harboring spies. No one had
thought to put him next to the game.
That all? Goodness, no! We cleaned up for a week and had been so good
that the Faculty had about decided that nothing had happened when the
Reverend Ponsonby Diggs appeared in Jonesville again. He came with a

United States marshal for a bodyguard, too. He had footed it to the next
town, it seems, and had wired the nearest British consul that he had been
attacked by savages at Siwash College and robbed of all his baggage. They
say he demanded battleships or a Hague conference, or something of the
sort, and that the consul's office asked a Government officer to go out and
pacify him. They stepped off the train at the Union Station and went right
up to college—only four blocks away.
Petey and I remained considerably invisible, but the boys tell me that the
look on the Reverend's face when he arrived at the real Siwash was worth
perpetuating in bronze. He went up the fine old avenue, past the fine new
buildings, in a daze; and when our good old Prexy, who had him skinned
forty ways for dignity, shook hands with him and handed him a little talk
that was a saturated solution of Latin, he couldn't even say "most
extraordinary." You can realize how far gone he was.
Some of the boys got hold of the marshal that day and told him the story.
He laughed from four P. M. until midnight, with only three stops for
refreshments. The Reverend Pubby Diggs stayed three days as the guest of
the Faculty and he didn't get up nerve enough in all that time to talk
business. We saw him at chapel where he couldn't see us, and he looked like
a man who had suddenly discovered, while falling out of his aeroplane, that
somebody had removed the earth and had left no address behind. His
baggage mysteriously appeared at his room in the hotel on the first night,
and when he left he hadn't recovered consciousness sufficiently to inquire
where it came from. I think he went right back to England when he left
Siwash, and I'll bet that by now he has almost concluded that some one had
been playing a joke on him. You give those Englishmen time and they will
catch on to almost anything.

CHAPTER VI
THE GREEK DOUBLE CROSS

Suffering bear-cats! Say! excuse me while I take a long rest, Jim. I need it.
I've just read a piece of information in this letter that makes me tired all
over.
What is it? Oh, just another variety of competition smothered with a
gentlemanly agreement—that's all; another bright-eyed little trust formed
and another readjustment of affairs on a business basis. We old fellows
needn't break our necks to get back to Siwash and the frat this fall, they
write me. Of course they'll be delighted to see us and all that; but there's no
burning need for us and we needn't jump any jobs to report in time to put
the brands on the Freshmen and rescue them from the noisome Alfalfa Delts
and Sigh Whoops—because there isn't going to be any rescuing this fall.
They've had an agreement at Siwash. They're going to approach the
Freshies under strict rules. No parties. No dinners at the houses. No
abductions. No big, tall talk about pledging to-night or staggering through a
twilight life to a frowzy-headed and unimportant old age in some bum
bunch. All done away with. Everything nice and orderly. Freshman arrives.
You take his name and address. Call on him, attended by referees. Maintain
a general temperature of not more than sixty-five when you meet him on the
campus. Buy him one ten-cent cigar during the fall and introduce him to
one girl—age, complexion and hypnotic power to be carefully regulated by
the rushing committee. Then you send him a little engraved invitation to
amalgamate with you; and when he answers, per the self-addressed
envelope inclosed, you are to love him like a brother for the next three and
a half years. Gee! how that makes me ache!
Think of it! And at old Siwash, too!—Siwash, where we never considered a
pledge safe until we had him tied up in a back room, with our colors on him
and a guard around the house! That settles me. I've always yearned to go
back and cavort over the campus in the fall when college opened; but not

for me no more! Why, if I went back there and got into the rushing game,
first thing I knew they'd have me run up before a pan-Hellenic council,
charged with giving an eligible Freshman more than two fingers when I
shook hands with him; and I'd be ridden out of town on a rail for rushing in
an undignified manner.
Rushing? What's rushing? Oh, yes; I forgot that you never participated in
that delicious form of insanity known as a fall term in college. Rushing is a
cross between proposing to a girl and abducting a coyote. Rushing a man
for a frat is trying to make him believe that to belong to it is joy and
inspiration, and to belong to any other means misery and an early tomb; that
all the best men in college either belong to your frat or couldn't get in; that
you're the best fellows on earth, and that you're crazy to have him, and that
he is a coming Senator; that you can't live without him; that the other gang
can't appreciate him; that you never ask men twice; that you don't care
much for him anyway, and that you are just as likely as not to withdraw the
spike any minute if you should happen to get tired of the cut of his trousers;
that your crowd can make him class president and the other crowds can
make him fine mausoleums; that you love him like real brothers and that he
has already bound himself in honor to pledge—and that if he doesn't he will
regret it all his life; and, besides, you will punch his head if he doesn't put
on the colors. That's rushing for you.
What's my crowd? Why, the Eta Bita Pie, of course. Couldn't you tell that
from my skyscraper brow? We Eta Bites are so much better than any other
frat that we break down and cry now and then when we think of the poor
chaps who can't belong to us. We're bigger, grander, nobler and tighter
about the chest than any other gang. We've turned out more Senators,
Congressmen, Supreme Justices, near-Presidents, captains of industry,
foreign ambassadors and football captains than any two of them. We own
more frat houses, win more college elections, know more about neckties
and girls, wear louder vests and put more cross-hatch effects on our
neophytes than any three of them. We're so immeasurably ahead of
everything with a Greek-letter name that every Freshman of taste and
discrimination turns down everything else and waits until we crook our
little finger at him. Of course, sometimes we make a mistake and ask some
fellow that isn't a man of taste and discrimination; he proves it by going into
some other frat; and that, of course, keeps all the men of poor judgment out

of our gang and puts them in the others. Regular automatic dispensation of
Providence, isn't it?
It's been a long time since I had a chance to gather with the brethren back at
Siwash and agree with them how glorious we are, but this note brings it all
back. My! how I'd like this minute to go back about ten years and cluster
around our big grate fire, which used to make the Delta Kaps so crazy with
envy. Those were the good old days when we came back to college in the
fall, looked over the haycrop in the Freshman class, picked out the likeliest
seed repositories, and then proceeded to carve them out from the clutches of
a round dozen rival frats, each one crazy to get a spike into every new
student who looked as if he might be president of the Senior class and an
authority on cotillons some day. No namby-pamby, drop-three-and-carry-
one crochet effects about our rushing those days! We just stood up on our
hind legs and scrapped it out. For concentrated, triple-distilled, double-X
excitement, the first three weeks of college, with every frat breaking its
collective neck to get a habeas corpus on the same six or eight men, had a
suffragette riot in the House of Parliament beaten down to a dove-coo.
There was nothing that made us love a Freshman so hard as to have about
six other frats after him. I've seen women buy hats the same way. They've
got to beat some other woman to a hat before they can really appreciate it.
And when we could swat half a dozen rival frats over the heart by waltzing
a good-looking young chap down the walk to chapel with our colors on his
coat, and could watch them turning green and purple and clawing for air—
well, I guess it beat getting elected to Congress or marrying an heiress-
apparent for pure, unadulterated, unspeckled joy!
Competition was getting mighty scarce in the country even then. There
were understandings between railroad magnates and beef kings and biscuit
makers—and even the ministers had a scale of wedding fees. But
competition had a happy home on our campus. About the best we had been
able to do had been to agree not to burn down each other's frat houses while
we were haltering the Freshmen. I've seen nine frats, with a total of one
hundred and fifty members, sitting up nights for a week at a time working
out plans to despoil each other of a runty little fellow in a pancake hat,
whose only accomplishment was playing the piano with his feet. One frat
wanted him and that started the others.

Of course we'd have got along better if we'd put the whole Freshman class
in cold storage until we could have found out who the good men were and
who the spoiled fruit might be. We were just as likely to fall in love with a
suit of clothes as with a future class orator. We took in one man once
because he bought a pair of patent-leather tan shoes in his Junior year. We
argued that, if he had the nerve to wear the things to his Y. M. C. A.
meetings, there must be some originality in him after all—and we took a
chance. We won. But it's a risky business. Once five frats rushed a fellow
for a month because of the beautiful clothes he wore—and just after the
victorious bunch had initiated him a clothing house came down on the
young man and took the whole outfit. You can't always tell at first sight. But
then, I don't know but that college fraternities exercise as much care and
judgment in picking brothers as women do in picking husbands. Many a
woman has married a fine mustache or a bunch of noble clothes and has
taken the thing that wore them on spec. That's one more than we ever did.
You could fool us with clothes; but the man who came to Siwash with a
mustache had to flock by himself. He and his whiskers were considered to
be enough company for each other.
There were plenty of frats in Siwash to make things interesting in the fall.
There were the Alfalfa Delts, who had a house in the same block with us
and were snobbish just because they had initiated a locomotive works, two
railroads and a pickle factory. Then there were the Sigh Whoopsilons, who
got to Siwash first and who regarded the rest of us with the same kindly
tolerance with which the Indians regarded Daniel Boone. And there were
the Chi Yis, who fought society hard and always had their picture taken for
the college annual in dress suits. Many's the time I've loaned my dress suit
to drape over some green young Chi Yi, so that the annual picture could
show an unbroken row of open-faced vests. And there were the Shi Delts,
who were a bold, bad bunch; and the Fli Gammas, who were good, pious
boys, about as exciting as a smooth-running prayer-meeting; and the Delta
Kappa Sonofaguns, who got every political office either by electing a
member or initiating one; and the Delta Flushes; and the Mu Kow Moos;
the Sigma Numerous; and two or three others that we didn't lie awake
nights worrying about. Every one of these bunches had one burning
ambition—that was to initiate the very best men in the Freshman class
every fall. That made it necessary for us, in order to maintain our proud

position, to disappoint each one of them every year and to make ourselves
about as popular as the directors of a fresh-air and drinking-water trust.
Of course we always disappointed them. Wouldn't admit it if we didn't. But,
holy mackerel! what a job it was! Herding a bunch of green and timid and
nervous and contrary youngsters past all the temptations and pitfalls and
confidence games and blarneyfests put up by a dozen frats, and landing the
bunch in a crowd that it had never heard of two weeks before, is as bad as
trying to herd a bunch of whales into a fishpond with nothing but hot air for
gads. It took diplomacy, pugnacity and psychological moments, I tell you;
and it took more: it took ingenuity and inventiveness and cheek and second
sight and cool heads in time of trouble and long heads on the job, from
daybreak to daybreak. I'd rather go out and sell battleships to farmers, so far
as the toughness of the job is concerned, than to tackle the job of persuading
a wise young high-school product with two chums in another frat that my
bunch and he were made for each other. What did he care for our glorious
history? We had to use other means of getting him. We had to hypnotize
him, daze him, waft him off his feet; and if necessary we had to get the
other frats to help us. How? Oh, you never know just how until you have to;
and then you slip your scheme wheels into gear and do it. You just have to;
that's all. It's like running away from a bear. You know you can't, but you've
got to; and so you do.
Makes me smile now when I think of some of the desperate crises that used
to roll up around old Eta Bita Pie like a tornado convention and threaten to
engulf the bright, beautiful world and turn it into a howling desert, peopled
only by Delta Kappa Whoops and other undesirables. I'm far enough away,
now, to forget the heart-bursting suspense and to see only the humor of it.
Once I remember the Shi Delts, in spite of everything we could do,
managed so to befog the brain of the Freshman class president that he cut a
date with us and sequestered himself in the Shi Delt house in an upper back
room, with the horrible intention of pledging himself the next morning.
Four of the largest Shi Delts sat on the front porch that evening and the
telephone got paralysis right after supper. They had told the boy that if he
joined them he would probably have to leave school in his Junior year to
become governor; and he didn't want to see any of us for fear we would
wake him up. I chuckle yet when I think of those four big bruisers sitting on
the front porch and guarding their property while I was shinning up the

corner post of the back porch, leaving a part of my trousers fluttering on a
nail and ordering the youngster in a blood-curdling whisper to hand down
his coat, unless he wanted to lose forever his chance of being captain of the
football team in his Sophomore year. He weighed the governorship against
the captaincy for a minute, but the right triumphed and he handed down his
coat. I sewed a big bunch of our colors on it, discoursed with him
fraternally while balancing on the slanting roof, shook hands with him in a
solemn, ritualistic way and bade him be firm the next morning. When the
Shi Delts came in and found that Freshman pledged to another gang they
had a convulsion that lasted a week; and to this day they don't know how
the crime was committed.
There was another Freshman, I remember, who was led violently astray by
the Chi Yis and was about to pledge to them under the belief that their gang
contained every man of note in the United States. We had to get him over to
the house and palm off a lot of our alumni as leading actors and authors,
who had dropped in to dinner, before he was sufficiently impressed to
reason with us. Of course this is not what the English would call "rully
sporting, don't you know!" but in our consciences it was all classified as
revenge. We got the same doses. Pillings, of the Mu Kow Moos, pulled one
of our spikes out in beautiful fashion once by impersonating our landlord.
He rushed up the steps just as a Freshman rushee was starting down all
alone and demanded the rent for six months on the spot, threatening to
throw us out into the street that minute. The Freshman hesitated just long
enough to get his clothes out of the house, and we didn't know for a month
what had frozen his feet.
The Fli Gams weren't so slow, either. They found out once that one of the
men we were just about to land had a great disgust for two of our men.
What did one of their alumni do but happen craftily over our way and
mention in the most casual manner the undying admiration that the boy had
for those two? Of course we sandwiched him between them for a week—
and of course we were pained and grieved when he tossed us into the
discard; but we got even with them the next year. We picked up an eminent
young pugilist, who made his headquarters in the next town, and for a little
consideration and a suit of clothes that was a regular college yell we got
him to hang around the campus for a week. We rushed him terrifically for a
day and then managed to let the Fli Gams get him. They rushed him for a

week in spite of our carefully regulated indignation and then proposed to
him. When he told them that he might consider coming to school—as soon
as he had gone South and had cleaned up a couple of good scraps—they let
out an awful shriek and fumigated the house. They were nice young chaps,
but no judge of a pugilist. They expected to be able to see his hoofs.
Well, it was this way every year all fall. Ding-dong, bing-bang, give and
take, no quarter and pretty nearly everything fair. As I said, it wasn't
considered exactly proper to burn a rival frat house in order to distract the
attention of the occupants while they were entertaining a Freshman, but
otherwise we did pretty nearly what we pleased to each other—only being
careful to do it first. Of course a lot of things are fair in love and war that
would not be considered strictly ethical in a game of croquet. And rushing a
Freshman is as near like love as anything I know of. It isn't that we love the
Freshman so much. When I think of some of the trash we fought over and
lost I have to laugh. But we couldn't bear the idea of losing him. To sit by
and watch another gang win the affections of a young fellow who you know
is designed by Nature for your frat and the football team; to note him
gradually breaking off the desperate chumminess that has grown up
between you in the last forty-eight hours; to think that in another day he
will have on the pledge colors of another fraternity and will be lost to you
forever and ever and ever, and then some—what is losing a mere girl to
some other fellow compared with that? Of course I realize now that, even if
a Freshman does join another frat, you can eventually get chummy with him
again after college days are over if you find him worth crossing the street to
see; and I find myself lending money to Shi Delts and borrowing it from
Delta Whoops just as freely as if they were Eta Bites. But somehow you
don't learn these things in time to save your poor old nerves in college.

Naturally I was somewhat dazzled
Page 147
When I was in school the Alfalfa Delts, the Sigh Whoopsilons and the Chi
Yis were giving us a horrible race. I'm willing to admit it now, though I'd
have fought Jeffries before doing it ten years ago. Each fall was one long
whirlwind. The President of the United States in an office-seekers'
convention would have had a placid time compared with the Freshmen. We
didn't exactly use real axes on each other and we didn't actually tear any
Freshman in two pieces, but we came as near the limit as was comfortable.
No frat was safe for a minute with its guests. If you tried to feed 'em there
was kerosene in the ice cream. If you entertained them some frat with a
better quartet worked outside the house. If you took them out to call the
parlor would fill up with riffraff in no time; and if you took your eye off

your victim for a minute he was gone—some other gang had got him. I
sometimes think some of the crowds knew how to palm Freshmen the way
magicians do, from the way they disappeared.
Even the girls took a hand in it. When I was a Sophomore I was intrusted
with the task of leading a Freshman three blocks down to Browning Hall to
call on one of our solid girls, and before I had gone a block two Senior girls
met us. They were bare acquaintances of mine, being strong Delta Kap.
allies, and they usually managed to see me only after a severe effort; but
this time you'd have thought I was a whole regiment of fiancés. They
literally fell on my neck. It was cruel of me, they declared, to be so
unsociable. There I was, a football hero—I'd just broken my rib on the
scrub team—and every girl in school was dying to tell me how grand it was
to suffer for one's college; and yet I wouldn't so much as hint that I wanted
to come to the sorority parties—and lots more talk of the same kind.
Naturally I was somewhat dazzled and I'd walked about half a block with
the prettiest one before I noticed that the other one was steering Freshie the
other way. I turned around and never even said "Good day" to that girl; but
it was too late. About a dozen Delta Kaps appeared out of the ground and
tried to look surprised as they gathered around that scared little Freshman
and engulfed him. We never saw him again—that is, in his innocent
condition—and the boys wouldn't even trust me with the pledges we were
rushing around for bait the rest of the fall term. Bait? Oh, yes. Sometimes
we'd pledge a man on the quiet and leave him out a week or two, so that
plenty of frats could bid him—made them appreciate his worth, you know,
and got every one well acquainted.
By the time I was a Senior the competition was desperate. We spent the
summers scouring the country for prospects and we spent the first week of
school smuggling our trophies into our houses and pledging them, without
giving the other fellow a look in—that is, we tried to. We came back fairly
strong in my Senior year, with a good bunch of prospects; but the one that
excited us most was a telegram from Snooty Vincent in Chicago. It was
brief and erratic, like Snooty himself, and read as follows:
Freshman named Smith will register from Chicago. Son of old
man Smith, multimillionaire. Kid's a comer. Get him sure!
Snooty.

That was all. One of the half million Smiths of Chicago was coming to
college—age, weight, complexion, habits and time of arrival unknown.
That telegram qualified Snooty for the paresis ward. We didn't even know
what Smith his millionaire father was. The world is full of Smiths who are
pestered by automobile agents. All we knew was the fact that we had to find
him, grab him, sequester him where no meddling Alfalfa Delt or Chi Yi
could find him, and make him fall in love with us inside of forty-eight
hours. Then we could lead him forth, with the colors and his art-nouveau
clothes on, spread the glad news—and there wouldn't have to be any more
rushing that fall. We'd just sit back and take our pick.
We sat back and built brains full of air-castles for about three minutes—and
then got busy. It was matriculation day. There were half a dozen trains to
come yet from Chicago on various roads. We had to meet them all, pick out
the right man by his aura or by the way the porter looked when he tipped
him, and grab him out from under the ravenous foe. The next train was due
in ten minutes and the depot was a mile away. We sent Crawford down. He
was trying for the distance runs anyway.
The rest of us went out to show a couple of classy boys from a big prep
school how to register and find a room, and pick out textbooks; and
incidentally how to distinguish a crowd of magnificent young student
leaders from eleven wrangling bunches of miscellaneous thickheads, who
wouldn't like anything better than to rope in a couple of good men to teach
them the ways of the world. We were succeeding in this to the queen's taste,
having accidentally dropped in on our porch with the pair, when young
Crawford rushed up green with despair and took the rushing committee
inside. He almost cried when he told us. He'd watched the train as carefully
as he could, he said, but he couldn't be everywhere at once; and so a couple
of Mu Kow Moos had got Smith. He knew it because he had heard them
ask what his name was and he had told them Smith. He'd pretty nearly
wrecked his brain trying to think of an excuse to butt in, but they had taken
the boy away and he'd run all the way to the house to see if something
couldn't be done.
Petey Simmons had listened, sitting crosslegged on the windowseat, which
was a habit of his. Petey was a Senior and his deep studies in rhetoric
during his four years in the frat had given him a great power of expression.

He turned to the despairing Crawford and reduced him to a cinder with one
look.
"So you couldn't think of any excuse to butt in!" he remarked slowly, "Say,
Crawford, if you saw a young lady falling through the ice you'd write to her
mother for permission to cheer her up. Which way did they go?"
"They're coming this way," said what was left of Crawford.

He was so bashful that his voice
blushed when he used it
Page 151
Petey grabbed his hat and discharged himself toward the depot. We brought
in those big prep school boys and tried to give them the time of their lives,

but our hearts weren't in it. We were thinking of those Mu Kow Moos—that
frat of all others—blissfully towing home a prize they'd stumbled onto and
didn't know anything about! We thought of those beautifully designed air-
castles we were hoping to move into and we got pumpkins in our throats.
Stung on the first day of school by a bunch that had to wear their pins on
their neckties to keep from being mistaken for a literary society! Oh,
thunder! We went in to dinner all smeared up with gloom. Then the door
opened and Petey came in. He was five feet five, Petey was, but he stooped
when he came under the chandelier. He had a suitcase in one hand and a
stranger in the other.
"Boys," he said, "I want you to meet Mr. Smith, of Chicago."

At first glance you wouldn't have taken Smith for a perambulating national
bank, with a wheelbarrow of spending-money every month. He was well-
enough dressed and all that, but he didn't loom up in any mountainous
fashion as to looks. He was runty and his hair was a kind of discouraged
red. He had freckles, too, and he was so bashful that his voice blushed when
he used it. He didn't have a word to say until dinner, when he said "thank
you" to Sam, the waiter. Altogether he was so meek that he had us worried;
but then, as Allie Bangs said, you can't always tell about these
multimillionaires. Some of them didn't have the nerve of a mouse. He'd
seen millionaires in New York, he said, who were afraid of cab drivers.
"And besides," said Petey, when a few of us were talking it over after
dinner, "I'd never have got him if he hadn't been so meek. I was determined
that no Mu Kow Moo was going to hang anything on us; and when I saw
the three of them coming I waded right in. Allison and Briggs, those two
dumb Juniors, were doing the steering. It was like taking candy from the
baby. I just fell right into them and took about five minutes to tell those two
how glad I was to see them back. I introduced myself to Smith; and—would
you believe it?—he was still carrying his suitcase! I grabbed it and
apologized for not having carried it all the way up from the station. You
should have seen those yaps scowl. They wanted to shred me up, but I never
noticed them again. I pointed out all the sights to Smith and told him his

friends had written me about him. There was so little room on the sidewalk
that I suggested we two walk ahead; and I shoved him right into the middle
of the walk and made Allison and Briggs fall behind. I had a piece of luck
just then. Old Pete and his sawed-off cab came by and I flagged him in a
minute. I shoved Smith in and got in after him. Then I told the two babes
that I could take care of Smith all right and that there was no need of their
walking clear up to the house. After that I shut the door and we came away.
If looks could kill I'd be tuning up my harp this minute. Say, if I didn't have
any more nerve than those two I'd get a permit from the city to live. And all
the time Smith never made a kick. I had him hypnotized. Now I'm going in
and make him jump through a hoop."
We should have been very happy—and we would have been, but just then
Symington came in with some astounding news. The Alfalfa Delts had a
man named Smith, of Chicago, over at their house. He was on the front
porch, with the whole gang around him; and from the looks of things they'd
have him benevolently assimilated before twenty-four hours. Naturally this
created a tremendous lot of emotion around our house. It was a serious
situation. We might have the right Smith and then again we might have a
Smith who would be borrowing money for car fare inside of ten minutes.
We had to find out which Smith it was before we tampered with his young
affections.
Did you ever snuggle up to a young captain of industry and ask him who his
father was and whether he was important enough in the business world to
be indicted by the Government for anything? That was the job we tackled
that night. Smith was meek enough, but somehow even Petey's nerve had its
limits. We approached the subject from every corner of the compass. We led
up to it, we beat around it—and finally we got desperate and led the boy up
to it. But he was too shy to come down with the information. Yes, he lived
in Chicago. Oh, on the North Side. Yes, he guessed the stock market was
stronger. Yes, the Annex was a great hotel. No, he didn't know whether they
were going to put a tower on the Board of Trade or not. Yes, the lake Shore
Drive was dusty in summer.—[Good!]—He wouldn't care to live on it.—
[Bah!]—Altogether he was as unsatisfactory to pump as a well full of dusty
old brickbats. Just then Rawlins, who had been scouting around seeing what
he could run against in the dark of the moon, arrived with the stunning

information that the Chi Yis had a man named Smith, of Oak Park, at their
house and that every corner of the lawn was guarded by picked men!
When we got this news most of us went upstairs and bathed our heads in
cold water. Oak Park sounded even more suspicious than Chicago. It's a
solid mahogany suburb and everybody there is somebody or other. You
have to get initiated into the place just as if it were a secret society, it's so
exclusive. That meant there were three Smiths from Chicago in school. We
had only one Smith. We had a one-in-three shot.
We stuck the colors on the boys from the big prep school just to keep our
hands in and went to bed so nervous that we only slept in patches. Still, two
Chicago Smiths in other frat houses were better than one. It meant that at
least one frat wasn't sure of its man. Maybe neither one was. Our scouts had
reported that, from what they could pick up, neither Smith had it on our
Smith much in looks. That could only mean one thing: there had been a leak
in the telegraph office again. What show has a guileless sixty-five-dollar-a-
month operator against a bunch of crafty young diplomatists? They had
read our telegram and were after the same Smith that we were.
By morning the suspense around the house could have been shoveled out
with a pitchfork. If one of the other frats had the right Smith and knew it,
and had pledged him during the night, there was positively no use in living
any longer. Petey, who had shared his room with our Smith, reported that he
was now like wax in our hands. But that didn't comfort us much. It was too
confoundedly puzzling. Maybe we had the heir to a subtreasury panting to
join us and maybe his freckles were his fortune. All Petey had gouged out
of him during the night was the fact that his father wanted him to come to
Siwash because it was a nice, quiet place. Oh, yes; it was deadly calm!
It couldn't have been more than seven o'clock when the telephone rang.
Petey answered it. A relative of Smith's was at the hotel and had heard the
boy was at our house. Would we please tell him to come right down? Petey
said he would and then rang off. Then he grabbed the 'phone again and
asked Central excitedly why she had cut him off. Central said she hadn't,
but of course she rang the other line again.
"Hello!" said Petey blandly. "This is the Alfalfa Delt house?"

"No; it's the Chi Yi house," was the answer. Petey put the receiver up
contentedly and we all turned handsprings over the library table. Fifty per
cent safe, anyway. The Chi Yis were trying to sort out the Smiths, too.
It was an hour before anything else happened. Then Matheson of the Alfalfa
Delts, a ponderous personage, who wore a silk hat on Sunday and did
instructing, came over and asked if we had a man named Smith with us. He
was to be a pupil of his, he said, and he wanted to arrange his work. Of
course Matheson was hoping to get a green man at the door, but he didn't
have any luck. Bangs himself let him in and let him read two or three
magazines through in the library while we turned some more handsprings—
in the dining room this time. The Alfalfa Delts were fishing, too. It was a
fair field and no favors.
After a while Bangs told Matheson that the man named Smith presented his
compliments and said it was all a mistake. His tutor's name was not
Matheson, but Muttonhead. That sent Matheson away as pleasant as you
please.
All that day we sat around and beat off the enemy and got beaten off
ourselves. Our Smith got a Faculty notice to appear at once and register—
that is, it got as far as the door. We sent it back to the Chi Yi house. We sent
the Alfalfa Delt Smith a telegram from Chicago, reading: "Father ill. Come
at once." That only got as far as a door, too. Some Alfalfa Delt got it and
sent the boy back with the answer: "So careless of father!" Blanchard called
up the fire department and sent it over to the Chi Yi house, hoping to be
able to slip over and cut out Smith in the confusion that followed; but the
game was too old. The Chi Yis had played it themselves the year before and
refused to bite. Meantime we had found a Chi Yi alumnus in the kitchen
trying to sell a book to the cook; and in the proceedings that followed we
discovered that the book had a ten-dollar bill in it. All around, it was an
entertaining but profitless day. By night, there wasn't another idea left in the
three camps. We sat exhausted, each clutching its Smith and glaring at the
other two.
As far as our Smith was concerned we almost wished some one would steal
him. He was about as interesting as a pound of baking powder. What with
fishing for his Bradstreet rating, and inventing lies to keep him from going

out and seeing the town, and watching the horizon for predatory Alfalfa
Delts and Chi Yis, we were plumb worn out. We were so skittish that, when
the bell rang about eight o'clock, we let it ring four times more before we
answered it; and when the ringer claimed to be an Eta Bita Pie from
Muggledorfer who had come over to attend Siwash, we made him repeat
pretty nearly the whole ritual before we would consider his credentials
good.
He got in at last, slightly peevish at our unbrotherly welcome, and took his
place in the library circle. We were explaining the whole situation to him,
when Allie Bangs gave an earnest yell and stood on his head in the corner.
"What did you say your name was?" he asked the visitor after he had been
set right side up again.
"Maxwell, of Fella Kappa chapter," said the latter.
"No, it isn't," said Bangs earnestly. "You ought to know your own name!"
he went on severely. "It's Smith—and you're a barb from the cornfield!
You've come to Siwash to forget how to plow and to-morrow you're going
to organize a Smith Club. Do you hear? Don't let me catch you forgetting
your name now—and listen closely."
It was all as simple as beating a standpat Congressman. Maxwell was a
stranger, of course. He was to pin his Eta Bita Pie pin on his undershirt and
go forth in the morning a brand-new Smith, green and guileless. It was to
occur to him just before chapel that a Smith Club ought to be formed and he
was to post a notice to that effect. He would get a couple of well-known
non-fraternity Smiths interested and have them visit the houses and see the
Chicago Smiths. With all the Smiths in session that night he ought to have
no difficulty in finding out which was the son of old man Smith. He could
be lowdown and vulgar enough to ask right out if he wished. If he found out
he was to cut out that Smith and bring him to our house—if he had to bind
and gag him. If he didn't he was to bring all three—if he could.
There was a quiet and most reassuring tone in Maxwell's voice as he said: "I
can." They evidently had their little troubles at Muggledorfer, too.
"After we get them here," said Bangs earnestly, "we'll just pledge all three.
We'll surely get the right one that way and perhaps the other two will not be

so bad."
Upstairs, Petey Simmons was wearily explaining to our Smith for the ninth
time that Freshmen were not allowed to appear on the campus for the first
three days; and that it was considered good form to keep indoors until the
Sophomore rush; and that there wasn't a room left in town anyway, and he
might as well stay with us a while; and that the police were looking for
college students downtown and locking them up, as they did each fall, to
show their authority. Blanchard relieved him of his task and he came
downstairs mopping his brow. Then we went to work and planned details
until midnight. It was to be the plot of the century and every wheel had to
mesh.
We spent the next day in a cold perspiration. Neither Alfalfa Delt nor Chi Yi
paraded any pledged Freshmen. They were still hunting for the right Smith,
too—evidently. They fell for the Smith Club plan with such suspicious
eagerness that it was plain each bunch had some nasty, low-lived scheme up
its sleeves. We were righteously indignant. It was our game and they ought
not to butt in. But Maxwell only smiled. He was a Napoleon, that boy was.
He just waved us aside. "I'll run this little thing the way we do at
Muggledorfer," he explained. "You fellows can play a few lines of football
pretty well, but when it comes to surrounding a Freshman and making a
Greek out of him, I wouldn't take lessons from old Ulysses himself." And so
we left him alone and held each other's hands and smoked and cussed—and
hoped and hoped and hoped.
Maxwell went after the three Smiths himself that night. He had taken a
room in an out-of-the-way part of town and his plan was to take them over
there after the meeting to discuss the future good of the Smith Club. Then
about a dozen of us would slide gently over there—and a curtain would
have to be drawn over the woe that would ensue for the other gangs.
Meanwhile, all we had to do was to sit around the house and gnaw our
fingers. Maxwell called for our Smith last and he had the other two in tow.
Oh, no; we didn't invite them in. Two Alfalfa Delts and three Chi Yis were
sitting on our porch, visiting us. Three Chi Yis and two Eta Bita Pies were
sitting on the Alfalfa Delt porch. Four Eta Bites and two Alfalfa Delts were
calling on the Chi Yi house. It was a critical moment and none of us was

taking chances. We couldn't keep our Smiths from wandering, but we could
make sure they didn't wander into the wrong place.
Maxwell led his flock of Smiths away and we all sat and talked to each
other in little short bites. The Chi Yis were nervous as rabbits. They looked
at their watches every five minutes. The Alfalfa Delts listened to us with
one ear and swept the other around the gloom. The night was charged with
plots. Innumerable things seemed trembling in the immediate future. When
the visitors excused themselves a little later, and went away very hurriedly,
we learned with pleasure from one of our boys, who had been wandering
around to break in a new pair of shoes or something, that the Smith
meeting, which had been called for the Erosophian Hall, had been attended
by four nondescript and unknown Smiths and fourteen Chi Yis, who had
dropped in casually. First blood for us! Maxwell had evidently succeeded in
segregating his Smiths. We expected a telephone call from his room at any
minute.
We kept on expecting it until midnight and then strolled down that way. The
house was dark. A very mad landlady came down in response to our earnest
request and informed us that the young carouser who had rented her room
had not been there that evening; and that if we were his rowdy friends we
could tell him that he would find his trunk in the alley. Then we went home
and our brains throbbed and gummed up all night long.
We went to chapel the next morning to keep from going insane outright.
The Chi Yis were there looking perfectly sour. The Alfalfa Delts on the
other hand were riotous. Every one of them had a pleasant greeting for us.
They slapped us on the back and asked us how we were coming on in our
rushing. Matheson was particularly vicious. He came over to Bangs and put
his arm around him in a friendly way. "I am going to have dinner with my
pupil to-night," he said triumphantly. "He wants me to come over and get
his trunk. Says he's got a good room now and he's much obliged to you
fellows for your trouble. Have you heard that there's another Smith in
school—son of a big Chicago man? There's some great material here this
fall, don't you think?"
Bangs tripped on Matheson's pet toe and went away. Something horrible
had happened. How we hated those Alfalfa Delts! They had stung us before,

but this was a triple-expansion, double-back-action, high-explosive sting,
with a dum dum point. We hurt all over; and the worst of it was, we hadn't
really been stung yet and didn't know where it was going to hit us. Did you
ever wait perfectly helpless while a large, taciturn wasp with a red-hot tail
was looking you over?
The Alfalfa Delts frolicked up and down college that day, Smithless but
blissful. We consoled ourselves with a couple of corking chaps whom the
Delta Flushes had been cultivating, and put the ribbons on them in record
time. Ordinarily we would have been perfectly happy about this, but instead
we were perfectly miserable. We detailed four men at a time to be gay and
carefree with our pledges; and the rest of us sat around and listened to our
bursting hearts. Of all the all-gone and utterly hopeless feelings, there is
nothing to compare with the one you have when your frat—the pride of the
nation—has just been tossed into the discard by some hollow-headed
Freshman.
I took my head out of my hands just before dinner and went down the street
to keep a rushing engagement. I had to pass the Alfalfa Delt house. It hurt
like barbed wire, but I had to look. I was that miserable that it couldn't have
bothered me much more, anyway, to see that wildly happy bunch. But I
didn't see it. I saw instead a crowd of fellows on the porch who made our
dejection look like disorderly conduct. There was enough gloom there to fit
out a dozen funerals, and then there would have been enough left for a book
of German philosophy. The crowd looked at me and I fancied I heard a
slight gnashing of teeth. I didn't hesitate. I just walked right up to the porch
and said: "Howdedo? Lovely evening!" says I. "How many Smiths have
you pledged to-day?"
The gang turned a dark crimson. Then Matheson got up and came down to
me. He was as safe-looking as somebody else's bull terrier.
"We don't care to hear any more from you," he said, clenching his words;
"and it would be safer for you to get out of here. We're done with your
whole crowd. You're lowdown skates—that's what you are. You're
dishonorable and sneaky. You're cads! We'll get even. I give you warning.
We'll get even if it takes a hundred years."

"Thanks!" says I. "Hope it takes twice as long." Then I went back home and
let my date take care of itself.

We went through dinner in a daze and sat around, that night, like a bunch of
vacant grins on legs. Our grins were vacant because we didn't know why we
were grinning. We'd stung the Alfalfa Delts. We didn't know why or how or
when. But we'd stung them! We had their word for it. Sooner or later
something would turn up in the shape of particulars; only we wished it
would hurry. If it didn't turn up sooner we were extremely likely to burst at
the seams.
It turned up about nine o'clock. There was a commotion at the front door
and Maxwell came in. He was followed by an avalanche of Smiths. There
was our Smith, and a tall, lean Smith, and a Smith who waddled when he
walked. They were all dirty and dusty; they all wore our pink-and-blue
pledge ribbons on their coat lapels and when they got in the house they
gave the Eta Bita Pie yell and sang about half of the songbook. Maxwell
had not only pledged them, but he had educated them.
After we had stopped carrying the bunch about on our shoulders, and had
put the roof of the house back, and had righted the billiard table, and
persuaded the cook to come down out of a tree in the back yard, we allowed
Maxwell to tell his story.
"It was perfectly simple," he said. "Didn't expect to be kidnapped, of
course; but it's all in the day's work. You've no idea what a job I had getting
colors to pin on these chumps. If it hadn't been for my pink garters and a
blue union suit I'd put on yesterday—"
We stopped Maxwell and backed him up to the starting pole again. But he
was no story-teller. He skipped like a cheap gas engine. We had to take the
story away from him piece by piece. He'd dodged his Smiths down a side
street, it seems, on the plea that there weren't any more Smiths coming—
and they might as well go over to his room. All would have been well if one
Smith hadn't got an awful thirst. There was a corner drug store on the way
to the room and while the quartet were insulting their digestions with

raspberry ice-cream soda a college man with a wicked eye came by. A few
minutes later, just as they were crossing the railroad viaduct near Smith's
home, two closed carriages drove up and six husky villains fell upon them,
shouting: "Chi Yi forever!" And after dumping them in the carriages, they
sat on them while the teams went off.
"After I'd got my man's knee out of my neck," said Maxwell, "I didn't seem
to care much whether I was kidnapped or not. It would bind us four closer
together after we escaped; and, besides, I have never found kidnapping to
pay—too much risk. Anyway, they drove us nothing less than twenty miles
and bundled us into an old deserted house. The leader told us, with a whole
lot of unnecessary embroidery, that we were to stay there until we pledged
to Chi Yi if we rotted in our shoes. Then, of course, I saw through the whole
thing. It was an Alfalfa Delt gang disguised as Chi Yis. The Alfalfa Delts
would send another gang out the next day, rout the bogus Chi Yis and allow
the poor Freshies to fall on their necks and pledge up. That used to be
popular at Muggledorfer.
"I did the talking and let my knees knock together considerably. I told them
that we'd been too badly shaken up to think, but if they would let us alone
that night we'd try to learn to love them by morning. So they put us upstairs
and warned us that every window was guarded; then we lay down together
and I began at the first chapter and pumped those chaps full of Eta Bita Pie
all night.

With our colors on and four particularly wicked-looking
chair legs in our hands
Page 167
"It was six o'clock when they finally pledged. When the gang came up they
found us adamant. 'Never!' said I. 'We'll pledge Alfalfa Delt or die martyrs
to a holy cause!' Of course they didn't dare give themselves away. They
couldn't even shout for joy. All they could do was to wait for the rescuing
party. I spent the day teaching the boys the songs and the yell in whispers;
and about three o'clock I got my grand inspiration about the colors and
rigged them out. Then I dug my own pin out and put on my vest and about
four o'clock the rescuing party drove up. Say, you'd have laughed to see that
fight! Ham-actors in Richard the Third would have made it look tame. The
Chi Yis put up a fist or two, threw a brick and then cut for the timber; and
the noble Alfalfa Delts burst open the door just as I got the chorus going on
that grand old song:
"'Oh, you've got to be
an Eta Bita Pie
Or you won't get a
scarehead

when you die!'
"When they saw us there, with our colors on and four particularly wicked-
looking chair legs in our hands, they gave one simultaneous gasp—and say,
boys, I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't see yet how they disappeared so
instantaneously! And anyway, for Heaven's sake, bring out the prog. We
drilled eight miles to a railroad station and my vest buttons are tickling my
backbone."
Just then a telegram arrived.
"Don't look for Smith. Changed his mind and went to Jarhard!
"Snooty."
No wonder we couldn't blast any information out of our Smiths! Oh, they
were our Smiths all right—and they weren't such a bad bunch at that. The
fat one turned out to be the champion mandolin teaser in school and the
lean one made the debating team; while our own particular first edition
Smith won the catch-as-catch-can chess championship of the college three
years later.
Just the same, I'd like to get one fair crack at that Smith who went to
Jarhard. I'd get even for those three days, I'll bet a few!

CHAPTER VII
TAKING PACE FROM FATHER TIME

Honestly, Bill, it's so hard to keep up to date these days, that sometimes I'm
afraid to go to sleep at night for fear I'll find myself in an ethnological
museum when I wake up the next morning, with people making funny
cracks about the strange clothes I was wearing when they caught me.
I'm not constitutionally a back number myself either. I come as near
wearing next year's styles as most fellows, and I had my wrist broken
cranking an automobile before most Americans believed the things would
go. I was tired of this hand-chopped furniture fad years ago, and if you hand
me any slang that I can't catch on the fly you'll have to make it up right
now. But there's no use talking. No one man can keep up with this world all
by himself. Sometimes I get to thinking I'm so far ahead that I can afford to
sit down and get a breath or two, and when I get up I have to eat dust for the
next year trying to catch up.
Take colleges, for instance. I've been conceited enough to think that these
flappy little college boys, with their front hair brushed back down on their
necks, couldn't show me anything that I wasn't tired of. I've kept up to date
on college things, I've always flattered myself. You might lose me now and
then on some new way of abusing lettuce during a salad course, perhaps,
but as far as looking startled at anything that might be said or done around a
college campus goes, I've had a notion that I wasn't in the learning class—
which shows how much I knew about it. This morning a gosling from the
old school—a Sophomore—came in and visited with me for a few minutes,
on the strength of the fact that he knew my baby brother in high school. We
hadn't talked a minute before he handed me "pragmatism" and "zing-
slingers." While I was rolling my eyes and clawing for a foothold he
confessed that he was the best glider in college. When I remarked that I had
been somewhat of a glider myself, but that I had preferred the twostep, he
laughed and explained that he was captain of the aviation team—that they

had three gliders and were finishing a monoplane that had a home-made
engine with concentric cylinders.
Can you beat it? There I was, Petey Simmons' best friend, and personally
acquainted with eleven thousand forms of college excitement, listening to
an infant with my mouth open and stopping him every few words to say
"land sakes," "dew tell" and "what d'ye mean by that?" I never was so
humiliated in my life, but there's no getting around the truth. I've been ten
years out of college, and when I go back they'll pull the grandfather clause
on me and wheel me in early nights. I'm a back number and I know the
symptoms. When that young Sophomore told me the boys of Eta Bita Pie
had just spent twenty dollars apiece on a formal dance and house party, I
put up the same kind of a lecture to him that my father gave me when I
explained that we simply had to spend five dollars apiece on our party, or
belong in the fag end of things. And I suppose when my father's crowd blew
in a couple of dollars for a load of wood, his father reminded him that when
HE went to college they didn't coddle themselves with fires in their
dormitories. And I suppose that some day this Sophomore will be telling his
son that when he was in college a simple little home-made aeroplane
furnished amusement for twenty fellows, and that they never dreamed of
dropping over to the coast on Saturdays for a dip in the surf in their private
monoplanes. Oh, well, it's human nature and natural law, I suppose. No use
trying to put a rock on the wheels of progress—and there's no use trying to
ride the darned thing either. It'll throw you every time.
When I went to college, Billy—loud pedal on that "I"—things were
different. We didn't spend our time fooling with gliders or blow ourselves
up monkeying with pragmatism. We attended strictly to business. We were
there for educational purposes and we had no time to chase humming birds
and chicken hawks. Why, the gasoline money of a young collegian to-day
would have paid my board bills then! We didn't go to Japan on baseball
tours, or lug telescopes around South America when we ought to have been
studying ethics. We lived simply and plainly. There wasn't an automatic
piano in a single frat house when I was in college, and as for wasting our
money on motion-picture shows and taxi-cabs—nonsense. We'd have died
first.

You see I'm getting into practice. Some day I'll have a son, I hope, and he'll
go back to Siwash. Just wait till he comes home at the end of the first
semester and tries to put across any bills for radium stickpins and
lookophonic conversations with the co-eds at Kiowa. I'll pull a When-I-
was-at-Siwash lecture on him that will make him feel like a spider on a hot
stove. If I've got to be a back number I want to romp right back far enough
to have some fun out of it. I'll make him sweat as much lugging me up to
date as I had to perspire in the old days to illuminate things for Pa.
After all, there is no question at college more serious than the Pa question,
anyway, Bill. It was always butting into our youthful ambitions and tying
pig iron to our coat-tails when we wanted to soar. It's simply marvelous
how hard it is to educate a Pa a hundred miles or more away into the
supreme importance of certain college necessities. It isn't because they
forget, either. It's because they don't realize that the world is roaring along.
I can see it all since this morning. Take my father, for instance. There was
no more generous or liberal a Pa up to a certain point. He wanted me to
have a comfortable room and vast quantities of good food, and he was glad
to pay literary society dues, and he would stand for frat dues; but when it
came to paying cab hire, you could jam an appropriation for a post-office in
an enemy's district past Joe Cannon in Congress more easily than you could
put a carriage bill through him. He just said "no" in nine languages; said
that when he went to Siwash—"and it turned out good men then, too, young
fellow"—the girls were glad to walk to entertainments through the mud;
and when it was unusually muddy they weren't averse to being carried a
short distance. I believe I would have had to lead disgusted co-eds to parties
on foot through my whole college course if I hadn't happened across an old
college picture of father in a two-gallon plug hat. That gave me an idea. I
put in a bill for a plug hat twice a year and he paid it without a murmur.
Then I paid my carriage bills with the money. Plug hats had been the
peculiar form of insanity prevalent at Siwash in his day and he thought they
were still part of the course of study.
I got along much easier than many of the boys, too. Allie Bangs' Pa made
him buy all his clothes at home, for fear he'd get to looking like some of the
cartoons he'd seen in the funny papers. "Prince" Hogboom was a wonder of
a fullback, and his favorite amusement was to get out at night and try to pull

gas lamps up by the roots. He was a natural born holy terror, but his father
thought he was fitted by nature to be a missionary, and so Hoggie had to
harness himself up in meek and long-suffering clothes and attend Bible-
study class twice a week. The crimes he committed by way of relieving
himself after each class were shocking. Then there was Petey Simmons,
who was a perpetual sunbeam and greatly beloved because it was so easy to
catch happiness from him. And yet Petey went through school with a cloud
over his young life, in the shape of a Pa who gave him a thousand dollars a
year for expenses and wouldn't allow a single cent of it to be spent for
frivolity. And he had a blanket definition for frivolity that covered
everything from dancing parties to pie at an all-night lunch counter. By hard
work Petey could spend about four hundred dollars on necessary expenses,
and that left him six hundred dollars a year to blow in on illuminated
manuscripts, student lamps, debating club dues and prints of the old
masters. He had to borrow money from us all through the year, and then
hold a great auction of his art trophies and student lamps, before vacation
came, in order to pay us back.
But all of these troubles weren't even annoyances beside what Keg Rearick
had to endure. Keg was an affectionate contraction of his real nickname
—"Keghead." He had the worst case of "Pa" I ever heard of. He was a
regular high explosive—one of these fine, old, hair-triggered gentlemen,
who consider that they have done all the thinking that the world needs and
refuse to have any of their ideas altered or edited in any particular. Keg had
had his life laid out for him since the day of his birth, and when he left for
Siwash—on the precise day announced by his father eighteen years before
—the old man stood him up and discoursed with him as follows:
"My son, I am about to give you the finest education obtainable. You are to
go down to Siwash and learn how to be a credit to me. Let me impress it on
you that that is your only duty. You will meet there companions who will
try to persuade you that there are other things to be done in college besides
becoming a scholar. You will pay no attention to them. You are to spend
your time at your books. You are to lead your class in Latin and Greek.
Mathematics I am not so particular about. You are to waste no time on
athletics and other modern curses of college. I shall pay your expenses and I
shall come down occasionally to see how you are progressing. And you
know me well enough to know that if I find you deviating from the course I

have laid out in any particular, you will return home and go into the store at
six dollars a week."
That's the way Keg always repeated it to us. With that affectionate farewell
ringing in his ears he came on down to Jonesville; and when the Eta Bita
Pies saw his honest features and his particularly likable smile, they
surrounded and assimilated him in something less than fifteen minutes by
the clock. And then his troubles began. Keg's father had come down the
week before school and had selected a quiet place about three miles from
the college—out beyond the cemetery in a nice lonely neighborhood, where
there was just about enough company to keep the telephone poles from
getting despondent. Moreover, he hadn't given Keg any spending money.
"Education is the cheapest thing in the world," he roared. "You don't have to
keep your pockets full of dollars to live in the times of Homer and Horace.
I've told them to let you have what you need at the bookstore. For the rest,
the college library should be your haunt and the debating society your
recreation." If ever any one was getting knowledge put down his throat with
a hydraulic ram, it certainly was Keg Rearick.
It isn't hard to imagine the result. Keg toiled away three miles from
anything interesting and got bluer and gloomier and more anarchistic every
day. Wouldn't have been so bad if nobody had loved him. Lots of fellows go
through college with no particular friends and emerge in good health and
spirits. But we had courted Keg and had tried to make it impossible for him
to live without us. We liked him and we hankered for his company. We
wanted to parade him around the campus and confer him upon the prettiest
co-ed in his boarding hall, and teach him to sing a great variety of
interesting songs, with no particular sense to them, and snatch off two or
three important offices around school. Instead of that he only got to say
"howdy" to us between classes, and the rest of his time he spent Edward
Payson Westoning back and forth from his suburban lair, without a cent in
his pockets and the street-car motor-men giving him the bell to get off of
the track into the mud every other block.
We very soon found this wasn't going to do. Keg's spirits were down about
two notches below the absolute zero. If this was college life, he said, would
somebody kindly take a pair of forceps and remove it. It ached. The upshot

was we made Keg steward of the frat-house table, which paid his board and
room and moved him into the chapter house. He objected at first, because of
what his father would say when he heard of it. But he finally concluded that
anything he might say would be pleasanter than going all day without
hearing anything, so he surrendered and came along.
The first night at dinner, when we pushed back our chairs and sang a few
lines by way of getting ready to go upstairs and chink a little assorted
learning into our headpieces, Keg cried for pure joy. He buckled down to
work the way a dog takes hold of a root, and inside of a week he couldn't
remember a time in his young existence when he had been unhappy. He was
tossing out Greek declensions to the prof. like a geyser, and Conny
Matthews, our champion Livy unraveler, had shown him how to hold a
Latin verb in his teeth while he broke open the rest of the sentence. And,
besides that, we had introduced him to all the nicest girls in the college and
had assisted the glee club coach to discover that he had a fine tenor voice.
He was a sure-enough find, and fitted into college life as if it had been
made to measure for him.
Of course all this pleasantness had to have a gloom spot in it somewhere.
Rearick's father furnished the gloom. He was certainly the most
rambunctious, most unreconstructed and most egregious Pa that ever tried
to turn the sunshine off of a bright young college career. Regularly once a
week a letter would come to Keg from him. It always began "When I was in
college," and it always wound up by ordering Keg to eat a few assorted
lemons for the good of his future. He was to go to morning prayer, regularly
—there hadn't been any for twenty years. He was to become as well
acquainted as possible with his professors, because of the inspiration it
would give him—fancy snuggling up to old Grubb. He was to take a
Sunday-school class at once. He was to remember above all things that
though it was a disgrace to waste a minute of the precious college years it
was equally a disgrace to go through college without being self-supporting.
He should by all means learn to milk at once. He, Keg's father, had been
valet to a couple of very fine Holstein cows while he was in college, and he
attributed much of his success to this fact. He would of course pay Keg's
expenses while he had to, but he would hold it to his discredit. He must at
once begin to find work.

This last command impressed Keg deeply, for he had been sailing along
with us without a cent. He'd been earning his board and room, of course, but
that was already paid for for a month out on the edge of the planet; and as it
was the first time the family that owned the house had ever got a student
boarder they firmly declined to rebate. It's pretty hard to butterfly joyously
along with the fancy-vest gang without any other assets than unlimited
credit at the bookstore, so Keg began to prowl for a job. Presently he picked
up a laundry route. The laundry wagon was a favorite vehicle on which to
ride to fame and knowledge in those days. By getting up early two
mornings a week and working late nights, Keg managed to put away about
six dollars and forty-five cents a week, providing every one paid his laundry
bill. He was so pleased and tickled over the idea that he wrote to his father
at once explaining that he now had plenty of work, but had had to move
downtown in order to do it.
Did this please old pain-in-the-face? Not noticeably. There had been no
such things as laundry wagons in his day. Students were lucky if they had a
shirt to wear and one to have washed at the same time. He wrote a letter
back to Keg that bit him in every paragraph. He was to give up the frivolous
laundry job and get some wood to saw. That and tending cows were the
only real methods of toiling through college. He, Keg's father, had received
his board and room for milking cows and doing chores, and he had
sometimes earned as much as three dollars a week after school hours and
before breakfast sawing cordwood at seventy-five cents a cord. It was
healthful and classic. He would send his old saw by express. And he was
further to remember—there were about four more pages to memorize, a
headache in every page.
Good old Keg did his best to be obedient, but he had no chance. In the first
place, cordwood was phenomenally scarce in Jonesville, and anyway,
people had a vicious habit of hindering the cause of education by sawing it
at the wood-yards with a steam saw. There were plenty of cows in the
outskirts, but they were either well provided with companions for their
leisure hours, or their owners declined to allow Keg to practice on them—
he knowing about as much about a cow as he did about a locomotive. And
so he dawdled on with us at the chapter house, gulping down Livy, getting a
strangle hold on Homer, and pulling in six or seven dollars a week at his
frivolous laundry job, some of which cash he was saving up for a dress suit.

And then, one day, Pa Rearick blew in for another visit and caught his son
playing a mandolin in our lounging room—far, far from the nearest cyclone
cellar.
To judge from the conversation that followed—we couldn't help hearing it,
although we went out-of-doors at once—one might have thought that Keg
had been caught in a gilded den of sin, playing poker with body-snatchers.
Pa Rearick simply cut loose and bombarded the neighborhood with red-hot
adjectives. That he should have brought up a son to do him honor and
should have found him dawdling his college moments away with loafers;
fawning on the idle sons of the rich; tinkling a mandolin instead of walking
with Homer; wasting time and money instead of trying to earn his way to
success—"Bah," likewise "Faugh," to say nothing of other picturesque
expressions of entire disgust—from all of which one would judge almost
without effort that Keg was in bad, and in all over.
I suppose Keg attempted to explain. Possibly some people try to argue with
a funnel-shaped cloud while it is juggling the house and the barn and the
piano. Anyway the explanations weren't audible. Presently Pa Rearick
announced, for most of the world to hear, that he was going to take his idle,
worthless, disgraced and unspeakable nincompoop of a son back to his
home and set him to weighing out dried apples for the rest of his life. Then
up rose Keg and spoke quite clearly and distinctly as follows:
"No, you're not, Dad."
"Wh-wh-wh-whowhowwy not!" said Pa Rearick, with perfect self-
possession but some difficulty.
"Because I like this college and I'm going to stay here," said Keg. "I'm
standing well in my studies and I'm learning a lot all around."
"All I have to say is this," said Pa Rearick. I really haven't time to repeat all
of those few words, but the ukase, when it was completely out, was the
following: Keg was to have a chance to ride home in the cars if he packed
up within ten minutes. After that he could walk home or dance home or play
his way home with his mandolin. And he was given to understand that,
when he finally arrived, the nearest substitute to a fatted calf that would be

prepared for dinner would be a plate of cold beans in the kitchen with the
hired man.
"You may stay here and dawdle with your worthless companions if you
desire," shouted Pa Rearick to a man in an adjoining county. "The lesson
may be a good one for you. I wash my hands of the whole matter. But
understand. Don't write to me for a cent. Not one cent. You've made your
bed. Now lie on it."
With which he went away, and we tiptoed carefully in to rearrange the
shattered atmosphere and comfort Keg. We found him looking thoughtfully
at nothing, with his hands deep in his pockets, from which about six dollars
and seventy-five cents' worth of jingle sounded now and then. We waited
patiently for him to speak. At last he turned on us and grinned pensively.
"Do you know, boys," he said, "as a bed-maker I can beat the owner of that
prehistoric old corn-husk mattress out in the suburbs with one hand tied
behind me."

Of course it is a sad thing to be regarded with indignation and disgust by
one's only paternal parent, but Keg bore up under it pretty manfully. He dug
into his work harder than ever—and he was a good student. Latin words
stuck to him like sandburrs. That wasn't his fault, of course. Some men are
born with a natural magnetism for Latin words; and others, like myself,
have to look up quoque as many as nine times in a page of Mr. Horace's
celebrated metrical salve-slinging. Keg went into a literary society, too, and
developed such an unholy genius at wadding up the other fellow's words
and feeding them back to him that he made the Kiowa debate in his
Freshman year. He also chased locals for the college paper, made his class
football team, got on the track squad and won the Freshman essay prize. In
fact, he killed it all year long and likewise he trained all year long with his
idle and vicious companions—meaning us.
It beats all how much benefit you can get from training with idle and
vicious companions, if you are built that way. Of course we taught him how
to play a mandolin, and how to twostep on his own feet exclusively, and

how to roll a cigarette without carpeting the floor with tobacco, and how to
make a pretty girl wonder if she is as beautiful as all that, without really
saying it himself, and dozens of other pretty and harmless little tricks. But
that wasn't half he picked up while he was loafing away the golden hours of
his college course in our chapter house. Conny Matthews, whose hobby was
Latin verse, plugged him up to sending in translated sonnets from Horace
for Freshman themes. Noddy Pierce showed him how to grab the weak
point in the other fellow's debate and hang on to it through the rebuttal,
while the enemy floundered and struggled and splattered disjointed
premises all over the hall. Allie Bangs had a bug on fencing, and because he
and Keg used to tip over everything in the basement trying to skewer each
other, they got to reading up on old French customs of producing artistic
conversations and deaths and other things, and eventually they wrote one of
those "Ha" and "Zounds" plays for the Dramatic Club. In fact, there's no
limit to what you can absorb from idle and vicious companions. In one term
alone I myself picked up banjo playing, pole vaulting, a little Spanish, a bad
case of mumps, and two flunks, simply by associating with the Eta Bita Pie
gang twenty-seven hours a day.
But nobody had to show Keg how to get jobs after his first experience. He
had a knack of scenting a soft financial snap a mile away to leeward, and
working his way through college was the least of his troubles. It used to
make me tired to see the nonchalance with which he would sleuth up to a
nice fat thing like a baseball season program, and put away a couple of
hundred with a single turn of the wrist and about four days' hard soliciting
among the long-suffering Jonesville merchants. I never could do it myself. I
had the popular desire to work my way through school when I entered
Siwash, and I pictured myself at the end of my college career receiving my
diploma in my toil-scarred fist, without having had a cent from home. But
pshaw! I was a joke. I mowed one lawn in my Freshman year, after hunting
for work for three weeks; and I lost that engagement because the family
decided the hired girl could do it better. After that I gave up and took my
checks from home like a little man. In Siwash it is all right to get sent
through school, and nobody looks down on you for it. The boys who make
their own way are very kind and never taunt you if you have to lean on Pa.
But all the same, you feel a little bit disgraced. Why, I've seen a cotillon
leader run all the way home from a downtown store where he clerked after

school hours, in order to get into his society harness on time; and when the
winner of the Interstate Oratorical in my Freshman year had received his
laurel wreath and three times three times three times three from the crazy
student body, he excused himself and went off to the house where he lived,
to fill up the hard-coal heater and pump the water for the next day's
washing.
As I started to say, some time ago, Keg proved to be a positive genius in
nailing down jobs. He hadn't been with us three months until he had
presented his laundry route to one of the boys. He didn't have time to attend
to it. He had hauled down a chapel monitorship that paid his tuition. He got
his board and room from us for being steward, and how he ever got the
fancy eats he gave us out of four dollars per week per appetite is an
unsolved wonder. He made twenty-five dollars in one week by introducing
a new brand of canned beans among the hash clubs. He took orders for
bookbinding on Saturdays, and sold advertising programs for the college
functions after school hours. More than once I borrowed ten dollars from
him that year, while I was living on hope and meeting the mailman half-
way down the block each morning just before the first of the month. And I
wasn't the only man who did it, either.
Perhaps you wonder how he had time to do all this and to mix up in all the
various departments of student bumptiousness, besides absorbing enough
information laid down and prescribed by the curriculum to batter an "A" out
of old Grubb, who hated to give a top mark worse than most men hate to
take quinine. That's one of the mysteries of college life. No one has time to
do anything but the busy man. In every school there are a few hundred
joyous loafers who hold down an office or two, and make one team, and
then have only time to take a few hasty peeps at a book while running for
chapel; and there are a dozen men who do the debating and the heavy
thinking for half a dozen societies, and make some athletic team, and get
their lessons and make their own living on the side—and who always have
time, somehow, to pick up some new and pleasant pastime, like reading up
for an oration on John Randolph, of Roanoke, or some other eminent has-
been. When I think of my wasted years in college and of how I was always
going to take hold of Psych. and Polykon and Advanced German, and shake
them as a terrier does a rat, just as soon as I had finished about three more
hands of whist—oh, well, there's no use of crying about it now. What makes

me the maddest is that my wife says I'm an imposingly poor whist player at
that.
Keg went home with one of us for the semester holidays. And at
commencement time he wrote an affectionate letter home to his volcanic
old sire, and told him that he was going to stride forth into the
unappreciative world and yank a living away from it that summer. That was
the great ambition of almost every Siwash boy. When we weren't thinking
of girls and exams in the blissful spring days, we were stalking some
summer job to its lair and sitting down to wait for it. There wasn't anything
that a Siwash boy wouldn't tackle in the summer vacation. The farmer boys
had a cinch, of course. They were skilled laborers; and, besides, they came
back in the fall in perfect condition for the football squad. Some of the town
boys became street-car conductors. The new railroad that was built into
Jonesville about that time was a bonanza for us. It was no uncommon thing,
the summer of my Sophomore year, to find a dozen muddy society leaders
shoveling dirt in a construction crew and singing that grand old hymn
composed by Petey Simmons, which ran as follows:
I've a blister on me
heel, and me
beak's begun to
peel;
I've an ache for
every bone
that's in me
back.
I've a feeling I could
eat rubber hose
and call it
sweet,
And me hands is
warped from
lugging bits
of track.
Oh, me closes they are
tore, and me

shoulders they
are sore,
And I sometimes
wish that I
had died a
'borning';
And me eye is full of
dirt, and there's
gravel in me
shirt,
But I'm going back
to Siwash in
the mor-r-r-
r-r-r-r-rning.
One of our own boys is a division superintendent on one of the big western
roads to-day, and he caught the railroad microbe in the shovel gang.
The boys got newspaper positions and clerked in the stores, and one or two
of them tooted cornets or other disturbances at summer-resort hotels. One
junior, during my time, aroused the envy of the whole college by painting
the steeple of the First Baptist Church during vacation; and when he
finished the job his class numerals were painted in big letters on top of the
ornamental knob that tipped the spire. At least, so he announced, and no
rival class had the nerve to investigate.
But the most popular road to prosperity during the summer was the
canvassing route. About the last of April various smooth young college
chaps from other schools would drift into Siwash and begin to sign up
agents for the summer. There were three favorite lines—books, stereopticon
slides and a patent combination desk, blackboard, sewing-table, snow-
shovel, trundle-bed and ironing-board—which was sold in vast numbers at
that time by students all over the country. All through May the agents fished
for victims. They signed them up with contracts guaranteeing them back-
breaking profits, and then instructed them with great care in a variety of
speeches. Speech No. 1, introductory. Speech No. 2, to women. Speech No.
3, clinching talk for waverers. Speech No. 4, to parents. Speech No. 5,
rebuttal to argument that victim already has enough reading matter. Speech

No. 6, general appeal to patriotism and love of progress. Then on
Commencement day the hopeful young collegians would go forth to argue
with the calm and unresponsive farmer's wife and sell her something that
she had never needed and had never wanted, until hypnotized by the classic
eloquence of a bright-eyed young man with his foot in the crack of the half-
opened door.
I chose the book game one summer, and went out with about thirty others.
Twenty-five of them quit at the end of the first week. That was about the
usual proportion—but the rest of us stuck. I devastated a swath of territory
fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. I talked, argued, persuaded,
plead, threatened and mesmerized. I sold books to men on twine binders, to
women with their hands in the bread dough, and once, after a farmer had
come grudgingly out to rescue me from his dog, I sold a book to him from a
tree. I worked two months, tramped four hundred miles, told the same story
of impassioned praise for and confidence in my book eleven hundred times,
and sold sixty-five volumes at a gross profit of seventy-nine dollars—my
expenses being eighty dollars even. But it was worth the effort. I was a shy
young thing at the beginning of the summer, who believed that strangers
would invariably bite when spoken to. When school began I was a tanned
pirate who believed the world belonged to him who could grab it, and who
would have walked up to a duke and sold him a book on practical farming
with as much assurance as if it were a subpœna I was serving.
Keg went out with the desk crowd, and it was evident from the first minute
that he was going to return a plutocrat. He sold a desk to the train brakeman
on his way to his field, and another to a kind old gentleman who
incautiously got into conversation with him. He raged through four counties
like a plague, selling desks in farmhouses, public libraries, harness stores,
banks and old folks' homes. He was the season's sensation and won a prize
every month from the proud and happy company. When he had finished
collecting he took a hasty run to Denver on a sight-seeing trip, and came
back to Siwash that fall in a parlor car, with something over four hundred
dollars in his jeans.
Naturally we would have ceased worrying about the probability of keeping
Keg with us then if we had not done so long before. As a matter of fact, he
was more prosperous than any of us. He had made his own money and he

drew his own checks when he pleased, instead of taking them the first of the
month wrapped up in a cayenne coating composed of parental remarks on
extravagance and laziness. He gave away all of his little jobs to the rest of
us first thing, and said he was content with what he had; but, pshaw!—when
a man has the gift he can't dodge prosperity. Keg had to manage the college
paper that year because no one else could do it quite so well; and it netted
him about fifty dollars a month. When the glee-club manager got cold feet
over the poor prospects, Keg backed a trip himself—and I hate to say how
much he cleared from it. That was the first year we swept the West with our
famous football team of trained mastodons; and at the earnest solicitation of
about a dozen daily papers here and there, Keg dashed off something like
one hundred yards of football dope at five dollars a column—sort of a
literary hundred-yard dash. He used to write it between bites at the dinner
table. And then to top off everything, his precious desk company came
along and stole him from us early in April. It considered him too valuable a
man to tramp the country selling desks, while there were other young
collegians who only needed the touch of a magic tongue to get them into
the great calling. So Keg made a tour of Kiowa and Muggledorfer and
Hambletonian and Ogallala colleges, lining up canvassers at a net profit of
something like fifty dollars per head—full or empty. When he blew in at the
end of the year to spend Commencement week with us he was nothing short
of an amateur Crœsus. He bulged with wealth. I remember yet the awe with
which the rest of us, hoarding our last nickels at the end of the long and
billful year, took a peep at the balance in his checkbook and touched him
humbly for advances, great and small.
Keg had gone out the second evening of Commencement week to bring a
little pleasure into the barren life of a girl who hadn't been shown any
attention by any one for upward of four hours. The rest of the boys were
also away scattering seeds of kindness in a similar manner, and so I was
alone when Pa Rearick stumped up the walk to the chapter-house porch and
glared at me.
"I want to see my boy," he said, out of the corner of his beard. He seemed to
suspect that I had made him into a meat pie or otherwise done away with
him.

"He's out," I said, not very scared; "but if you want to wait for him, won't
you make yourself quite at home?"
He took a seat on the porch without a word. I went on smoking a cigarette
in my most abandoned style and saying all I had to say, which was nothing.
After a while Pa Rearick glared over at me again in a most belligerent
manner.
"Is he well?" he asked.
"Finer'n silk," I answered, most disrespectfully.
"Humph!" said he; which, being freely translated, seemed to mean: "If I had
an impudent, lazy, immoral, shiftless, unlicked cub like you, I'd grind him
up for hen feed."
Much more silence. I lit another cigarette.
"Does he get enough to eat?"
"When he has time," I said. "He's generally pretty busy."
"Playing the mandolin, I suppose."
"Most of the time," said I. "He runs the college in his odd moments."
"He wouldn't have run the Siwash I went to," said Pa Rearick grimly.
"No," said I, "you egregious timber-head, he'd have spent his time limping
after Homer." But as I said it only to myself, no one was insulted.
"Has he learned anything?" said old Hostilities, after some more silence.
"Took the Sophomore Greek prize this year," I said, blowing one of the
most perfect smoke rings I had ever achieved.
"I don't believe it," said Pa Rearick deliberately.
I blew another ring that was very fair, but it lacked the perfect double whirl
of the first one. And presently the neatest spider phaeton that was owned by
a Jonesville livery stable drew up before the house and Keg jumped out,
telling a delicious chiffon vision to hold old Bucephalus until he got his

topcoat. Keg was a good dresser, but I never saw him quite as letter-perfect
and wholly immaculate as he was just then. He hurried up the steps, took
one look, and yelled "Dad," then made a rush; and I went inside to see if I
couldn't beat that smoke ring where there was not so much atmospheric
disturbance.

Pa Rearick stayed the rest of the week, and after he had interviewed certain
professors the next day he moved over to the house and stayed with us.
Mrs. Rearick came down, too, and on this account we didn't see quite as
much of Keg as we had hoped to. The girl in chiffon didn't, either, but that's
neither here nor there. She was only a passing fancy, anyway. By successive
degrees Keg's father viewed the rest of us with disapproval, suspicion,
tolerance, benevolence, interest and friendliness. But I am convinced that it
was only on Keg's account. He gave us credit for exercising unexpected
good taste in liking him. And maybe it wasn't interesting to see him thaw
and melt and struggle with a stiff, wintry smile, as a young man does with
his first mustache, and finally give himself up unreservedly to fatherly
pride. When a father has religiously put away these things all his life for
fear of spoiling a son, and finally finds that that son is unspoilable, even by
friendliness and parental tenderness, he has a lot of pleasure to indulge
himself in during his remaining years.
It was like the old fire-eater to call us together before he went and punished
himself. I suppose it was his sense of justice which was too keen for any
good use. "I've misjudged my son," he said to us; "and I want to make
public admission of it. I am perhaps a little out of date—a little old-
fashioned. The world didn't move so fast when I was a boy here. When I
was in school we saved our money and studied. My son tells me he can't
afford to save money—that time is too precious. I don't pretend to
understand all your ways, but he seems to think you have been good to him
and I want to thank you for it. My son has made his way alone these two
years. I threw him out to support himself. When I casually mentioned
yesterday that times were very hard in the business just now, he wanted to
put five hundred dollars into it. I want you to know I'm proud of him. I hope

you young gentlemen will feel free to stop and visit us when you come
through our town. I must say, times seem to have changed."
Right he was. Times have changed. And here I have been dunderheading
along in just his way, imagining that I was pacing them, instead of sitting on
the fence and watching them go by. If I can find that little Sophomore who
insulted me this morning, I'm going to make him come to dinner and tell me
some more about the way they do things this afternoon. As for to-morrow—
what does he or any one else know about it?

CHAPTER VIII
FRAPPÉD FOOTBALL

As a rule there is only about one thing to mar the joy of college days and
nights and early mornings. That is the Faculty. Honestly, I used to sit up
until long after bedtime every little while trying to figure out some real
reason for a college Faculty. They interfere so. They are so inappropriate.
Moreover, they are so confoundedly ignorant of college life.
How a professor can go through an assorted collection of brain stufferies,
get so many college degrees that his name looks like Halley's Comet with
an alphabet tail, and then teach college students for forty years without even
taking one of them apart to find out what he is made of, beats my time!
That's a college professor for you, right through. He thinks of a college
student only as something to teach—whereas, of all the nineteen hundred
and eighty-seven things a college student is, that is about the least important
to his notion. A boy might be a cipher message on an early Assyrian brick
and stand a far better chance of being understood by his professor.
A college Faculty is a collection of brains tied together by a firm resolve—
said resolve being to find out what miscreant put plaster of Paris in the
keyhole of the president's door. It is a wet blanket on a joyous life; it is a
sort of penance provided by Providence to make a college boy forget that
he's glad he's alive. It's a hypodermic syringe through which the student is
supposed to get wisdom. It takes the place of conscience after you've been
destroying college property. When I sum it all up it seems to me that a
college Faculty is a dark, rainy cloud in the middle of a beautiful May
morning—at least that's the way the Faculty looked to me when I was a
humble seeker after the truth in Siwash College.
The Faculty was to boys in Siwash what indigestion is to a jolly good
fellow in the restaurant district. It was always either among us or getting
ready to land on us. Our Faculty had thirty-two profs and thirty-three pairs
of spectacles. It also had two good average heads of hair and considerable

whiskers. It could figure out a perihelion or a Latin bill-of-fare in a minute,
but you ought to hear it stutter when it tried to map out the daily relaxations
of a college full of husky young hurricanes, who had come to school to
learn what life looks like from the inside. Fairy tales in the German and tea
and wafers with quotations looked like a jolly good time to the Faculty; and
it couldn't understand why some of us liked to put gunpowder in the tea.
Now don't understand me to say that there isn't anything good about a
college professor. Bless you, no! There's a lot of it. A Faculty is a lot of
college profs in a state of inflammation, but individually most of the Siwash
profs were nearly human at times. I look back at some of them now with
awe. They really knew a lot. They knew so much that most of them are
there yet; and I go back and look at them with a good deal more respect
than I used to have. I'll tell you it fills a chap with awe to see a man
teaching along for twenty years at eighteen hundred dollars per, and raising
children, and buying books, and going off to Europe now and then on that
princely sum—and coming through it all happy and content with life. I go
around them nowadays with my hat off and try to persuade them that if it
wasn't for my sprained arm I could quote Latin almost as well as the stone
dog in front of Prexy's house.
And some of them are bully good fellows, too. Nowadays they take me into
their studies at Commencement and give me good cigars, making sure first
that there are no undergraduates around. Why, one of the profs I worried the
most, when I was a cross between a Sophomore and a spotted hyena, is as
glad to see me nowadays as though I owed him money. He runs a little
automobile, and I hope I may get laid out in the subway if I haven't heard
him cuss in real United States when the clutch slipped. And he was the chap
who used to pick out the passages in Livy that had inflammatory
rheumatism and make me recite on them, and who always told me that a
student who smoked cigarettes would be making a wise business move if he
brought his hat to recitation and left the less important part of his head at
home.
But, as I was saying, the Faculty at Siwash, like all other Faculties, didn't
know its place. It wasn't satisfied with teaching us Greek and Latin and
Evidences of Christianity and tall-brow twaddle of all sorts. It had to butt
into our athletics and regulate them. Did you ever see a farmer regulate a

weed patch with a hoe? You know how unhealthy it is for the weeds. Well,
that was the way the Faculty regulated our athletics. It didn't believe in
athletics anyway. They were too interesting. They might not have been
sinful, but they were not literary and they were uneconomic. Of course all
the professors admitted that good outdoor exercise was healthy for college
boys, but most of them believed that you ought to get it in the college
library out of Nature books. And so the way they went at the real athletics,
to keep them pure and healthful, almost drove us into the violent ward.
Those were the days at Siwash when our football team could start out for a
pleasant stroll through any teams in our section and wonder after it had
passed the goal line, why those undersized fellows had been jogging their
elbows all the way down the field. That was the kind of a team we built up
every fall; and it wasn't half so much trouble to keep other teams from
beating it as it was to keep the Faculty from blowing it to pieces with non-
eligibility notices. There was something diabolical about that Faculty when
it was wrestling with the athletic problem. It wasn't human. It was like
Mount Etna. You never could tell just when it would stop being lovely and
quiet, and scatter ruin all over the vicinity.
Its idea of regulating athletics at Siwash was to think up excuses for
flunking every man who weighed over one hundred and fifty-five and could
have his toes stepped on without saying "Ouch!" And it never got the
excuses thought up until the night before the most important games. The
Faculty pretended to be as bland and innocent as Mary's lamb, but no one
can ever tell me it didn't know what it was about. Men have to have real
genius to think up the things it did. You couldn't do it accidentally. When a
Siwash Faculty could moon along happily all fall until twenty-four hours
before the Kiowa game and then discover with regret that our two-hundred-
and-twenty-pound center had misspelled three words in an examination
paper the year before; that our two-hundred-pound backs didn't put enough
rear-end collisions into their words when they read French; and that Ole
Skjarsen read Latin with a Norwegian accent and was therefore too big an
ignoramus to play football, I decline to be fooled. I never was fooled.
Neither was Keg Rearick. But that is hurdling about three chapters.
Honestly, we used to spend one day out of six building up our football team
and the other five defending it from the Faculty. It positively hungered for a

bite out of the line-up. It had us helpless. If we didn't like the way it ran
things we could take our happy young college life up by the roots and
transplant it to some other school, where the football team moved around
the field like a parade. Theoretically the Faculty could sit around and take
our best players off the team, as fast as we developed them, for non-
attention to studies. But, as a matter of fact, it wasn't an easy matter. It beats
all how early in the morning you have to get up to get ahead of college lads
who have got it into their heads that the world will gum up on its axle and
stop dead still if their innocent little pleasures are interfered with.
I remember the fall that the Faculty decided Miller couldn't play because he
hadn't attended chapel quite persistently enough the spring before. Miller
was our center and as important to the team that year as the mainspring of a
watch. The ponderous brain trust that sat on this case didn't decide it until
the day before the big game with Muggledorfer; then they practically ruled
that he would have to go back to last spring and take his chapel all over
again. It took us all night to sidestep that outrage, but we did it. The next
morning an indignation committee of fifty students met the Faculty and
presented alibis that were invincible. It was demonstrated by a cloud of
witnesses that Miller had been absent nine times hand-running because he
had been sitting up nights with a sick chum. The Faculty was inexperienced
that year and let him play; but, when it found out the next day by consulting
the records that the chum had attended chapel every one of those nine
mornings, it got more particular than ever and its heart seemed to harden.
On the day before the Thanksgiving game that year the Faculty held a long
meeting and decided that our two guards were ineligible. There wasn't a
word of truth in it. They weighed two hundred and twenty pounds apiece
and were eligible to the All-American team, but you couldn't make the
human lexicons look at it that way. They found them deficient in
trigonometry and canned them off the team. It was an outrage, because the
two chaps didn't know what trigonometry meant even and couldn't take an
examination. We had to call the trig. professor out of town by a telegram
that morning and then have the suspended men demand an immediate
examination. That worked, too; but every time we managed to preserve a
glory of old Siwash, the Faculty seemed to get a little more crabby and
unreasonable and diabolically persisted in its determination to regulate
athletics.

The next fall it was well understood when football practice began that there
was going to be war to the knife between the Faculty and the football team.
We were meek and resigned to trouble, but you can bet we were not going
to sit around and embrace it. The longest heads in the school made
themselves into a sort of an unofficial sidestepping committee; and we
decided that if the Faculty succeeded in massacring our football team they
would have to outpoint, outfoot, outflank and outscheme the whole school.
Just to draw their fire, we advertised the first practice game as a deadly
combat, in which the honor of Old Siwash was at stake. It was just a little
romp with the State Normal, which had a team that would have had to use
aeroplanes to get past our ends; but the Faculty bit. It held a special session
that night and declared the center, the two backs and the captain ineligible
because they had not prepared orations the spring before at the request of
the rhetoric professor. That was first blood for us. We chased the Normalites
all over the lot with a scrub team and Keg Rearick sat up nights the next
week writing the orations. The result was we got four fine new dry-cleaned
records for our four star players and the Faculty was so pleased with their
fine work on those orations that we could scarcely live with it for a week.
That was only a skirmish, however. We knew very well that the sacred
cause of education would come right back at us and we decided to be
elsewhere when it struck its next blow for progress. We talked it all over
with Bost, the coach, and the result was that a week before the
Muggledorfer game, the last week in September, Bost gave out his line-up
for the season in chapel. There were a good many surprises in the line-up to
some of us. It seemed funny that Miller shouldn't make the team out and
that Ole Skjarsen should have been left off; but the best of men will slump,
as Bost explained, and he had picked the team that he thought would do the
most good for Siwash. It was a team that I wouldn't have hired to chase a
Shanghai rooster out of a garden patch, but the blind and happy Faculty
didn't stop to reason about its excellence. It held a meeting the night before
the Muggledorfer game and suspended nine of the men for inattention to
chapel, smoking cigarettes during vacation and other high crimes. The
whole school roared with indignation. Bost appeared before the Faculty
meeting and almost shook his fist in Prexy's face. He told the Faculty that it
was the greatest crime of the nineteenth century; and the Faculty told him in
very high-class language to go chase himself. So Bost went sorrowfully out

and put in the regular team as substitutes. The next day we whipped
Muggledorfer 80 to 0.

Our peculiar style of pushing a football
right through the thorax of the whole
middle west
Page 205
I think that would have discouraged the Faculty if it hadn't been for
Professor Sillcocks. Did I ever tell you about Professor Sillcocks? It's a
shame if I haven't, because every one is the better and nobler for hearing
about him. He was about a nickel's worth of near-man with Persian-lamb
whiskers and the disposition of a pint of modified milk. Crickets were bold
and quarrelsome beside him. He knew more musty history than any one in

the state and he could without flinching tell how Alexander waded over his
knees in blood; but rather than take off his coat where the world would have
seen him he would have died. He was just that modest and conventional. He
had to come to his classes through the back of the campus up the hill; and
they do say that one day, when half a dozen of the Kappa Kap Pajama girls
were sitting on the low stone wall at the foot of the hill swinging their feet,
he cruised about the horizon for a quarter of an hour waiting for them to go
away in order that he might go up the hill without scorching his collar with
blushes. That was the kind of a roaring lion Professor Sillcocks was.
Well, to get back from behind Robin Hood's barn, Professor Sillcocks had a
great hobby. He believed that college boys should indulge in athletics, but
that they should do it with their fingers crossed. Those weren't his exact
words, but that was what he meant. It was noble to play games, but wicked
to want to win. In his eyes a true sport was a man who would start in a foot
race and come in half a mile behind carrying the other fellow's coat. Our
peculiar style of pushing a football right through the thorax of the whole
Middle West nearly made him shudder his shoes off and every fall in chapel
he delivered a talk against the reprehensible state of mind that finds
pleasure in the defeat of others. We always cheered those talks, which
pleased him; but he never could understand why we didn't go out afterward
and offer ourselves up to some high-school team as victims. It pained him
greatly.
Naturally Professor Sillcocks participated with great enthusiasm in the work
of pruning our line-up, and after the Faculty had thrown up its hands he
climbed right in and led a new campaign. We had to admire the scientific
way in which he went about it, too. For a man whose most violent exercise
consisted of lugging books off a top shelf, and who had learned all he knew
about football from the Literary Pepsin or the Bi-Weekly Review, he got
onto the game in wonderful style. Somehow he managed to learn just who
were our star players—what they played and how badly they were needed
—and then he went to work to quarantine these players.
First thing we knew the Millersburg game, which was always a fierce affair,
arrived; and on the morning of the game Bumpus and Van Eiswaggon, our
two star halfbacks, got notices to forget there was such a game as football
until they had taken Freshman Greek over again—they being Seniors and

remembering about as much Greek as their hats would hold on a windy day.
I'll tell you that mighty near floored us; but virtue will pretty nearly always
triumph, and when you mix a little luck into it, it is as slippery to corner as
a corporation lawyer. We had the luck. There were two big boners, Pacey
and Driggs, in college who wore whiskers. There always are one or two
landscape artists in college who use their faces as alfalfa farms. We took
Bumpus and Van Eiswaggon and the leading man of a company that was
playing at the opera house that night over to these two Napoleons of
mattress stuffing and they kindly consented to be imitated for one day only.
Old Booth and Barrett had a tremendous layout of whiskers in his valise
and before he got through he had produced a couple of mighty close copies
of Pacey and Driggs. That afternoon the two real whisker kings went out in
football suits and ran signals with the team until their wind was gone. Then
they went back into the gym and their improved editions came out. Most of
the college cried when they found that the two eminent authorities on
tonsorial art were going to try to interfere with Millersburg's ambition, but
those of us who were on to the deal simply prayed. We prayed that the
whiskers wouldn't come off. They didn't, either. It was a grand game. We
won, 20 to 0; and the school went wild over Pacey and Driggs. Even Prexy
came out of it for a little while and went into the gym to shake hands with
them. It took lively work to detain him until we could get them stripped and
laid out on the rubbing boards. They were the heroes of the school for the
rest of the year and, being honest chaps, they naturally objected. But we
persuaded them that they had saved the college with their whiskers; and
before they graduated we begged a bunch from each of them to frame and
hang up in the gym some day when the incident wasn't quite so fresh.
Naturally, by this time, we believed that the Faculty ought to consider itself
lucky to be allowed to hang around the college. Professor Sillcocks looked
rather depressed for a day or two, but he soon cheered up and seemed to
forget the team's existence. We swam right along, beating Pottawattamie,
scoring sixty points on Ogallala and getting into magnificent condition for
the Kiowa game on Thanksgiving. That was the game of the year for us.
Time was when Kiowa used to beat us and look bored about it, but that was
all in the misty past. For two years we had tramped all the lime off her goal
lines; and maybe we weren't crazy to do it again! As early as October we
used to sit up nights talking over our chances, and as November wore along

the suspense got as painful as a good lively case of too much pie. We
watched the team practise all day and dreamed of it all night. And then the
blow fell.
It wasn't exactly a blow. It was more like a dynamite explosion. School let
out the day before Thanksgiving, and when announcement time came in
chapel Professor Sillcocks got up and begged permission to make a few
remarks. Then this little ninety-eight-pound thinking machine, who couldn't
have wrestled a kitten successfully, paralyzed half a thousand husky young
students and a whole team of gladiators with the following remarks:
"I have long held, young gentlemen, that the pursuit of athletic exercises for
the mere lust of winning is one of the evils of college life. It does not
strengthen the mind or build up one's manhood. It does not encourage that
sporting spirit which leads a man to smile in defeat or to give up his
chances of winning rather than take an undue advantage. It does not make
for gentleness, mildness or generosity. I have, young gentlemen,
endeavored to make you see this in the past year by all the poor means at
my disposal. I have not succeeded. But this morning I propose to bring it to
you in a new way. As chairman of the credentials committee which passes
upon the eligibility of your football players I have decided that the entire
team is ineligible. If you ask for reasons, I have them. They may not,
perhaps, suit you, but they suit me. These players are ineligible because
they play too well. With them you cannot hope to be defeated and I am
determined that the Siwash football team shall be defeated to-morrow. Your
college experience must be broadened. Your football team, I understand,
has not been defeated in three years. This is monstrous. All of you, except
the Seniors, are totally uneducated in the art of taking defeat. This education
I propose to open to you to-morrow. I have made it more certain by
suspending all of what you call your second team and your scrubs—I
believe that is correct. And the Faculty joins me, young gentlemen, in
assuring you that if the game with Kiowa College is abandoned—abrogated
—called off, I believe you express it—football will cease permanently at
Siwash. Young gentlemen, accept defeat to-morrow as an opportunity and
try to appreciate its great benefits. That is all."
That last was pure sarcasm. Imagine an executioner carving off his victim's
head and murmuring politely, "That is all," to the said victim when he had

finished! There we were, wiped out, utterly extinguished—legislated into
disgrace and defeat—and all by a smiling villain who said "That is all"
when he had read the death sentence!
There wasn't a loophole in the decree. Sillcocks had carved the entire
football talent of the school right out of it with that little list of his. We
would have to play Kiowa with a bunch of rah-rah boys who had never
done anything more violent than break a cane on a grandstand seat over a
touchdown. The chaps who were butchered to make a Roman holiday didn't
have anything at all on us. We were going to be tramped all over by our
deadly rival in order to afford pleasure to a fuzzy-faced old fossil who had
peculiar ideas and had us to try them out on.
I guess, if the students had had a vote on it that day, Professor Sillcocks
would have been elected resident governor of Vesuvius. We seethed all day
and all that night. The board of strategy met, of course, but it threw up its
hands. It didn't have any first aid to the annihilated in its chest. Besides,
Professor Sillcocks hadn't played the game. He had just grabbed the cards.
It was about to pass resolutions hailing Sillcocks as the modern Nero, when
Rearick began to come down with an idea. Nowadays people pay him five
thousand dollars apiece for ideas, but he used to fork them out to us gratis—
and they had twice the candle-power. As soon as we saw Rearick begin to
perspire we just knocked off and sat around, and it wasn't two minutes
before he was making a speech.
"Fellows," he said, "we're due for a cleaning to-morrow. It's official. The
Faculty has ordered it. If I had a Faculty I'd put kerosene on it and call the
health department; but that's neither here nor there. We've got to lose. We've
got to let Kiowa roll us all over the field; and if we back out we've got to
give up football. Now some of you want to resign from college and some of
you want to burn the chapel, but these things will not do you any good.
Kiowa will beat us just the same. Therefore I propose that if we have to be
beaten we make it so emphatic that no one will ever forget it. Let's make it
picturesque and instructive. Let's show the Faculty that we can obey orders.
Let's play a game of football the way Sillcocks and his tools would like to
see it. You let me pick the team now, and give me to-night and to-morrow
morning to drill them, and I'll bet Kiowa will never burn any property
celebrating."

Bost was there with his head down between his knees and he said he didn't
care—Rearick or Sillcocks or his satanic majesty could pick the team. As
for himself, he was going to leave college and go to herding hens
somewhere over two thousand miles from the Faculty. So we left it to
Rearick and went home to sleep and dream murderous dreams about
meeting profs in lonesome places.
The first thing I saw next morning when I went out of the house was a
handbill on a telegraph pole. It was printed in red ink. It implored every
Siwash student to turn out to the game that afternoon. "New team—new
rules—new results!" it read. "The celebrated Sillcocks system of football
will be played by the Siwash team. Attendance at this game counts five
chapel cuts after Thanksgiving. Admission free. Tea will be served. You are
requested to be present."
Were we present? We were—every one of us that wasn't tied down to a bed.
There was something promising in that announcement. Besides, the
greenest of us were taken in by that chapel-cut business. Besides, it was
free! College students are just like the rest of the world. They'd go to their
great-grandmother's funeral if the admission was free. Our gang put on big
crêpe bows, just to be doing something, and marched into the stadium that
afternoon with hats off. It was packed. Talk about promotion work. Rearick
had pasted up bills until all Jonesville was red in the face. And the Faculty
was there, too. Every member was present. They sat in a big special box
and Sillcocks had the seat of honor. He looked as pleased as though he had
just reformed a cannibal tribe. I suppose the programs did it. They
announced once more that the celebrated Sillcocks system of football as
worked out by the coach and Mr. Keg Rearick would be played in this game
by the Siwash team. The whole town was there too, congested with
curiosity. In one big bunch sat all the Siwash men who had ever played
football, in their best clothes and with their best girls. They were the guests
of honor at their own funeral.
The Kiowa team came trotting out—behemoths, all of them—ready to get
revenge for three painful years. They had heard all about the massacre and
regarded it as the joke of the century on Siwash. They also regarded it as
their providential duty to emphasize the joke—to sharpen up the point by
scoring about a hundred and ten points on the scared young greenhorns who

would have to play for us. All our ex-players stood up and gave them a big
cheer when they came. So did everybody else. It's always a matter of policy
to grin and joke while you're being dissected. Nothing like cheerfulness.
Cheerfulness saved many a martyr from worry while he was being eaten by
a lion.
Then our gymnasium doors opened and the brand-new and totally innocent
Siwash football team came forth. When we saw it we forgot all about
Kiowa, the Faculty, defeat, dishonor, the black future and the disgusting
present. We stood up and yelled ourselves hoarse. Then we sat down and
prepared to enjoy ourselves something frabjous.
Rearick had used nothing less than genius in picking that team. First in line
came Blakely, a mandolin and girl specialist, who had never done anything
more daring than buck the line at a soda fountain. He had on football armor
and a baseball mask. Then came Andrews. Andrews specialized in poetry
for the Lit magazine and commonly went by the name of Birdie, because of
an unfortunate sonnet that he had once written. Andrews wore evening
dress, and carried a football in a shawl strap. Then came McMurty and
Boggs, sofa-pillow punishers. They roomed together and you could have
tied them both up in Ole Skjarsen's belt and had enough of it left for a
handle. James, the champion featherweight fusser of the school, followed.
He carried a campchair and a hot-water bottle. Petey Simmons, five feet
four in his pajamas, and Jiggs Jarley, champion catch-as-catch-can-and-
hold-on-tight waltzer in college, came next. Then came Bain, who weighed
two hundred and seventeen pounds, had been a preacher, and was so mild
that if you stood on his corns he would only ask you to get off when it was
time to go to class. He was followed by Skeeter Wilson, the human
dumpling, and Billings, who always carried an umbrella to classes and who
had it with him then. Behind these came a great mob of camp-followers
with chairs, books, rugs, flowers, lunch tables, tea-urns and guitars. It was
the most sensational parade ever held at Siwash; and how we yelled and
gibbered with delight when we got the full aroma of Rearick's plan!
The Kiowa men looked a little dazed, but they didn't have time to comment.
The toss-up was rushed through and the two teams lined up, our team with
the ball. It would have done your eyes good to see Rearick adjust it
carefully on a small doily in the exact center of the field, mince up to it and

kick it like an old lady urging a setting hen off the nest. A Kiowa halfback
caught it and started up the field. Right at him came Birdie Andrews, hat in
hand, and when the halfback arrived he bowed and asked him to stop. The
runner declined. McMurty was right behind and he also begged the runner
to stop. Boggs tried to buttonhole him. Skeeter Wilson, who was as fast as a
trolley car, ran along with him for twenty-five yards, pleading with him to
listen to reason and consent to be downed. It was no use. The halfback went
over the goal line. The Kiowa delegation didn't know whether to go crazy
with joy or disgust. Our end of the grandstand clapped its hands pleasantly.
Down in the Faculty box one or two of the professors, who hadn't forgotten
everything this side of the Fall of Rome, wiggled uneasily and got a little bit
red behind the ears.
The teams changed goals and Rearick kicked off again. This time he
washed the ball carefully and changed his necktie, which had become
slightly soiled. The other Kiowa half caught the ball this time; he plowed
into our boys so hard that McMurty couldn't get out of the way and was
knocked over. Our whole team held up their hands in horror and rushed to
his aid. They picked him up, washed his face, rearranged his clothes and
powdered his nose. He cried a little and wanted them to telegraph his
mother to come, but a big nurse with ribbons in her cap—it was Maxwell—
came out and comforted him and gave him a stick of candy half as large as
a barber-pole.
By this time you could tell the Faculty a mile off. It was a bright red glow.
Every root-digger in the bunch had caught on except Sillcocks. He was
intensely interested and extremely grieved because the Kiowa men did not
enter into the spirit of the occasion. As for the rest of the crowd, it sounded
like drowning men gasping for breath. Such shrieks of pure unadulterated
joy hadn't been heard on the campus in years. When the teams lined up
again Kiowa had got thoroughly wise. They had held a five-minute session
together, had taken off their shin, nose and ear guards, had combed their
hair and had put on their hats. The result was what you might call
picturesque. You could hear ripping diaphragms all over the stadium when
they tripped out on the field. The two teams lined up and Rearick kicked off
again. This time he had tied a big loop of ribbon around the ball; when it
landed a Kiowa man stuck his forefinger through the loop and began to
sidle up toward our goal, holding an imaginary skirt. Our team rushed

eagerly at him, Billings and his umbrella in the lead. On every side the
Kiowa players bowed to them and shook hands with them. The critical
moment arrived. Billings reached the runner and promptly raised his
umbrella over him and marched placidly on toward our goal. Hysterics
from the bleachers. The Kiowa man didn't propose to be outdone. He
stopped, removed his derby and presented the ball to Billings. Billings put
his hand on his heart and declined. The Kiowa man bowed still lower and
insisted. Billings bumped the ground with his forehead and wouldn't think
of it. The Kiowa man offered the ball a third time, and we found afterward
that he threatened to punch Billings' head then and there if he didn't take it.
Billings gave in and took the ball.
"Siwash's ball!" we yelled joyfully. The two teams lined up for a
scrimmage. Right here a difficulty arose that threatened to end the game.
The opposing players insisted on gossiping with their arms around each
other's necks. They would not get down to business. The referee raved—he
was an imported product, with no sense of humor, and was rapidly getting
congestion of the brain. "Don't hit in the clinches!" yelled some joker. For
five minutes the teams gossiped. Then our quarter gave his signal—the first
two bars of "Oh Promise Me"—and passed the ball to Wilson, who was
fullbacking.
It was twice as interesting as an ordinary game because nobody knew what
Wilson would do; in fact, he didn't seem to know himself. He stood a
minute dusting off the ball carefully and manicuring his soiled nails. The
Kiowa team and our boys strolled up, arm in arm. Wilson still hesitated.
The Kiowa captain offered to send one of his men to carry the ball. Wilson
wouldn't think of causing so much trouble. Our captain suggested that the
ball be taken to our goal. The Kiowa captain protested that it had been there
twice already. Some one suggested that they flip for goals. The captains did
it. Siwash won. Calling a messenger boy, our captain sent him over to
Kiowa's goal with the ball, while the two teams sat down in the middle of
the field and the Kiowa captain set 'em up to gum.
By this time people were being removed from the stadium in all directions.
There was a sort of purple aurora over the Faculty box that suggested
apoplexy. The learned exponents of revised football looked about as
comfortable as a collection of expiring beetles mounted on large steel pins

—that is, all but Professor Sillcocks. He was beaming with pleasure. I never
saw a man so entirely wrapped up in manly sports as he was just then.
Evidently the new football suited him right down to the ground. He clapped
his hands at every new atrocity; and whenever some Siwash man put his
arm around a Kiowan and helped him tenderly on with the ball, he turned
around to the populace behind him and nodded his head as if to say: "There,
I told you so. It can be done. See?"
When the Kiowa center kicked off for the next scrimmage he introduced a
novelty. He produced a large beanbag, which I presume Rearick had slipped
him, kicked it about four feet and then hurriedly picked it up and presented
it to one of our men. All of our boys thanked him profoundly and then lined
up for the scrimmage. Immediately the Kiowa captain put his right hand
behind him. Our captain guessed "thumbs up." He was right and we took
the ball forward five yards. Deafening applause from the stadium. Then our
captain guessed a number between one and three. Another five yards.
Shrieks of joy from Siwash and desperate cries of "Hold 'em!" from the
Kiowa gang. Then the Kiowa captain demanded that our captain name the
English king who came after Edward VI. That was a stonewall defense,
because Rearick had flunked two years running in English history. Kiowa
took the ball, but the umpire butted in. It was an offside play, he declared,
because it wasn't a king at all. It was a queen and it was Siwash's ball and
ten yards. That made an awful row. The Kiowa captain declared that the
whole incident was "very regrettable," but the umpire was firm. He gave us
the ball; and on the very next down Rearick conjugated a French verb
perfectly for a touchdown.
All of this was duly announced to the stadium and the excitement was
intense. I guess there were as many as two hundred Chautauqua salutes
after that touchdown. Both teams had tea together and our rooters' chorus
sang "Juanita," while old Professor Grubb got up, with rage printed all over
his face in display type, and went home. He never went near the stadium
again as long as he lived, I understand.
It was a most successful occasion up to this point, but somehow college
boys always overdo a thing. The strain was telling on the two teams; for,
when you come right down to it, no Siwash man loves a Kiowa man any
more fervently than a bull pup loves a cat. The teams lined up again and

began playing "ring-around-a-rosy" to find who should make the next
touchdown, when something happened. Klingel, the two-hundred-and-ten-
pound Kiowan guard, started it. He was just about as good a fellow as a
white rhinoceros, and an hour of entire civilization was about all he could
possibly stand. He had the beanbag and he was tired of it. Beanbags meant
nothing to him. He couldn't grasp their solemn beauty. He offered it to
Petey Simmons. Petey declined, with profuse thanks. Klingel insisted. Petey
bowed very low and swore that rather than make another touchdown on
Kiowa he would suffer wild horses to tear him into little bits. Then Klingel
began to get offside.
"You hear what I say, you little shrimp!" he said politely. "If you don't take
this thing and quit your yawping I'm going to make you do it."
"Listen, you overfed mountain of pork!" said Petey, with equal cordiality.
"If you don't like that beanbag eat it. It would do you good. You don't know
beans anyway."
Then Klingel, without further argument, hit Petey in the eye and laid him
out.

"If you don't like that beanbag eat it"
Page 220
Wow! Talk about irritating a hornet convention. Klingel was a great little
irritator. The whole game had been torture for our real team, cooped up
among the ruffles in the stadium; and when they saw little Petey go down
they gave one simultaneous roar and vaulted over the railing. It was a close
race, but Ole Skjarsen beat Hogboom out by a foot. He hit Klingel first.
Hogboom hit him second, third, fifth and thirty-fourth. Then the two teams
closed together and for five minutes a cyclone of dust, dirt, sweaters,
collars, arms, legs, hair and bright red noses swept up and down the field.
The grandstand went crazy. The five hundred Kiowa rooters grabbed their
canes and started in. They met about seven hundred Siwash patriots and
then the whole universe exploded.

The police interfered and about half an hour later the last Siwash student
was pried off the last Kiowan. It was the most disgraceful riot in the history
of the college. I don't think there was a whole suit of clothes on the field
when it was over; and the Siwash man who didn't have two or three knobs
on his head wasn't considered loyal. The girls all cried. The Faculty went
home in cabs, the mayor declared martial law and the Kiowa gang walked
out of town to the crossing and took the train there to avoid further hard
feelings. We were all ashamed of ourselves and I think the two schools
liked each other a little better after that. Anyway, we regarded the whole
affair as only logical.
The Faculty held a meeting that lasted all the next day. Then it adjourned
and did absolutely nothing at all except to pile upon us more theses, themes
and special outrages that semester than any body of students had ever been
inflicted with in a like period. The profs wouldn't speak to us. They
regarded us as beneath notice. But when the real Kiowa game was
scheduled by mutual consent, two weeks afterward, there wasn't a remark
from headquarters. We played Kiowa and spread them all over the map—
and not a Faculty member was in town that day.
I understand Professor Sillcocks is not yet thoroughly persuaded that his
style of football wasn't a success. "But for that unfortunate riot, which
comes from playing with less cultured colleges," he remarked to a Senior
the next spring, "that would have been the most successful exhibition of
mental control and inherent gentility ever seen at Siwash."
True, very true.

CHAPTER IX
CUPID—THAT OLD COLLEGE CHUM

Well! Well! Well! Here's another magazine investigator who has made a
great discovery. Listen to this, Sam: "Co-education, as found in American
colleges, is amazingly productive of romance, and the great number of
marriages resulting between the men and women in co-educational schools
indicates all too plainly that love-making occupies an important part of the
courses of study."
Those are his very words. Isn't he the Christopher Columbus, though! Who
would have thought it? Who would have dreamt that there were any mutual
admiration societies in co-educational colleges? I am amazed. What won't
these investigators discover next? Why, one of them is just as likely as not
to get wise to the fact that there is a hired-girl problem. You can't keep
anything away from these gimlet-eyed scientists.
Oh, sure! I knew it was just about time for some kind of an off-key noise
from you, you grouchy old leftover. Just because you graduated from one of
those paradises in pants, where they import a carload of girls from all over
the country to one dance a year and worry along the rest of the time with
chorus girls and sweet young town girls who began bringing students up by
hand about the time Wm. H. Taft was a Freshman, you think you are
qualified to toss in a few hoots about co-education. Back away, Sam! That
subject is loaded. I've had palpitations on a college campus myself; and I
want to tell you right here that it beats having them at a stage door, or at a
summer resort, or in a parlor just around the corner from nine relatives, or
in one of those short-story conservatories, or in the United States mails,
forty ways for Sunday; and, besides, it's educational. We co-educationalists
get a four years' course in close-coupled conversation and girl classification
while you fellows in the skirtless schools are getting the club habit and are
saving up for the privilege of dancing with other fellows' fiancées at the
proms once a year.

Honestly, I never could see just why a fellow should wait until he is through
college before he begins to study the science of how to make some
particular girl believe that if Adam came back he would look at him and
say: "Gee, it swells me all up to think that chap is a descendant of mine!"
And I may be thick in my thought dome, but I never could see any
objection to marrying a classmate, either, even though I didn't do it myself.
I admit co-educational schools are strong on matrimony. Haven't I dug up
for thirty-nine wedding presents for old Siwash students already? And don't
I get a shiver that reaches from my collar-button down to my heels every
time I get one of those thick, stiff, double-barreled envelopes, with "Kindly
dig," or words to that effect, on the inside? Usually they come in pairs—the
bid to the next wedding and the bill for the last present. Why, out of sixty-
five ninety-umpters with whom I graduated, six couples are already holding
class reunions every evening; and just the other day another of the boys,
who thought he would look farther, came back after having made a pretty
thorough inspection all over the civilized world, and camped outside of the
home of a girl in our class until she admitted that he looked better to her
than any of the rising young business men who had bisected her orbit in the
last ten years. They're to be married this spring and I'm going back to the
wedding. Incidentally I'm going to help pay for three more silver cups. We
give a silver cup to each class baby and each frat baby, and I've been
looking around this past year for a place where we can buy them by the
dozen.
Weddings! Why, man, a co-educational college is a wedding factory. What
of it? As far as I can see, Old Siwash produces as many governors,
congressmen and captains of industry to the graduate as any of the single-
track schools. And I notice one thing more. You don't find any of our
college couples hanging around the divorce courts. There is a peculiar sort
of stickiness about college marriages. They are for keeps. When a Siwash
couple doesn't have anything else agreeable to talk about it can sit down and
have a lovely three months' conversation on the good old times. It takes a
mighty acrimonious quarrel to stand a college reunion around a breakfast
table. Take it from me, you lonesome old space-waster, with nothing but a
hatrack to give you an affectionate welcome when you come home at night,
there is no better place on earth to find good wife material than a college
campus. Of course I don't think a man should go to college to find a wife;

but if his foot should slip, and he should marry a girl whose sofa pillows
have the same reading matter on them as there is on his, there's nothing to
yell for help about. Ten to one he's drawn a prize. Girls who go through co-
educational colleges are extra fine, hand-picked, sun-ripened, carefully
wrapped-up peaches—and I know what I'm talking about.
How do I know? Heavens, man! didn't I go through the Siwash peach
orchard for four years? Don't I know the game from candy to carriages?
Didn't I spend every spring in a light pink haze of perfect bliss? And wasn't
all the Latin and Greek and trigonometry and athletic junk crowded out of
my memory at the end of every college year by the face of the most utterly,
superlatively marvelous girl in the world? And wasn't it a different face
every spring? Oh, I took the entire course in girlology, Sam! I never skipped
a single recitation. I got a Summa Cum Laudissimus in strolling, losing frat
pins, talking futures and acquiring hand-made pennants. And the only bitter
thought I've got is that I can't come back.
You'll never realize, my boy, how old Pa Time roller-skates by until you go
back to a co-ed college ten years afterward. Here, in the busy mart of trade,
I'm a promising young infant who has got to "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to the
big ones, and be good and get to work on time for thirty years before I will
be trusted to run a monopoly alone on a quiet day; but back on the Siwash
Campus, Sam, I'm a patriarch. That's one reason why I don't go back. I'm
married and I don't care to be madly sought after, but also I don't care to
make a hit as a fine old antique for a while yet, thank you. When I am forty,
and have gummed up my digestion in the dollar-herding game until I
wheeze for breath when I run up a column of figures, I'll go back and have a
nice comfy time in the grandpa class. But not now. The only difference
between a thirty-year-old alumnus and the mummy of Rameses, to a college
girl, is in favor of the mummy. It doesn't come around and ask for dances.
I suppose, Sam, you think you've been all lit up under the upper left-hand
vest pocket over one or two girls in your time, but I don't believe a fellow
can fall in love so far over his ears anywhere in the world as he can in
Siwash College. That's only natural, for the finest girls in the world go to
Siwash—except one girl who went to another school by accident and whom
I ran across about three years ago wearing an Alfalfa Delt pin. I'll take you
up to the house to see her some time. She was too nice a girl to wear an

Alfalfa Delt pin and I just naturally had to take it off and put on an Eta Bita
Pie pin; and somehow in the proceedings we got married—and all I have to
say about it is three cheers for the universe!
Anyway, as I was saying, it was as easy to fall in love at Siwash as it was to
forget to go to chapel. We got along all right in the fall. We liked the girls
enormously and were always smashing up some football team just to please
them. And, of course, we kept ourselves all stove up financially during the
winter hauling them to parties and things in Jonesville's nine varnished
cabs. It took about as much money to support those cabs as it does to run a
fleet of battleships. But it was in the spring that the real fireworks began.
Suddenly, about the first Wednesday after the third Friday in April, the
ordinary Siwash man discovers that some girl whom he has known all year
isn't a girl at all, but a peachblow angel who is just stopping on earth to
make a better man of him and show him what a dull, pifflish thing Paradise
would be without her. Life becomes a series of awful blank spots, with
walks on the campus between them. He can't get his calculus because he is
busy figuring on a much more difficult problem; he is trying to figure
whether three dances with some other fellow mean anything more to Her
than charity. He gets cold chills every time he reflects that at any minute a
member of some royal family may pass by and notice Her, and that he will
have to promote international spasms by hashing him. He realizes that he
has misspent his life; that football is a boy business; that frats are foolish,
and that there ought to be a law giving every college graduate a job paying
at least two thousand dollars a year on graduation. He is nervous, feverish,
depressed, inspired, anxious, oblivious, glorified, annihilated, encouraged
and all cluttered up with emotion. The planet was invented for the purpose
of letting Her dig Her number three heels into it on spring afternoons.
Sunshine is important because Her hair looks better with the light on it.
Every time She frowns the weather bureau hangs out a tornado signal, and
every time She smiles somebody puts a light-blue sash around the horizon
and a double row of million-candle-power calcium lights clear down the
future, as far as he can see.
That's what love does to a college boy in spring. It's a kind of rose-colored
brainstorm, but it very seldom has complications. By the next fall, the
ozone is out of the air; and after a couple has gone strolling about twice,
football and the sorority rushes butt in—and it's all over. Freshman girls are

a help, too. Beats all how much assistance a Freshman girl can be in
forgetting a Senior girl who isn't on the premises! Even in the spring-fever
period we didn't get engaged to any extent. The nearest I ever came to it
was to ask the light of my life for ninety-several if she would wear my frat
pin forever and ever until next fall. And, let me tell you, there wasn't any
local of the Handholders' Union on the Siwash Campus. That's another
place where you soubrette worriers have us figured out wrong. Rushing a
Siwash girl was about as distant a proposition for us as trying to snuggle up
to the planets in the telescopic astronomy course. For cool, pleasant and
skillful unapproachability, a co-ed girl breaks all records. We just worshiped
them as higher beings, and I find that a lot of Siwash boys who have
married Siwash girls are still a little bit dazed about the whole affair. They
can't figure how they ever had the nerve to start real businesslike
negotiations.
This very high-class insulation in our love affairs caused us fellows a lot of
woe once in a while. You never could tell whether or not a girl was engaged
to some fellow back home. We didn't get impertinent enough to ask. I think
there ought to be a law compelling a girl who comes to college engaged to
some rising young merchant prince in the country store back home to wear
an engagement ring around her neck, where it can be easily seen. More than
once, a Siwash man who had been conservative enough to worship the same
girl right through his college course and who had proposed to her on the last
night of school, when the open season for thou-beside-me talk began, has
found that all the time some chap has been writing her a letter a day and
that she has only regarded the Siwash man as a kind friend, and so on.
Never will I forget when Frankling got stung that way! Of course we didn't
generally know when a tragedy of this sort happened, but in his case he
brought it on himself. If he hadn't made a furry-eared songbird out of
himself when Ole Skjarsen drew his girl at the Senior class party—
You want to know about this girl lottery business, you say? Well, it's plain
that I shall have to begin right back at the beginning of the Siwash social
system and educate you a little at a time. Now this class party drawing is an
institution which has been handed down at Siwash ever since the ancients
went to school before the war. You see, at Siwash, as at most colleges, there
is the fraternity problem. The frat men give parties to the sorority girls as
often as the Dean of Women will stand for it, and every one gets gorgeously

acquainted and extremely sociable. The non-fratters go to the Y. M. C. A.
reception at the beginning of each year and to the Commencement
exercises, and that's about all. Of course they pick up lots of friends among
the non-sorority girls; and I guess D. Cupid solders up about as many jobs
among them as he does among the others. But there isn't much chance for
these two tribes to mix. That was why the class lottery was invented. It has
been a custom at Siwash, ever since there has been a Siwash, for each class
to hold a party each year. Now class parties are held in order that pure and
perfect democracy may be promoted, and it is necessary to take violent
measures to shuffle up the people and get every one interested. So they
draw for partners. The class which is about to effervesce socially holds a
meeting. At this meeting the names of all the men are put in one hat and the
names of all the girls in another. Then two judges of impregnable honesty
draw out a name from each hat simultaneously and read them to the class.
When I was at Siwash a class party was the most exciting event in college.
For uncertainty and breath-grabbing anxiety they made the football games
seem as tame as a church election. Of course everybody can't be a Venus de
Milo or an Apollo with a Beveled Ear, as Petey Simmons used to call him.
Every class has its middle-aged young ladies, who are attending college to
rest up from ten or fifteen years of school-teaching, and its tall young
agriculturalists with restless Adam's apples, whose idea of being socially
interesting is to sit all evening in the same chair making a noise like one of
those $7.78-suit dummies. That's what made the class lotteries so
interesting. The plow-chasers drew the prettiest girls in the class and the
most accomplished fusser among the fellows usually drew a girl who would
make the manager of a beauty parlor utter a sad shriek and throw up his job.
Of course every one was bound in honor to take what came out of the hat.
Nobody flinched and nobody renigged, but there was a lot of suppressed
excitement and well-modulated regret.
I have been reasonably wicked since I left college. Once or twice I have
slapped down a silver dollar or thereabout and have watched the little ball
roll round and round a pocket that meant a wagon-load of tainted tin for me;
and once in a while I have placed five dollars on a pony of uncertain ability
and have watched him go from ninth to second before he blew up. But I
never got half the heart-ripping suspense out of these pastimes that I did out
of a certain few party drawings, when I waited for my name to come out

and wondered, while I looked across the hall at the girl section, whether I
was going to draw the one girl in the world, any one of four or five mighty
interesting runners-up, or the fat little girl in the corner with ropy hair and
the general look of a person who had had a bright idea a few years before
and had been convalescing from it ever since.
Talk about excitement and consequences! Those drawings kept us on the
jump until the parties were pulled off. Generally the proud beauties who
had been drawn by the midnight-oil destroyers did not know them, and
some one had to steer the said destroyers around to be introduced. What
with dragging bashful young chaps out to call and then seeing that they
didn't freeze up below the ankles and get sick on the night of the party; and
what with teaching them the rudiments of waltzing and giving them
pointers on lawn ties; or how to charter a good seaworthy hack in case the
girl lived on an unpaved street; and bracing up the fellows who had drawn
blanks, and going to call on the blanks we had drawn and getting gloriously
snubbed—give me a wall-flower for thorns!—well, it was no cinch to run a
class party. But they were grand affairs, just the same, and promoted true
fellowship, besides furnishing amusement for the whole college in the off
season. And, besides, I always remember them with gratitude for what they
did to Frankling.
You know there are two kinds of fussers in college. There is the chap like
Petey Simmons, for instance, whose heart was a directory of Siwash girls;
and there is the fellow who grabs one girl and stakes out claim boards all
around her for the whole four years. That was Frankling's style. He was
what we always called a married man. He and Pauline Spencer were the
closest corporation in college. They entered school in the same class, and he
called on her every Friday night at Browning Hall and took her to every
party and lecture and entertainment for the next three and a half years—
except, of course, the class parties. It was one of our chief delights to watch
Frankling grind his teeth when some lowbrow—as he called them—drew
her name. She always had rotten luck—you never saw such luck! Once
Ettleson drew her. He was a tall, silent farmer, who wore boots and a look
of gloom; and he marched her through a mile of mud to the hall without
saying a word, handed her to the reception committee and went over to a
corner, where he sat all evening. But that wasn't so bad as the Junior she
drew. His name was Slaughter. His father had a dairy at the edge of

Jonesville and Slaughter decided that, as the night was cold and rainy, a
carriage would be appropriate. So he scrubbed up the milk wagon
thoroughly, put a lot of nice, clean straw on the floor, hung a lantern from
the top for heat and drove her down to the party in state. She was game and
didn't make a murmur, but Frankling made a pale-gray ass of himself. As I
said, I never liked Frankling. He had a nasty, sneering way of looking at the
whole school, except his own crowd. His father owned the locomotive
works and he always went to Europe for his summers. He was one of those
unnecessary individuals who are solemnly convinced that if you don't do
things just as they do something is lacking in your mind; and, though he
was perfectly bred, he was only about half as pleasant to have around as a
well-behaved hyena.
I never could see what Miss Spencer saw in him, unless it was the
locomotives. As far as we could tell—we never got much chance to judge—
she was a real nice girl. She was a little haughty and never had much to say,
and always acted as if she was a princess temporarily off the job. But she
was a good scout, and proved it at the class parties by making it as pleasant
as she could for the nervous nobodies who took her; while the yellow streak
in Frankling was so broad there wasn't enough white in him to look like a
collar. That's why the whole college went crazy with delight over the Ole
Skjarsen affair.—Last station, ladies and gents. Story begins here.
When we were Seniors Ole Skjarsen was the chief embarrassment of the
class. As a football player he was a wonder, but as a society fritterling he
was one long catastrophe. He just couldn't possibly get hep—that was all.
He was as companionable and as good-natured as a St. Bernard pup and just
as inconvenient to have around. He dressed like a vaudeville sketch, and the
number of things he could do in an hour, which are not generally done in
low-vest and low-neck circles, was appalling. However we all loved Ole
because of his grand and historic deeds on the team, and we took him to our
parties and never so much as fell out of our chairs when he took off his coat
in order to dance with more comfort and energy. The girls were as loyal as
we were and danced with him as long as their feet held out, and we made
them leather hero medals and really had a lot of fun out of the whole
business—all except Frankling. It just about killed him to have to mingle
with Ole socially; and when the time for the Senior class party drew near he

got so nervous that he called a meeting of a few of us fellows and made a
big kick.
"I tell you, fellows, this has got to stop!" he declared. "We've encouraged
this lumber-jack until he has gotten too fresh for any use. Why, he'll ask any
girl in the college to dance with him, and he goes and calls on them, too.
Now, it's up to us to show him his place. I'm dead against putting his name
in the hat for the party. He'll be sure to draw a girl who will be humiliated
by having to go with him; and I have a little too much regard for chivalry
and courtesy to allow him to do it. We'll just have to hint to him that he'd
better have another engagement the night of the class party, that's all."
Thereupon we all rose joyously up and told Frankling to go jump in the
creek. And he called us muckers and declared we were ignorant of the first
principles of social ethics. He said that Skjarsen might be near enough our
level to be inoffensive, but as for him he declined to have anything to do
with the class party. Thereupon we gave three cheers, and that made him so
mad that he left the meeting and fell over three chairs trying to do it with
speed and dignity. Altogether it was a most enjoyable occasion. We'd never
gotten quite so much satisfaction out of him before.
The drawing took place the next week and, sure enough, Frankling declined
to allow his name to be put in the hat. We put Ole's name in and were
prepared to have him draw a Class A girl; but what happened knocked the
props out from under us. His name came fourth and he drew the mortgaged
and unapproachable Miss Spencer.
We didn't know whether to celebrate or prepare for trouble. It seemed
reasonable that Miss Spencer would back up Frankling and reduce Ole to an
icicle when he asked her to go with him. But the next morning, when we
saw Frankling, we were so happy that we forgot to worry. He was one large
paroxysm. I never saw so much righteous indignation done up in one
bundle. He cornered the class officers and declared in passionate tones that
they had committed the outrage of the century. They had insulted one of the
finest young women in the college. They had made it advisable for all
persons of culture to remain away from Siwash. The disgrace must not be
allowed. He didn't speak as a friend, but as a disinterested party who wanted
justice done; and he proposed to secure it.

We took all this quite humbly and asked him why he didn't see Ole himself
and order him to unhand the lady. From the way he turned pale, we guessed
he had done that already. Ole weighed two-twenty in his summer haircut
and was quick-tempered. We then asked him why he didn't buy Ole off. We
also asked him why he didn't shut down the college, and why he didn't have
Congress pass a law or something, and if his head had ever pained him
before. He was tearing off his collar in order to answer more calmly and
collectedly when Ole came into the room. Ole had combed his hair and
shined his shoes, and he had on the pink-and-blue necktie that he had worn
the month before to the annual promenade with a rented dress suit. He
seemed very cheerful.
"Vell, fallers," says he, "das leetle Spencer gal ban all rite. She say she go
by me to das party. Ve ban goin' stylish tu, Aye bet yu." Then he saw
Frankling and went over to him with his hand out. "Don't yu care, Master
Frankling," he said, with one of his transcontinental smiles. "Aye tak yust
sum good care by her lak Aye ban her steddy faller." Phew!

Ole took Miss Spencer to the party. There isn't a bit of doubt but that he
took her in style. He put more care and exertion into the job than any of the
rest of us and he got more impressive results. Ole has his ideas about dress.
Ordinarily he wore one of those canned suits that you buy in the coat-and-
pants emporiums, giving your age and waist measure in order to get a
perfect fit. He wore a celluloid collar with it and a necktie that must have
been an heirloom in the family; and he wore a straw hat most of the year.
He wore each one till it blew away and then got another. This rig was good
enough for Ole in ordinary little social affairs, but when it came to dances
and receptions he blossomed out in evening clothes. He had made a bargain
with a second-hand clothes-man downtown—split his wood all winter for
the use of a dress suit that had lost its position in a prominent family and
was going downhill fast. You know how the tailors work the dress suit
racket. They can't exactly change the style of a suit—it's got to be open-
faced and have tails—but they work in some little improvement like a braid
on or off, or an extra buttonhole, or a flare in the vest each year; so that a
really bang-up-to-date chap would blush all over if he had to wear a last

year's model. I notice the automobile makers are doing the same stunt. They
can't improve their cars any more, so they put four doors on one year, cut
'em in two the next and take them off the year after.
This hasn't anything to do with Ole except that that dress suit of his was
behind the times one hundred and two counts. It had been a fat man's suit in
the first place. It fitted him magnificently at the shoulders. He and the suit
began to leave each other from that point down. At the waist it looked like a
deflated balloon. The top of the trousers fitted him about as snugly as a
round manhole in the street. The legs flapped like the mainsail of a catboat
that's coming about. They ended some time before his own legs did and
there was quite a little stretch of yarn sock visible before the big tan shoes
began. Ole had two acres of feet and he polished his shoes himself, with
great care. They were not so large as an ordinary ballroom, but somehow he
used them so skillfully that they gave the effect of covering the entire space.
Four times around Ole's feet constituted a pretty fair encore at our dances;
and I've seen him pen up as many as three couples in a corner with them
when he got those feet tangled.
That was Ole's formal costume. But he didn't regard it with awe. Any one
could wear a dress suit. It seemed to him that a Senior party to which he
was to escort Miss Spencer was too important to pass airily off with the
same old suit. He had another card up his sleeve.
"Aye ent tal yu," he explained when we asked him anxiously what it was he
proposed to wear. "Yust vait. Aye ban de hull show, Aye tank. Yu fallers yust
put on your yumpin'-yack suits. Aye mak yu look lak torta cent."
Of course we waited. We didn't have anything else to do. We worried a
little, but we had gotten used to Ole, anyway—and what was the difference?
It would be a little hard on Miss Spencer, but it would be magnificently
horrible to Frankling, who considered that a collar of the wrong cut might
endanger a man's whole future career. So we resigned ourselves and
attended to our own troubles.
The night of the party was a cold, clear January evening. There was snow
on the ground and it was packed hard on the sidewalks. This was nuts for
the oil-burners. They walked their girls to the hall. Four of the reckless ones
clubbed together and hired a big closed carriage affair from the livery

stable. It happened to be a pallbearers' carriage during the daytime, but they
didn't know the difference and the girls didn't tell them; and what you don't
know will never cause your poor old brain to ache. We frat fellows blew our
hard-worked allowances for varnished cabs and thereby proved ourselves
the biggest suckers in the bunch. To this day I can't see why a girl who can
dance all night, and can stroll all afternoon of a winter's day, has to be
hauled three blocks in a two-horse rig every time she goes to a party. The
money we spent on cabs while I was at Siwash would have built a new
stadium, painted every frat house in town and endowed a chair of United
States languages. But, there!—I'm on my pet hobby again. How it did hurt
to pay for those hacks!
I got there late with my girl—she was a shy little conservatory student, who
evidently regarded conversation as against the rules—and I found the usual
complications that had to be sorted out at the beginning of every class party.
Stiffy Short was sore. He was short five dances for his girl—had been
working on her program for a week—and he accused the fellows of
dodging because she couldn't dance; and was threatening to be taken sick
and spend the evening in the dressing room smoking cigarettes. Miss
Worthington, one of our Class A girls, didn't have a dance, because
Tullings, who had drawn her, had presumed that she was to sit and talk with
him all evening. Petey Simmons was in even worse. His girl couldn't dance,
but insisted on doing so. She had done it the year before, too. Petey had
been training up for two weeks by tugging his dresser around the room.
Then there was Glenallen. We always had to form a committee of national
defense against Glenallen. He couldn't dance, either, and he would insist on
hitching his chair out towards the middle of the room. I've seen him throw
as many as four couples in a night. And there was a telephone call from
Miss Morse, class secretary and first-magnitude star. Her escort hadn't
shown up. He never did show up. When we went around to lynch him the
next day he explained desperately that at the last minute he found he had
forgotten to get a lawn necktie. You know how a little thing like a lawn
necktie that ain't can wreck an evening dress, unless you are an old enough
head to cut up a handkerchief and fold the ends under.
We had gotten things pretty well straightened out before we discovered that
Ole was missing. That would never do. If Miss Spencer needed rescuing we

were the boys to do it. Three of us rushed down the stairs to send a carriage
over to Browning Hall, and that minute Ole arrived at the party.
He had worn his very best—the suit he was proudest of and the one he
knew couldn't be duplicated. It was his lumber-camp rig—corduroy
trousers, big boots and overshoes, red flannel shirt, canvas pea-jacket and
fur cap. He came marching up the walk like the hero in a moving-picture
show and we thought he was alone till he reached the door. Then we saw
Miss Spencer. She was seated in state behind him on one of those hand-
sledges the farmers use for hauling cordwood. There were evergreen
boughs behind her and all around her, and she was so wrapped up in a huge
camp blanket that all we could see of her was her eyes.
We gave Ole three cheers and carried Miss Spencer upstairs on the
evergreen boughs. The two were the hits of the party. We never had a better
one. The incident broke more ice than we could have chopped out in a
month with all the dull-edged talk we had been handing around. Every one
had a good laugh by way of a general introduction and then we all turned in
and made things hum. The wall-flowers got plucked. Somebody taught the
president of the Y. M. C. A. how to waltz and poor Henry Boggs forgot for
two hours that he had hands and feet, and that they were beyond his control.
It was a tremendous success; we were so enthusiastic by the time things
broke up that we told the cabmen to go hang and all walked home to the
Hall, the men fighting for a chance to pull on the sledge-rope with Ole.
Hold on, Sam. Put down your hat. This isn't the end, thank you. It's just the
prologue. Of course we all expected, when Ole unloaded Miss Spencer at
the Hall and she bade him good evening, and thanked him for her delightful
time and so on, that the incident would be closed. Never dreamed of
anything else. Lumber-jack suits and cordwood sledges are fine for
novelties, but they can't come back, you know—once is enough. And that's
why we fell dead in rows when Ole, straw hat and all, walked over to Lab.
from chapel with Miss Spencer the next day—and she didn't call for the
police. We couldn't have stared any harder if the college chapel had bowed
and walked off with her. And we hadn't recovered from the blow when
Friday night rolled around and those of us who went to call at the Hall
found Ole seated in Frankling's particular corner, entertaining Miss Spencer

with an average of one remark a minute, which, so far as we could hear,
consisted generally of "Aye tank so" and "No, ma'am."
By this time we had decided that Frankling was sulking and that Miss
Spencer was showing him that if she wanted to be friendly with Ole, or the
town pump, or the plaster statue of Victory in the college library, she had a
perfect right to. I guess she showed him all right, too, for after a couple of
weeks he surrendered and then the queerest rivalry Siwash had ever seen
began. Frankling, son of the locomotive works, authority on speckled vests
and cotillons, was scrapping with Ole Skjarsen, the cuffless wonder from
the lumber camps, for the affections of the prettiest girl in college. No
wonder we got so interested that spring that most of us forgot to fall in love
ourselves.
I don't to this day believe that Miss Spencer meant a word of it. I think that
she was simply good-natured, in the first place, and that, when Frankling
began to bite little semicircular pieces out of the air, she began mixing her
drinks, so to speak, just for the excitement of the thing. Anyway, Frankling
walked over to chapel with her and Ole lumbered back. Frankling took her
to the basket-ball games and Ole took her to the Kiowa debate and slept
peacefully through most of it. Frankling bought a beautiful little trotting
horse and sleigh and took Miss Spencer on long rides. In Siwash, young
people do not have chaperons, guards, nurses nor conservators. That was a
knockout, we all thought; but it never feazed Ole. He invited Miss Spencer
to go street-car riding with him and she did it. Some of us found them
bumping over the line in one of the flat-wheeled catastrophes that the
Jonesville Company called cars—and Miss Spencer didn't even blush. She
bowed to us just as unconcernedly as if she wasn't breaking all long-
distance records for eccentricity in Siwash history.
Frankling dodged the whole college and got wild in the eyes. He looked
like an eminent statesman who was being compelled to act as barker in a
circus against his will. It must have churned up his vitals to do his sketch
act with Ole; but when you have had one of those four-year cases, and it has
gotten tangled up in your past and future, you can't always dictate just what
you are going to do. It was plain to see that Miss Spencer had Frankling
hooked, haltered, hobbled, staked out, Spanish-bitted, wrapped up and
stamped with her name and laid on the shelf to be called for; and it was just

as evident that she considered he would be all the nicer if she walked
around on him for a while and massaged his disposition a little with her
little French heels.
So Frankling continued to divide time with Ole, and all the fellows whom
he had insulted about their neckties and all the girls whom he had forgotten
to dance with sat around in perfect content and watched the show.

He invited Miss Spencer to go street-car
riding with him
Page 246
We all thought it would wear out after a few weeks. But it didn't. The
semester recess came and, when college assembled again, Ole cut Frankling

out for the athletic ball as neatly as if he had been in the girl game all his
life. Frankling countered with the promenade two weeks later, but he went
clear to the ropes when Miss Spencer came out one fine morning at chapel
with Ole's football charm—the one he had won the year the team had
annihilated two universities and seven assorted colleges. He came back
gamely and decorated her with fraternity hatpins, cuff buttons, belt buckles
and side combs; and on the strength of it he got three Friday evenings in a
row. That might have jarred any one but Ole. But he came up smiling and
took Miss Spencer to a Y. M. C. A. social, where he bought her four dishes
of ice cream and had to be almost violently restrained from offering her the
whole freezer.
Winter wore out and spring came. Frankling brought the whole resources of
the locomotive works into play. He got a private car and took a party off to
the Kiowa baseball game, with Miss Spencer as guest of honor. He
bombarded her with imported candy and American beauties, and cluttered
up the spring with a series of whist parties, which butted into the social
calendar something frabjous. Ole plowed right along with his own peculiar
style of argument. He met the private-car business with a straw ride and his
prize offering was a hunk of spruce gum from his pine woods, as big as
your two fists; and, so far as we could see, the gum got exactly the same
warmth of reception as the candy—though it didn't disappear with
anywhere near the rapidity.
As April went by, we Seniors got busy with the first awful preliminaries of
Commencement. It began to be considered around college that Senior Day
would settle the affair one way or the other. Senior Day is the last event of
Commencement Week at Siwash and more engagements have been
announced formally or otherwise that day than at any other time. If a Senior
man and girl, who had been making a rather close study of each other,
walked out on the campus together after the exercises and took in the
corporation dinner at noon side by side, no one hesitated about offering
congratulations. They might not be exactly due, but it was a sign that there
was going to be an awful lot of nice-looking stationery spoiled by the two
after the sad partings were said. Now we didn't have a doubt that either
Frankling or Ole would amble proudly down between the lilac rows on
Class Day with Miss Spencer, under the good old pretense of helping her
locate the dinner-tables a hundred yards away; and betting on the affair got

pretty energetic. Day after day the odds varied. When Frankling broke
closing-time rules at Browning Hall by a good thirty minutes some two-to-
one money was placed on him. When Ole and Miss Spencer cut chapel the
next day the odds promptly switched. You could get takers on either side at
any time, but I think the odds favored Ole a little. You can't help boosting
your preferences with your good money. It's like betting on your college
team.
Commencement Week came and, although we were Seniors, we went
through it without hardly noticing the scenery. We watched Ole and
Frankling all through Baccalaureate, and when Ole won a twenty-yard dash
across the church and over several of us, and marched down the street with
Miss Spencer, it looked as if all was over but the Mendelssohn business.
But Frankling had her in a box at the class play the next night. How could
you pay any attention to the glorious threshold of life and the expiring gasps
of dear college days with a race like that on!
Commencement was on Wednesday and Senior Day was Thursday. Up to
Wednesday night it was an even break—steen points all. One of the two had
won. We hadn't a doubt of it. But, if both men had been born poker players,
drawing to fill, in a jack-pot that had been sweetened nine times, you
couldn't have told less to look at them. Frankling was as glum as ever and
Ole had the same reënforced concrete expression of innocence that he used
to wear while he was getting off the ball behind somebody's goal line, after
having carried it the length of the field. We were discussing the thing that
night on the porch of the Eta Bita Pie house and were putting up a few final
bets when Ole came up, carpet-bag in hand and his diploma under his arm,
and bade us good-by. He was going out on the midnight train—going away
for good.
For a minute you could have heard the grass growing. If Ole was going
away that night it meant just one thing: the cruel Miss Spencer had tossed
him over and he was bumping the bumps downward into a cold and
cheerless future. We were so sorry we could hardly speak for a minute.
Then Allie Bangs got up and put his arm as far across Ole's shoulder as it
would go.
"By thunder, I'm sorry, old chap!" he said huskily.

For a man who had just had an air-castle fall on his neck, Ole didn't talk
very dejectedly. "Vy yu ban sorry?" he demanded. "Aye got gude yob St.
Paul vay. De boss write me Aye skoll come Friday. Aye ent care to be late
first t'ing."
"But, Ole—" Bangs began. Then he stopped. You can't bawl out a question
about another man's love affairs before a whole mob.
"Yu fallers ban fine tu me," Ole began again. "Aye lak yu bully! Ven yu
come by St. Paul, take Yim Hill's railroad and come to Sven Akerson's
camp, femt'n mile above Lars Hjellersen's gang. Aye ban boss of Sven's
camp now. Aye gat yu gude time and plenty flapyack."
He turned to go. Allie and I got up and walked firmly down the walk with
him. We were going to be relieved of our suspense if we had to buy the
information.
"Now, Ole," said Allie, grabbing his carpet-bag, "you know we're not going
to let you go down to the train alone. Besides, we want to know if
everything is all right with you. You know we love you. We're for you, Ole.
You—you and Miss Spencer parting good friends?"
"Yu bet!" said Ole enthusiastically. "She ban fine gur'rl, Aye tal yu. Sum day
Aye ban sending her deerskin from lumber camp."
Bangs braced up again. "Er—you and Miss Spencer—er—not engaged, are
you?" he said, the way a fellow goes at it when he is diving into cold water.
Ole looked around in perfect good humor. "Get married by each odder?" he
said. "Yee whiz! no, Master Bangs. She ban nice gur'rl. It ent any nicer in
Siwash College. But she kent cook. She kent build fire in woodstove. She
kent wash. She kent bake flatbrot. She kent make close. She yust ban purty,
like picture. Vat for Aye vant to marry picture gallery? Aye ban tu poor
faller fur picture gallery, Aye tank."
"But, Ole," says I, jumping in, "you've been rushing the girl all winter as if
your life depended on it. What did you mean by that?"
Ole turned around patiently and sat down on the steps of the First Methodist
Church, which happened to be passing just then. "Vell, Aye tal yu," he
explained. "Miss Spencer she ban nice tu me. She go tu class party 'nd ent

give dam vat das Frankling faller say. Aye ent forget dat, Aye tal yu; 'nd, by
yimminy Christmas! Aye show her gude time all right."
We took Ole to the station and sat down to rest three times on the way back.
So all that terrific performance was a reward for Miss Spencer! "O
gratitude!" says the poet, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!"
We were so dazed that night that it didn't occur to us to wonder why Miss
Spencer stood for all the gratitude. But the next day, when the exercises
were over, that young lady stepped down from the platform and was met by
a tall chap whom she later introduced to us as a friend of the family from
her home town. You can always spot these family friends by the way the
girl blushes when she introduces them. Miss Spencer wore a fine new
diamond ring and we knew what it meant. It was just another case where
the girl came to school and the man stayed at home and built a seven-room
house on a prominent corner four blocks from his hardware store and
waited—and tried not to get any more jealous than possible. I suppose Miss
Spencer used Ole as a sort of parachute to let Frankling down easily at the
last. Anyway, we wiped the whole affair off the slate after that. She wasn't
one of us, anyway. Made us shiver to think of her. What if one of us had
sailed in the Freshman year and cut Frankling out!

You can always spot these family friends
Page 252

CHAPTER X
VOTES FROM WOMEN

Do I believe in woman's suffrage? Certainly, if you do, Miss Allstairs. As I
sit here, where I couldn't help seeing you frown if I didn't please you, I
favor anything you favor. If you want the women to vote just hand me the
ax and show me the man who would prevent them. If you think the women
should play the baseball of our country it's all right with me. I'll help pass a
law making it illegal for Hans Wagner to hang around a ball park except as
water-boy. If you believe that women ought to wear three-story hats in
theaters—
No, I'm not making fun of you. I hope I may never be allowed to lug a box
of Frangipangi's best up your front steps again if I am. If you want the
women to vote, Miss Allstairs, just breathe the word, and I'll go out and
start a suffragette mob as soon as ever I can find a brick. And I would be a
powerful advocate, too. You can't tell me that women wouldn't be able to
handle the ballot. You can't tell me they would get their party issues mixed
up with their party gowns. I've seen them vote and I've seen them play
politics. And let me tell you, when woman gets the vote man will totter
right back to the kitchen and prepare the asparagus for supper, just to be out
of harm's way. His good old arguments about the glory of the nation, the
rising price of wheat and the grand record of those sterling patriots who
have succeeded in getting their names on the government payroll won't get
him to first base when women vote. He'll have to learn the game all over
again, and the first ninety-nine years' course of study will be that famous
subject, "Woman."
How do I know so much about it? Just as I told you. I've been through the
mill. I've seen women vote. I've tried to get them to vote my way. I've never
herded humming birds or drilled goldfishes in close formation, but I'd take
the job cheerfully. It would be just a rest cure after four years' experience in
persuading a large voting body of beautiful and fascinating young women
to vote the ticket straight and to let me name the ticket.

Oh, no! I never lived in Colorado, and I never was a polygamist in Utah,
thank you. I'm nothing but an alumnus of Siwash College, which, as you
know, is co-educational to a heavenly degree. I'm just a young alumnus
with about eighty-nine gray hairs scattered around in my thatch. Each one
of those gray hairs represents a vote gathered by me from some Siwash co-
ed in the cause of liberty and progress and personal friends. Eighty-nine
was my total score. Took me four years to get 'em, working seven days in
the week and forty weeks in the year. I'm no brass-finished and splash-
lubricated politician, but I'll bet I could go out in any election and cord up
that many votes with whiskers on them in three days. "Votes for Women" is
a fine sentiment and very appropriate, Miss Allstairs, but "Votes from
Women" has always been the motto under which I have fought and been
bled—I beg your pardon; that just slipped out accidentally. Of course there
was nothing of the sort possible. Now there isn't the slightest use of your
getting angry and making me feel like an Arctic explorer in a linen suit. If
you insist I'll go out on the front porch and sit there a few weeks until you
forgive me, but that's the very best I can do for you. I will positively not
erase myself from your list of acquaintances. When a man has been hanging
around the world in a bored way for thirty-two years, just waiting for Fate
to catch up with its assignments and trundle you along within my range in
order to give the sun a rest—
Oh, well—if you forgive me of course I'll stop anything you say. Though
really, now, that wasn't joshing. It came from the depths. Anyway, as I was
saying, "Votes from Women"—excuse me, please; I fell off there once and
I'm going to go slow—"Votes from Women" was the burning question back
at Siwash when I infested the campus. The women had the votes already—
no use agitating that. The big question was getting 'em back when we
needed them. You see, the Faculty always insisted on regulating athletics
more or less and on organizing things for us—didn't believe we mere
college youths could get an organization together according to Hoyle, or
whoever drew up the rules of disorder in college societies, without the help
of some skyscraper-browed professor. So they saw fit to organize what they
called a general athletic association. Every student who paid a dollar was
enrolled as a member, with a vote and the privilege of blowing a horn in a
lady or gentleman like manner at all college games. And just to assure a
large membership, the faculty made a rule that the dollar must be paid by all

students with their tuition at the beginning of the year. That, of course,
enrolled the whole college, girls and all, in the Athletic Association. And it
was the Athletic Association that raised the money to pay for the college
teams and hired the coaches and greased old Siwash's way to glory every
fall during the football season.
Now this didn't bother any for a few years. The men went to the meetings
and voted, and the girls stayed at home and made banners for the games.
Everything was lovely and comfortable. Then one day, in my Freshman
year just before the election, there was a crack in the slate and the Shi Delts
saw a chance to elect one of their men president—it wasn't their turn that
year, but you never could trust the Shi Delts politically any farther than you
could kick a steam roller. They put up their man and there was a little
campaign for about three hours that got up to eleven hundred revolutions a
minute. We clawed and scratched and dug for votes and were still short
when Reilly got an idea and rushed over to Browning Hall. Five minutes
before the polls closed he appeared, leading twenty-seven Siwash girls, and
the trouble was over. They voted for our man and he was elected by four
votes. But, incidentally, we tipped over a can of—no, wait a minute. I've
simply got to be more classical. What's the use of a college diploma if you
have to tell all you know in baseball language? Let's see—you remember
that beautiful Greek lady who opened a box under the impression that there
was a pound of assorted chocolate creams in it and let loose a whole
international museum of trouble? Dora Somebody—eh? Oh, yes, Pandora. I
always did fall down on that name. Anyway, the box we opened in that
election would have made Pandora's little grief repository look like a box of
pink powder. The kind you girls—oh, very well. I take it back. Honestly,
Miss Allstairs, you'll get me so afraid of the cars in a minute that I'll have to
ditch this train of thought and talk about art. Ever hear me talk about art?
Well, it would serve you right if you did. I talked about art with a
kalsominer once, and he wanted to fight me for the honor of his profession.
However, as I was saying, the women voted at Siwash that fall and I guess
they must have liked the taste, for the first thing we knew we had the
woman vote to take care of all the time. The next fall pretty nearly every
girl in the college turned out to class meetings, and the way they voted
pretty nearly drove us mad. They seemed to regard it as a game. They
fussed about whether to vote on pink paper or blue paper; voted for

members of the Faculty for class president; one of them voted for the
President of the United States for president of the Sophomore class; wanted
to vote twice; came up to the ballot box and demanded their votes back
because they had changed their minds; went away before election and left
word with a friend to vote for them. Took us an hour, right in football
practice time, to get the ticket through in our class; and what with lending
pencils and chasing girls who carried their ballots away with them, and
getting called down for trying to see that everything went along proper and
shipshape and according to program, we boys were half crazy when it was
all over.
But the girls liked it enormously. It was a novelty for them, and we saw
right there that it was a case of organize the female vote or have things
hopelessly muddled up before the end of the year. In the interests of
harmony things had to be done in a businesslike manner. Certain candidates
had to be put through and certain factions had to be gently but firmly
stepped on. Harmony, you know, Miss Allstairs, is a most important thing in
politics. Without harmony you can't do a thing. Harmony in politics consists
of giving the insurgents not what they ask for, but something that you don't
want. I was a grand little harmonizer in my day too. I ran the oratorical
league the year before it went broke and then traded the presidency to the
Chi Yi-Delta Whoop crowd for the editorship of the Student Weekly. That's
harmony. They were happy and so was I. When I saw how hard they had to
hustle to pay the association debts the next fall I was so happy I could
hardly stand it.
No, Miss Allstairs, that was not meanness on my part. It was politics. There
is a great deal of difference between meanness and politics. One is
lowdown and contemptible and nasty, and the other is expedient. See? Why,
some of the most generous men in the world are politicians. Time and again
I've seen Andy Hoople, the big politician of our town, pay a man's fare to
Chicago so that he could go up there and rest during the last week of a
political campaign and not bother himself and get all worried over the way
things were going—and the man would be on the other side too.
Anyway, to—wait a minute; I'm going to hook over some French now.
Look out, low bridge—to rendezvous to our muttons—how's that? In a
good many ways there are worse jobs than that of persuading a pretty girl to

vote the right way. Sometimes I liked the job so well that I was sorry when
election came. But, on the whole, it was hard, hard work. We tried
arguments and exhortation and politics, and you might as well have shot
cheese balls at the moon. Never touched 'em. I talked straight logic to a girl
for an hour once, showing her conclusively that it was her duty as a
patriotic Siwash student to vote for a man who could give a strong mind
and a lot of money to the debating cause; and then she remarked quite
placidly that she would always vote for the other man for whatever office
he wanted, because he wore his dress suit with such an air. I had to take her
clear downtown and buy her ice cream and things before she could
understand the gravity of the case at all—
No, indeed, Miss Allstairs, I didn't bribe her. You must be very careful about
charging people with bribery. Bribery is a very serious offense. It's so
serious that nowadays it's a very grave thing to charge a politician with it. I
think it will be made a crime soon. I bought ice cream for this girl because
she could understand things better while she was eating ice cream. It made
her think better. Of course, you can't do that with a man in real politics. You
have to give him an office or a contract or something in order to get his
mind into a cheerful condition. You can argue so much better with a man
when he is cheerful. No, indeed. I wouldn't bribe a fly. Nobody would.
There isn't any bribing any more anyway. Illinois has taught the world that.
But that was the least of our troubles. After you had persuaded a girl to vote
right you had to keep her persuaded. Now most any man might be able to
keep one vote in line, but that wasn't enough. Some of us had to keep four
or five votes all ready for use, for competition was pretty swift and there
were a tremendous number of co-eds in school. You never saw such a job as
it was. No sooner would I have Miss A. entirely friendly to my candidate
for the editorship of the Weekly than Miss B. would flop over and show
marked signs of frost—and then I would have to drop everything and walk
over from chapel with her three mornings hand-running, and take her to a
play, and make a wild pass about not knowing whether any one would go to
the prom with me or not. And then just as she would begin to smile when
she saw me Miss A. would pass me on the street and look at me as if I had
robbed a hen-roost. And just as I was entirely friendly with both of them it
would occur to me that I hadn't called on Miss C. for three weeks and that
Bannister, of the Alfalfa Delts, was waiting for Miss D. after chapel every

morning and would doubtless make a lowdown, underhanded attempt to
talk politics to her in the spring. For a month before each election I felt like
a giddy young squirrel running races with myself around a wheel. Some
college boys can keep on terms of desperate and exclusive friendliness with
a dozen girls at a time—Petey Simmons got up to eighteen one spring when
we won the big athletic election—but four or five were as many as I could
manage by any means, and it kept me busted, conditioned and all out of
training to accomplish this. And when election-time approached and it came
to talking real politics, and the girl you had counted on all winter to swing
her wing of the third floor in Browning Hall for your candidate would
suddenly remember in the midst of a businesslike talk on candidates and
things that you had cut two dances with her at the prom, and you couldn't
explain that you simply had to do it because you had to keep your stand-in
with a girl on the first floor who had the music-club vote in her pocket-book
—well, I may get out over Niagara Falls some day on a rotten old tight-
rope, with a sprained ankle and a fellow on my shoulders who is drunk and
wants to make a speech, standing up—but if I do I won't feel any more
wobbly and uncertain about the future than I used to feel on those
occasions.
Of course it was entirely impossible for the few dozen college politicians to
make personal friends and supporters of all the girls in Siwash. We didn't
want to. There are girls and girls at Siwash, just as there are everywhere
else. Maybe a third of the Siwash girls were pretty and fascinating and wise
and loyal, and nine or ten other exceedingly pleasant adjectives. And
perhaps another third were—well, nice enough to dance with at a class
party and not remember it with terror. And then there was another third
which—oh, well, you know how it goes everywhere. They were grand
young women, and they were there for educational purposes. They took
prizes and learned a lot, and this was partly because there were no swarms
of bumptious young collegians hanging around them and wasting their time.
Far be it from me, Miss Allstairs, to speak disparagingly of a single member
of your sex—you are all too good for us—but, if you will force me to admit
it, there were girls at Siwash—ex-girls—who would have made a true and
loyal student of art and beauty climb a high board—certainly, I said I wasn't
going to say anything against them, and I'm not. Anyway, it's no great

compliment to be admired for your youth and beauty alone. Age has its
claims to respect too—oh, very well; I'll change the subject.
As I was saying, we couldn't influence all the co-ed vote personally, but we
handled it very systematically. Every popular girl in the school had her
following, of course, at Browning Hall. So we just fought it out among the
popular girls. Before elections they'd line up on their respective sides, and
then they'd line up the rest of the co-ed vote. On a close election we'd get
out every vote, and we'd have it accounted for, too, beforehand. The real
precinct leaders had nothing on us. It took a lot of time and worry; but it
was all very pleasant at the end. The popular girls would each lead over her
collection of slaves of Horace and Trig, and Counterpoint and Rhetoric, and
we'd cheer politely while they voted 'em. Then we'd take off our hats and
bow low to said slaves, and they would go back to their galleys after having
done their duty as free-born college girls, and that would be over for
another year. Everything would have continued lovely and comfortable and
darned expensive if it hadn't been for Mary Jane Hicks, of Carruthers'
Corners, Missouri.
No, I've never told you of Mary Jane Hicks. Why? The real reason is
because when we fellows of that period mention her name we usually cuss a
little in a hopeless and irritable sort of way. It's painful to think of her. It's
humiliating to think that twenty-five of the case-hardened and time-
seasoned politicians of Siwash should have been double-crossed,
checkmated, outwitted, out-generaled, sewed up into sacks and dumped into
Salt Creek by a red-headed, freckled-nosed exile from a Missouri clay farm;
and a Sophomore at that—say, what am I telling you this for, Miss
Allstairs? Honestly, it hurts. It's nice for a woman to hear, I know, but I may
have to take gas to get through this story.

It was a blow between the eyes
Page 268
This Mary Jane Hicks came to Siwash the year before it all happened and
was elected to the unnoticeables on the spot. She was a dumpy little girl,
with about as much style as a cornplanter; and I suspect that she bade her
pet calf a fond good-by when she left the dear old farm to come and play
tag with knowledge on the Siwash campus. Nobody saw her in particular
the first year, except that you couldn't help noticing her hair any more than
you can help noticing a barn that's burning on a damp, dark night. It was
explosively red and she didn't seem to care. She always had her nose turned
up a little—just on principle, I guess. And when you see a red-headed girl
with a freckled nose that turns up just locate the cyclone cellars in your
immediate vicinity, say I.

Well, Mary Jane Hicks went through her Freshman year without causing
any more excitement than you could make by throwing a clamshell into the
Atlantic Ocean. She drew a couple of classy men for the class parties and
they reported that she towed unusually hard when dancing. She voted in the
various elections under the protecting care of Miss Willoughby, who was a
particular friend of mine just before the Athletic election, and that's how I
happened to meet her. I was considerably grand at that time—being a Junior
who had had a rib smashed playing football and was going to edit the
college paper the next year—but the way she looked at me you would have
thought that I was the fractional part of a peeled cipher. She just nodded at
me and said "Howdedo," and then asked if the vest-pocket vote was being
successfully extracted that day. That was nervy of her and I frowned; after
which she remarked that she objected to voting without being told in
advance that the cause of liberty was trembling in the voter's palm. I
remember wondering at the time where she had dug up all that rot.
Miss Hicks voted at all the elections along with the rest of the herd, and as
far as I know no rude collegian came around and broke into her studies by
taking her anywhere. Commencement came and we all went home, and I
forgot all about her. The next fall was a critical time with the Eta Bita Pie-
Fly Gam-Sigh Whoopsilon combination, because we had graduated a large
number of men and we had to pull down the fall elections with a small
voting strength. So I went down to college a day early to confer with some
of the other patriotic leaders regarding slates and other matters concerning
the good of the college.
I hadn't more than stepped off the train until I met Frankling, the president
of the Alfalfa Delts, and Randolph, of the Delta Kappa Sonofaguns, and
Chickering, of the Mu Kow Moos, in close consultation. It was very evident
that they were going to do a little high-class voting too. And before night I
discovered that the Shi Delts and the Delta Flushes and the Omega Salves
had formed a coalition with the independents, and that there was going to
be more politics to the square inch in old Siwash that year than there had
been since the year of the big wind—that's what we called the year when
Maxwell was boss of the college and swept every election with his
eloquence.

There were any number of important elections coming off that fall. There
were all the class elections, of course, and the Oratorical election, and a
couple of vacancies to fill in the Athletic Association, and a college marshal
to elect, and goodness knows what all else to nail down and tuck away
before we could get down to the serious job of fighting conditions that fall.
I was so busy for the first three days, wiring up the new students and
putting through a trade on the Athletic secretaryship with the Delta Kap
gang, that I couldn't pay any attention to the class elections. But they were
pretty safe anyway. It was only about a day's job to put through a class slate.
The Junior election came first, and we had arranged to give it to Miss
Willoughby. We always elected women presidents of the Junior class at
Siwash. Little Willoughby had a cinch because, of course, our crowd
backed her hard—and we were strong in Juniors—and, besides she had a
good following among the girls. So we just turned the whole thing over to
the girls to manage and thought no more about it, being mighty hard
pressed by the miserable and un-American bipartisan combination on the
Athletic offices.
School opened on Tuesday. The Junior class election came off on Thursday
afternoon and a Miss Hamthrick was elected president. I would have bet on
the college bell against her. It was the shockingest thing that had happened
in politics for five years. Miss Hamthrick was a conservatory student. Even
when you shut your eyes and listened to her singing she didn't sound good-
looking. Davis drew her for the Sophomore class party the year before and
exposed himself to the mumps to get out of going. Not only was she elected
president, but the rest of the offices went to—no, I'll not describe them. I'm
sort of prejudiced anyway. They made Miss Hamthrick seem beautiful and
clever by comparison.
It was a blow between the eyes. The worst of it was we couldn't understand
it. I went over to see Miss Willoughby about it, and she came down all
powdery and beautiful about the eyes and nose and talked to me as
haughtily as if I had done it myself. She said she had trusted us, but it was
evident that all a woman could hope for in politics was the privilege of
being fooled by a man. She even accused me of helping elect the Hamthrick
lady, said she wished me joy, and asked if it had been a pretty romance.
That made me tired, and I said—oh, well, no use remembering what I said.
It was the last thing I ever had a chance to say to Miss Willoughby anyway.

I was pretty miserable over it—politically, of course, I mean, Miss Allstairs.
You understand. Now there's no use saying that. It wasn't so. College girls
are all very well, and one must be entertained while getting gorged with
knowledge; but really, when it comes to more serious things, I never—
All right, I'll go on with my story. The next day we got a harder blow than
ever. The Freshman class election came off on a snap call, and about half
the class, mostly girls, elected a lean young lady with spectacles and a
wasp-like conversation to the presidency. We raised a storm of indignation,
but they blandly told us to go hence. There was nothing in the Constitution
of the United States to prevent a woman from being president of the
Freshman class, and there didn't seem to be any other laws on the subject.
Besides, the Freshman class was a brand-new republic and didn't need the
advice of such an effete monarchy as the Senior class. While we were
talking it all over the next day the Sophomores met, and after a terrific
struggle between the Eta Bita Pies, the Alfalfa Delts and the Shi Delts, Miss
Hicks was elected president by what Shorty Gamble was pleased to term
"the gargoyle vote." I wouldn't say that myself of any girl, but Shorty had
been working for the place for a year, and when the twenty girls who had
never known what it was to have a sassy cab rumble up to Browning Hall
and wait for them cast their votes solidly and elected the Missouri Prairie
Fire he felt justified in making comments.
By this time it was a case of save the pieces. The whole thing had been as
mysterious as the plague. We were getting mortal blows, we couldn't tell
from whom. All political signs were failing. The game was going backward.
A lot of the leaders got together and held a meeting, and some of them were
for declaring a constitutional monarchy and then losing the constitution.
My! But they were bitter. Everybody accused everybody else of double-
crossing, underhandedness, gum-shoeing, back-biting, trading, pilfering and
horse-stealing. I think there was a window or two broken during the
discussion. But we didn't get anywhere. The next day the Senior class
elected officers, and every frat went out with a knife for its neighbor. A
quiet lady by the name of Simpkins, who was one of the finest old wartime
relics in school, was elected president.
That night I began putting two and two and fractional numbers together and
called in calculus and second sight on the problem. I remembered what the

Hicks girl had said to me the year before. That was more than the ordinary
girl ought to know about politics. I remembered seeing her doing more or
less close-harmony work with the other midnight-oil consumers—and the
upshot was I went over to Browning Hall that night and called on her.
She came down in due time—kept me waiting as long as if she had been the
belle of the prom—and she shook hands all over me.
"My dear boy," she said, sitting down on the sofa with me, "I'm so delighted
to renew our old friendship."
Now, I don't like to be "my dear boyed" by a Sophomore, and there never
had been any old friendship. I started to stiffen up—and then didn't. I didn't
because I didn't know what she would do if I did.
"How are all the other good old chaps?" she said as cordially as could be.
"My, but those were grand days."

"How are all the other good old
chaps?" she said
Page 270
I didn't see any terminus in that conversation. Besides, she looked like one
of those most uncomfortable girls who can guy you in such an innocent and
friendly manner that you don't know what to say back. So I brushed the
preliminaries aside and jumped right into the middle of things. "Miss
Hicks," says I, "why are you doing all this?"
"Singular or plural you?" she asked. "And why am I or are we doing what,
and why shouldn't we?"

"Help," said I, feeling that way. "Do you deny that you haven't been
instrumental in upsetting the whole college with those fool elections?"
"I am a modest young lady," said she, "so, of course, I deny it. Besides, this
college isn't upset at all. I went over this morning and every professor was
right side up with care where he belonged. And, moreover, you must not
call an election a fool because it doesn't do what you want it to. It can't help
itself."
"Miss Hicks," says I, feeling like a fly in an acre of web, "I am a plain and
simple man and not handy with my tongue. What I mean is this, and I hope
you'll excuse me for living—do you admit that you had a hand in those
class elections?"
Miss Hicks looked at me in the friendliest way possible. "It is more modest
to admit it than to declare it, isn't it?" she asked.
"Certainly," says I; "and this leads right back to question Number One—
Why did you do it?"
"And this leads back to answer Number One—Why shouldn't I?" she asked
again.
"Why, don't you see, Miss Hicks," says I, "that you've elected a lot of girls
that never have been active in college work, and that don't represent the
student body, and—"
"Don't go to the proms?" she suggested.
"I didn't say it and I'd die before I did," said I virtuously. "But what's your
object?"
"Education," said Miss Hicks mildly. "I'm paying full tuition and I want to
get all there is out of college. I think politics is a fascinating study. I didn't
get a chance to do much at it last year, but I'm learning something about it
every day now."
"But what's the good of it all?" I protested. "You'll just get the college
affairs hopelessly mixed up—"
"Like the Oratorical Association was last year?" she inquired gently.

"Oh, pshaw!" said I, getting entirely red. "Let's not get personal. What can
we do to satisfy you?"
"You've been satisfying us beautifully so far," said Miss Hicks.
"Who's us?" I asked.
"I don't in the least mind telling you," said Miss Hicks. "It's the Blanks."
"The Blanks!" I repeated fretfully. "Never heard of 'em."
"I know it," said Miss Hicks, "but you named them yourselves. What do
you say you've drawn when you draw a homely girl's name out of the hat as
a partner for a class party?"
"Oh!" said I.
"We're the Blanks," said Miss Hicks, "and we feel that we haven't been
getting our full share of college atmosphere. So we're going into politics. In
this way we can mingle with the students and help run things and have a
very enjoyable time. It's most fascinating. All of us are dippy over it."
"Oh," said I again. "You mean you're going to ruin things for your own
selfish interests?"
"My dear boy," said Miss Hicks—my, but that grated—"we're not going to
ruin anything. And we may build up the Oratorical Association."
That was too much. I got up and stood as nearly ten feet as I could. "Very
well," said I. "If there's no use of arguing on a reasonable basis we may as
well terminate this interview. But I'll just tell you there's no use of your
going any further. Now we know what we have to fight, we'll take precious
good care that you do not do any more mischief."
"Oh, very well," said Miss Hicks—she was infuriatingly good-natured
—"but I might as well tell you that we're going to get the Athletic offices,
the prom committee, the Oratorical offices and the Athletic election next
spring."
"Ha, ha!" said I loudly and rudely. Then I took my hat and went away. Miss
Hicks asked me very eagerly to drop in again. Me? I'd as soon have dropped

on a Mexican cactus. It couldn't be any more uncomfortable.
I went away and called our gang together and we seethed over the situation
most all night. They voted me campaign leader on the strength of my
service, and the next day we got the rest of the frats together, buried the
hatchet and doped out the campaign. It was the pride and strength of Siwash
against a red-headed Missouri girl, weight about ninety-five pounds; and we
couldn't help feeling sorry for her. But she had brought it on herself.
Insurgency, Miss Allstairs, is a very wicked thing. It's a despicable attempt
on the part of the minority to become the majority, and no true patriot will
desert the majority in his time of need.
I'm not going to linger over the next month. I'll get it over in a few words.
We started out to exterminate Miss Hicks. We put up our candidate for the
Oratorical Association presidency. The hall was jammed when the time
came, and before anything could be done Miss Hicks demanded that no one
be allowed to vote who hadn't paid his or her dues. Half the fellows we had
there never had any intention of getting that far into Oratorical work, and
backed out; but the rest of us paid up. There had never been so much money
in the treasury since the association began. Then the Blanks nominated a
candidate and skinned us by three votes. When we thought of all that money
gone to waste we almost went crazy.
But that was just a starter. We were determined to have our own way about
the Junior prom. What do wall-flowers know about running a prom? We
worked up an absolute majority in the Junior class, only to have a snap
meeting called on us over in Browning Hall, in which three middle-aged
young ladies who had never danced a step were named. The roar we raised
was terrific, but the president sweetly informed us that they had only
followed precedent—we'd had to do the same thing the year before to keep
out the Mu Kow Moos. We appealed to the Faculty, and it laughed at us.
Unfortunately, we didn't stand any too well there anyway, while most of the
Blanks were the pride and joy of the professors. Anyway, they told us to
fight our own battles and they'd see that there was fair play. Oh, yes. They
saw it. They passed a rule that no student who was conditioned in any study
could vote in any college election. That disenfranchised about half of us
right on the spot. If ever anarchy breaks out in this country, Miss Allstairs, it
will be because of college Faculties.

We made a last stand on the Athletic Association treasurership. It looked for
a while as if it was going to be easy. We threw all the rules away and gave a
magnificent party for all the girls we thought we could count on. It was the
most gorgeous affair on record, and half the dress suits in college went into
hock afterward for the whole semester. The result was most encouraging.
The girls were delighted. They pledged their votes and support and we
counted up that we had a clear majority. We went to bed that night happy
and woke up to find that Miss Hicks had entertained the non-fraternity men
in the gymnasium that night and had served lemonade and wafers. She had
alluded to them playfully as slaves, and they had broken up about fifty
chairs demonstrating that they were not. When the election came off she
had the unattached vote solid, and we lost out by a comfortable majority. An
estimable lady, who didn't know athletics from croquet, was elected. And
when the reception committee of the prom was announced the next day it
was composed exclusively of men who would have had to be led through
the grand march on wheels.
After that we gave up. I tried to resign as campaign manager, but the boys
wouldn't let me. They admitted that no one else could have done any better,
and, besides, they wanted me to go over and see Miss Hicks again. They
wanted me to ask her what her crowd wanted. When I thought of her
pleasant conversational hatpin work I felt like resigning from college; but
there always have to be martyrs, and in the end I went.
Miss Hicks received me rapturously. You would have thought we had been
boy and girl friends. She insisted on asking how all the folks were at home,
and how my health had been, and hadn't it been a gay winter, and was I
going to the prom, and how did I like her new gown? While I was at it I
thought I might as well amuse myself, too, so I asked her to marry me. That
was the only time I ever got ahead of her. She refused indignantly, and I
laughed at her for getting so fussed up over a little thing.
"Marriage is a sacred subject," she said very soberly.
"So was politics," said I, "until you came along. If you won't talk marriage
let's talk politics. What do you girls want?"
"Oh, I told you a while ago," she said.

"But, Great Scott!" said I. "Aren't you going to leave a thing for us fellows
who have done our best for the college?"
"Now you put it that way," she said quite kindly, "I'll think it over. We
might find something for you to do. There's a couple of janitorships loose."
"Hicksey," says I.
"Miss Hicks," says she.
"I beg your pardon—my dear girl, then," said I. "I've come over to the
bunch to confess. You've busted us. We're on the mat nine points down and
yelling for help. We don't want to run things. We only want to be allowed to
live. We surrender. We give up. We humbly ask that you prepare the crow
and let us eat the neck. Isn't there any way by which we can get a little
something to keep us busy and happy? We're in a horrible situation. Aren't
you even going to let us have the Athletic Association next spring?"
"I was thinking of running that myself," said Miss Hicks thoughtfully.
I let out an impolite groan.
"But I'll tell you what you might do," said Miss Hicks. "You boys might try
to win my crowd away from me. You see, you've played right into my hand
so far. You haven't paid any attention to my supporters. Now, if you were to
go after them the way you do the other girls in the college I shudder to think
what might happen to me."
"You mean take them to parties and theaters?"
"Why not?" asked Miss Hicks. "You see, they're only human. I'll bet you
could land every vote in the bunch if you went at it scientifically."
"But—"
"Oh, I know they're not pretty," said Miss Hicks. "But they cast the most
bee-you-ti-ful votes you ever saw."
"What you mean," I said, "is that if we don't show those girls a superlatively
good time this winter we won't get a look at the election next spring?"

"They'd be awfully shocked if you put it that way," said Miss Hicks; "and I
wouldn't advise you to talk to them about it. Their notions of honor are so
high that I had to pay for the lemonade for the independent men myself at
the last election."
"Oh, very well," says I, taking my hat, "we'll think it over."
"You might wear blinders, you know," she suggested.
"Oh, go to thunder!" said I as earnestly as I could.
"Come again," she said when she closed the door after me. "I do so enjoy
these little confidences."
Honestly, Miss Allstairs, when I think of that girl I shrink up until I'm afraid
I'll fall into my own hat. It ought not to be legal for a girl to talk to a man
like that. It's inhuman.
We thought matters over for two weeks and tried one or two little raids on
the enemy with most horrible results to ourselves. Then we gave in. We put
our pride and our devotion to art in cold storage and took up the politicians'
burden. We gave those girls the time of their young-to-middle-aged lives.
We got up dances and crokinole parties and concerts for them. We took
them to see Hamlet. We had sleighing parties. We helped every lecture
course in the college do a rushing business. We just backed into the shafts
and took the bit without a murmur. And maybe you think those girls didn't
drive us. They seemed determined to make up for the drought of all the
past. They were as coy and uncertain and as infernally hard to please as if
they'd been used to getting one proposal a day and two on Sunday. Let one
of us so much as drop over to Browning Hall to pass the time of day with
one of the real heart-disturbers, and the particular vote that he was courting
would go off the reservation for a week. It would take a pair of theater
tickets at the least to square things.
We gave dances that winter at which only one in five girls could dance. We
took moonlight strolls with ladies who could remember the moon of
seventy-six, and we gave strawrides to girls who insisted on talking history
of art and missionary work to us all the way. When I think of the tons of
candy and the mountains of flowers and the wagonloads of latest books that
we lavished, and of the hard feelings it made in other quarters, and of our

loneliness amid all this gayety, and of our frantic efforts to make the prom a
success, with ten couples dancing and the rest decorating the walls, I
sometimes wonder whether the college was worth our great love for it after
all.
But we were winning out. By April it was easy to see this. The Blanks
thawed with the snow-drifts. They got real friendly and sociable, and after
the warm weather came on we simply had to entertain them all the time,
they liked it so. When I think of those beautiful spring days, with us
sauntering with our political fates about the campus, and the nicest girls in
the world walking two and two all by themselves—Oh, gee! Why, they
even made us cut chapel to go walking with them, just as if it was a genuine
case of "Oh, those eyes!" and "Shut up, you thumping heart."

Why, they even made us cut chapel to go
walking with them
Page 280
All this time Miss Hicks wouldn't accept any invitation at all. She just
flocked by herself as usual, and watched us taking her votes away from her
without any concern apparently. I always felt that she had something saved
up for us, but I couldn't tell what it was; and anyway, we had those votes.
By the time the Athletic election came around there wasn't a doubt of it.
I must say the women did pretty well during the year. They'd cleaned up the
Oratorical debt, and somehow there was about three times as much money
in the Athletic treasury after the football season as there had ever been
before. But they'd raised a lot of trouble too. No passes. Dues had to be paid
up. Nobody got any fun out of the class affairs. They got up lectures and
teas and made the class pay for them. And, anyway, we wanted to run things
again. We'd felt all year like a bunch of last year's sunflowers. Besides, we'd
earned it. We'd earned a starry crown as a matter of fact, but all we asked
was that they give our little old Athletic Association back and let us run it
once more.
Miss Hicks announced herself as a candidate, and we felt sorry for her. Not
one of her gang was with her. They were enthusiastically for us. We'd
planned the biggest party of the year right after the election in celebration,
and had invited them already. Election day came and we hardly worried a
bit. The result was 189 to 197 in favor of Miss Hicks. Every independent
man and every bang-up-to-date girl in college voted for her.
Of course it looks simple enough now, but why couldn't we see it then? We
supposed the real girls knew that it was a case of college patriotism. And, of
course, it was a low-lived trick for Miss Hicks to float around the last day
and spread the impression that we'd never loved them except for their votes.
She simply traded constituencies with us, that's all. Take it coming or going,
year in or year out, you couldn't beat that girl. I'll bet she goes out to
Washington state and gets elected governor some day.
I went over to Browning Hall the night after the election, ready to tell Miss
Hicks just what everybody thought of her. I was prepared to tell her that
every athletic team in college was going to disband and that anarchy would

be declared in the morning. She came down as pleasant as ever and held out
her hand.
"Don't say it, please," she said, "because I'm going to tell you something.
I'm not coming back next year."
"Not coming back!" said I, gulping down a piece of relief as big as an
apple.
"No," she said, "I'm—I'm going to be married this summer. I've—I've been
engaged all this year to a man back home, but I wanted to come back and
learn something about politics. He's a lawyer."
"Well, you learned enough to suit you, didn't you?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," she said with a giggle. "Wasn't it fun, though! My father will be
so pleased. He's the chairman of the congressional committee out at home
and he's always told me an awful lot about politics. I've enjoyed this year so
much."
"Well, I haven't," I said; "but I hope to enjoy next year." And then I took
half an hour to tell her that, in spite of the fact that she was the most arrant,
deceitful, unreliable, two-faced and scuttling politician in the world, she
was almost incredibly nice. She listened quite patiently, and at the end she
held up her fingers. They'd been crossed all the time.
No, that's the last I ever saw of her, Miss Allstairs. She left before
Commencement. She sent me an invitation to the wedding. I'll bet she didn't
quite get the significance of the magnificent silver set we Siwash boys sent.
We sent it to the groom.
That was the end of women dominion at Siwash. There wasn't a rag of the
movement left next fall. But we boys never entirely forgot what happened
to us, and it's still the custom to elect a co-ed to some Athletic office. They
do say that the only way to teach a politician what the people want is to
bore a shaft in his head and shout it in, but our experience ought to be proof
to the contrary. Why, all we needed was the gentle little hint that Mary Jane
Hicks gave us.

CHAPTER XI
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA ALL-AMERICA

How did the Siwash game come out Saturday? Forget it, my boy. You'll
never know in this oversized, ingrowing, fenced-off, insulated metropolis
till some one writes and tells you. Every fall I ask myself that same question
all day Saturday and Sunday, and do you suppose I ever find a Siwash score
in one of those muddy-faced, red-headed, ward-gossip parties that they call
newspapers in New York? Never, not at all, you hopeful tenderfoot from the
unimportant West. After you've existed in this secluded portion of the
universe a few years you'll get over trying to find anything that looks like
news from home in the daily disturbances here. And I don't care whether
your home is in Buffalo, Chicago or Strawberry Point, Iowa, either. Go
down on the East Side and beat up a policeman, and you'll get immortalized
in ten-inch type. Go back West and get elected governor, and ten to one if
you're mentioned at all they'll slip you the wrong state to preside over.
Excuse me, but I'm considerably sore, just as I am every Sunday during the
football season. Here I am, eating my heart out with longing to know
whether good old Siwash has dusted off half a township with Muggledorfer
again, and what do I get to read? Four yards of Gale; five yards of Jarhard;
two yards of Ohell; and a page of Quincetown, Hardmouth, Jamhurst, Saint
Mikes, Holy Moses College and the Connecticut Institute of Etymology.
Nice fodder for a loyal alumnus eleven hundred and then some miles from
home, isn't it? Honest, when I first hit this seething burg I used to go down
to the Grand Central station on Sunday afternoon and look at the people
coming in from the trains, just because some of them were from the West.
Once I took a New Yorker up to Riverside Park, pointed him west and
asked him what he saw. He said he saw a ferryboat coming to New York.
That was all he had ever seen of the other shore. He called it Hinterland.
That made me mad and I called him an electric-light bug. We had a lovely
row.

But we're blasting out a corner for the old coll., even back here. We've got
things fixed pretty nicely here now, we Siwash men. Down near Gramercy
Park there's an old-fashioned city dwelling house, four stories high and
elbow-room wide. It's the Siwash Alumni Club. There are half a hundred
Siwash men in New York, gradually getting into the king row in various
lines of business, and we pay enough rent each year for that house to buy a
pretty fair little cottage out in Jonesville. Whenever a Siwash man drops in
there he's pretty sure to find another Siwash man who smokes the same
brand of tobacco and knows the same brand of college songs. We've got one
legislator, four magazine publishers, two railroad officials, a city prosecutor
and three bankers on the membership roll, and maybe some day we'll have a
mayor. Then we'll pass a law requiring the boys and girls of New York to
spend at least one hour a day learning about Siwash College, Jonesville, the
big team of naughty-nix and the formula for getting credit at the Horseshoe
Café. We'll make it obligatory for every newspaper to publish a full page
about each Siwash game in the fall, with pictures of the captain, the coach
and the fullback's right leg. Hurrah for revenge! I see it coming.
Join the club? Why, you don't have to ask to join it. You've got to join it.
Ten dollars, please, and sign here. When we get a little huskier financially
we won't charge new-fledged graduates anything for a year or two, but
we've got to now. The soulless landlord wants his rent in advance. You'll
find the whole gang there Saturday nights. Just butt right in if I'm not
around. You're a Siwash man, and if you want to borrow the doorknob to
throw at a hackman you've a perfect right to do it.
I'll tell you, old man, you don't know how nice it is to have a hole that you
can hunt in this hurricane town, when you're a bright young chap with a
glorious college past and a business future that you can't hock for a plate of
beans a day! Leaving college and going into business in a big city is like
taking a high dive from the hall of fame into an ice-water tank. Think of
that and be cheerful. You've got a nice time coming. Just now you're
Rudolph Weedon Burlingame, Siwash Naughty-several, late captain of the
baseball team, prize orator, manager of two proms and president of the
Senior class. To-morrow you'll be a nameless cumberer of busy streets,
useful only to the street-car companies to shake down for nickels. To-
morrow you're going around to the manager of some firm or other with a
letter from some customer of his, and you're going to put your hand on your

college diploma so as to have it handy, and you're going to hand him the
letter and prepare to tell the story of your strong young life. But just before
you begin you'll go away, because the manager will tell you he's sorry, but
he's busy, and there are fourteen applicants ahead of you, and anyway he'll
not be hiring any more men until 1918, and will you please come around
then, and shut the door behind you, if you don't mind.
Yep, that's what will happen to you. You'll spend your first three days trying
to haul that diploma out. The fourth day you'll put it in your trunk. I've
known men to cut 'em up for shaving paper. You'll stop trying to tell the
story of your life and in about a week you'll be wondering why you have
been allowed to live so long. In two weeks a clerk will look as big as a
senator to you and you'll begin to get bashful before elevator men. You'll
get off the sidewalk when you see a man who looks as if he had a job and
was in a hurry. You'll envy a messenger boy with a job and a future; you'll
wonder if managers are really carnivorous or only pretend to be. You feel as
tall as the Singer Building to-day, but you'll shrink before long. You'll
shrink until, after a long, hard day, with about nine turndowns in it, you'll
have to climb up on top of the dresser to look at yourself in the glass.
That's what you're going up against. Then the Siwash Club will be your
hole and you'll hunt it every evening. You'll be a big man there, for we
judge our members not by what they are, but by what they were at school.
You'll sit around with the boys after dinner, and the man on your right, who
is running a railroad, will be interested in that home run you made against
Muggledorfer, and the man on your left, who won't touch a law case for less
than five thousand dollars, will tell you that he, too, won the Perkins debate
once. And he'll treat you as if you were a real life-sized human being
instead of a job hunter, knee high to a copying clerk. You'll be back in the
old college atmosphere, as big as the best of 'em, and after you've swapped
yarns all evening you'll go to bed full of tabasco and pepper and you'll
tackle the first manager the next morning as if he were a Kiowa man and
had the ball. And sooner or later you'll get old Mr. Opportunity where he
can't give you the straight arm, and if you don't put a knee in his chest and
tame him for life you haven't got the real Siwash spirit, that's all.
Funny thing about college. It isn't merely an education. It's a whole life in
itself. You enter it unknown and tiny—just a Freshman with no rights on

earth. You work and toil and suffer—and fall in love—and climb and rise to
fame. When you are a Senior, if you have good luck, you are one of the
biggest things in the whole world—for there isn't any world but the campus
at college. Freshmen look up to you and admire men who are big enough to
talk with you. The Sophomores may sneer at faculties and kings, but they
wouldn't think of sassing you. The papers publish your picture in your
football clothes. You dine with the professors, and prominent alumni come
back and shake you by the hand. Of course, you know that somewhere in
the dim nebulous outside there is a President of the United States who is
quite a party in his way, but none of the girls mention it when they tell you
how grand you looked after they had hauled the other team off of you and
sewed on your ear. They talk about you exclusively because you're really
the only thing worth talking about, you know.
When Commencement comes you move about the campus like some tall
mountain peak on legs. The students bring their young brothers up to meet
you and you try to be kind and approachable. They give you a tremendous
cheer when you go down the aisle in the chapel to get your prizes. You are
referred to on all sides as one of the reasons why America is great. The
professors when they bid you good-by ask you anxiously not to forget them.
Then Commencement is over and college life is past, and there is nothing
left in life but to become a senator or run a darned old trust. You leave the
campus, taking care not to step on any of the buildings, and go out into the
world pretty blue because you're through with about everything worth
while; and you wonder if you can stand it to toil away making history
eleven months in the year with only time to hang around college a few
weeks in spring or fall. You're done with the real life. You're an old man,
you've seen it all; and it sometimes takes you two weeks or more to recover
and decide that after all a great career may be almost as interesting in a way
as college itself. So you buck up and decide to accept the career—and that's
where you begin to catch on to the general drift of the universe in dead
earnest.
Take a man of sixty, with a permanent place in Who's Who and a large
circle of people who believe that he has some influence with the sunrise and
sunset. Then let him suddenly find himself a ten-year-old boy with two
empty pockets and an appetite for assets, and let him learn that it isn't
considered even an impertinence to spank him whenever he tries to mix in

and air his opinions. I don't believe he would be much more shocked than
the college man who finds, at the conclusion of a glorious four-year slosh in
fame, that he is really just about to begin life, and that the first thing he
must learn is to keep out from under foot and say "Yes, sir," when the boss
barks at him. It's a painful thing, Burlingame. Took me about a year to think
of it without saying "ouch."
The saddest thing about it all is that the two careers don't always mesh. The
college athlete may discover that the only use the world has for talented
shoulder muscles is for hod-carrying purposes. The society fashion plate
may never get the hang of how to earn anything but last year's model pants;
and the fishy-eyed nonentity, who never did anything more glorious in
college than pay his class tax, may be doing a brokerage business in
skyscrapers within ten years.
When I left Siwash and came to New York I guess I was as big as the next
graduate. Of course I hadn't been the one best bet on the campus, but I knew
all the college celebrities well enough to slap them on the backs and call
them by pet names and lend them money. That of course should be a great
assistance in knowing just how to approach the president of a big city bank
and touch him for a cigar in a red-and-gold corset, while he is telling you to
make yourself at home around the place until a job turns up. Allie Bangs,
my chum, went on East with me. We had decided to rise side by side and to
buy the same make of yachts. Of course we were sensible. We didn't expect
to crowd out any magnates the first week or two. We intended to rise by
honest worth, if it took a whole year. All we asked was that the fellows
ahead should take care of themselves and not hold it against us if we ran
over them from behind. We didn't think we were the biggest men on earth—
not yet. That's where we fell down. We've never had a chance to since.
You've got to seize the opportunity for having a swelled head just as you
have for everything else.
It took us just six weeks to get a toe-hold on the earth and establish our
right to breathe our fair share of New York air. At the end of that time
neither one of us would have been surprised if we had been charged rent
while waiting in the ante-rooms of New York offices to be told that no one
had time to tell us that there was no use of our waiting to get a chance to
ask for anything. Talk about a come-down! It was worse than coming down

a bump-the-bumps with nails in it. It was three months before we got jobs.
They were microscopic jobs in the same company, with wages that were so
small that it seemed a shame to make out our weekly checks on nice
engraved bank paper—jobs where any one from the proprietor down could
yell "Here, you!" and the office boy could have fired us and got away with
it. If I had been hanging on to a rope trailing behind a fifty-thousand-ton
ocean liner I don't believe I should have felt more inconsequential and
totally superfluous.
But they were jobs just the same and we were game. I think most college
graduates are after they get their feelings reduced to normal size. We hung
on and dug in, and sneaked more work into our positions, and didn't quarrel
with any one except the window-washer's little boy who brought meat for
the cats in the basement. We drew the line at letting him boss us. And how
we did enjoy being part of the big rumpus on Manhattan Island. We had a
room—it wasn't so much of a room as it was a sort of stationary vest—and
we ate at those hunger cures where a girl punches out your bill on a little
ticket and you don't dare eat up above the third figure from the bottom or
you'll go broke on Friday. By hook or crook we always managed to save a
dollar from the wreckage each week for Sunday, and say, did you ever
conduct a scientific investigation into just how far a dollar will go providing
a day's pleasure in a big city? We did that for six months, and if I do say it
myself we stretched some of those dollars until the eagle's neck reached
from Tarrytown to Coney Island. We saw New York from roof garden to
sub-cellar. We even got to doing fancy stunts. We'd dig out our dress suits,
go over to one of those cafés where you begin owing money as soon as you
see the head waiter, and put on a bored and haughty front for two hours on a
dollar and twenty cents, including tips. And what we didn't know about the
Subway, the Snubway and the Grubway, the Clubway, and the various
Dubways of New York wasn't worth discovering or even imagining.
We hadn't been conducting our explorations for more than a week when a
most tremendous thing happened to us. You know how you are always
running up against mastodons in the big town. You see about every one who
is big enough to die in scare-heads. Taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue with
an old residenter and having him tell about the people you pass is like
having the hall of fame directory read off to you. Well, one Sunday night
when we were blowing in our little fifty cents apiece on one of those Italian

table d'hôte dinners with red varnish free, Allie looked across the room and
began to tremble. "Look at that chap," says he.
"Who is he?" I asked, getting interested. "Roosevelt?"
"Roosevelt nothing," he says scornfully. "Man alive, that's Jarvis!"
I just dropped my jaw and stared. Of course you remember Jarvis, the great
football player. At that time I guess most of the college boys in America
said their prayers to him. Out West we students used to read of his terrific
line plunges on the eastern fields and of his titanic defense when his team
was hard pushed, and wonder if any of us would ever become great enough
to meet him and shake him by the hand. What did we care for the
achievements of Achilles and Hector and Hercules and other eminent
hasbeens, which we had to soak up at the rate of forty lines of Greek a day?
They had old Homer to write them up—the best man ever in the business.
But they were too tame for us. I've caught myself speculating more than
once on what Achilles would have done if Jarvis had tried to make a gain
through him. Achilles was probably a pretty good spear artist, and all that,
but if Jarvis had put his leather-helmeted head down and hit the line low—
about two points south of the solar plexus—they would have carted Ac.
away in a cab right there, invulnerability and all.
That's about what we thought of Jarvis. We had his pictures pasted all over
our training quarters along with those of the other super-dreadnoughts from
the colleges that break into literature, and I imagine that if he had suddenly
appeared back in Jonesville we should have put our heads right down and
kow-towed until he gave us permission to get up. And here we were, sitting
in the same café with him. I'll tell you, I had never felt the glory of living in
the metropolis and prowling around the ankles of the big chiefs more
vividly than right there in that room the night we first saw him.
We sat and watched Jarvis while our meat course got cold. There was no
mistaking him—some people have their looks copyrighted and Jarvis was
one of them. We would have known it was he if we had seen him in a
Roman mob. After a while Bangs, who always did have a triple reënforced
Harveyized steel cheek, straightened up. "I'm going over to speak to him,"
he said.

"Sit still, you fool," says I; "don't annoy him."
"Watch me," says Bangs; "I'm going over to introduce myself. He can't any
more than freeze me. And after I've spoken to him they can take my little
old job away from me and ship me back to the hayfields whenever they
please. I'll be satisfied."
"You ought to bottle that nerve of yours and sell it to the lightning-rod
pedlers," says I, getting all sweaty. "Just because you introduced yourself to
a governor once you think you can go as far as you like. You stay right here
—" But Bangs had gone over to Jarvis.
I sat there and blushed for him, and suffered the tortures of a man who is
watching his friend making a furry-eared nuisance of himself. There was
the greatest football player in the world being pestered by a frying-sized
sprig of a ninth assistant shipping clerk. It was preposterous. I waited to see
Bangs wilt and come slinking back. Then I was going to put on my hat and
walk out as if I didn't belong with him at all. But instead of that Bangs
shook hands with Jarvis, talked a minute and then sat down with him. When
Bangs is routed out by the Angel Gabriel he'll sit down on the edge of his
grave and delay the whole procession, trying to find a mutual acquaintance
or two. That's the kind of a leather-skin he is.
Presently Bangs turned around and beckoned to me to come over. More
colossal impudence. I wasn't going to do it, but Jarvis turned, too, and
smiled at me. Like a hypnotized man I went over to their table. "I want you
to meet Mr. Jarvis," said Bangs, with the air of a man who is giving away
his aeroplane to a personal friend.
"Glad to meet you," said Jarvis kindly.
"M-m-m-mrugh," says I easily and naturally. Then I sat down on the edge
of a chair.
Well, sir, Jarvis—it was the real Jarvis all right—was as pleasant a fellow as
you would ever care to meet. There he was talking away to us fishworms
just as cordially as if he enjoyed it. He didn't seem to be a bit better than we
were. I've often noticed that when you meet the very greatest people they
are that way. It's only the fellows who aren't sure they're great and who are
pretty sure you aren't sure either, who have to put up a haughty front. Jarvis

offered us cigarettes and put us so much at our ease that we stayed there an
hour. It was a dazzling experience. He told us a lot about the city, and asked
us about ourselves and laughed at our experiences. And he told us that he
often dined there and hoped to see us again. When we got safely outside,
after having bade him good-by without any sort of a break, I mopped my
forehead. Then I took off my hat. "Bangs," said I, "you're the world's
champion. Some day you'll get killed for impudence in the first degree, but
just now I've got ten cents and I'm going to buy you a big cigar and walk
home to pay for it."
Incredible as it may sound, that was the beginning of a real friendship
between the three of us. Jarvis seemed to take a positive pleasure in being
democratic. And he was wonderfully thoughtful, too. He realized
instinctively that we had about nine cents apiece in our clothes as a rule,
and he didn't offer to be gorgeous and buy things we couldn't buy back. We
got to dropping in at the café once a week or so and eating at the same table
with him. Why on earth he fancied eating around with grubs like us, when
he could have been tucking away classy fare up on Fifth Avenue, we
couldn't imagine. Some people are naturally Bohemian, however. It seemed
to delight Jarvis to hear us tell about our team, and our college, and our
prospects, and how lucky we had been up to date, not getting stepped on by
any financial magnate or other tall city monument. He wasn't a talkative
man himself. It was especially hard to pry any football talk out of him,
probably because he was so modest. When we insisted he would finally
open up, and tell us the inside facts about some great college game that we
knew by heart from the newspaper accounts. And he would mention all the
famous players by their first names—you can't imagine how much more
alarming it sounded than calling a president "Teddy"—and we would just
sit there and drink it in, and watch history from behind the scenes until
suddenly he would stop, look absent and shut up like a clam. No use trying
to turn him on again. Presently he would bid us good night and go away.
The first time we thought we had offended him and we were miserable for a
week. But when we ran across him again he seemed as pleased as ever to
see us. It was just moods, after all, we finally decided, and thought no more
about it. Great men have a right to have moods if they want to. We admired
his moods as much as the rest of him, and were only glad they weren't
violent.

It was a couple of months before we got up courage enough to ask him to
drop in at our room. Even Allie got timid. He explained that he didn't want
to break the spell. But finally I braced up myself and invited him to drop
around with us, and he consented as kindly as you please. Came right up to
our little three by twice and wouldn't even sit in the one chair. Sat on the
bed and looked over our college pictures, and chatted until Allie asked him
if he was going back for the big game that fall. Then he said sort of abruptly
that he couldn't get away, and a few minutes afterward he went home. We
thought we'd offended him again, but a week afterward he turned up and
called on us—we'd asked him to drop in any time. We decided that he didn't
like to have too much familiarity about his football career and we respected
him for it. It's all right for a man like that to be affable and democratic, but
he mustn't let you crawl all over him. He's got his dignity to maintain.
As the winter came on Jarvis dropped up to see us quite frequently. He
never asked us to come and see him and we were really a little grateful—for
I don't believe I should have had the nerve to go bouncing into the
apartments of a national hero and hobnob with the mile-a-minute class.
Anyway we didn't expect it or dream of it. And we didn't ask him any more
questions about himself. We didn't care to try to elbow into his circle. If he
chose to come slumming and sit around with us, we were more than
content. We had seen enough of him already to keep us busy paralyzing
Siwash fellows for a week when we went back to Commencement. "Jarvis?
Oh, yes. Fact is, he's a friend of ours. Comes up to our rooms right along.
We happened to meet him in a café. And say, he tells us that when he made
that fifty-yard run—and so on." We used to practise saying things like this
naturally and easily. We could just see the undergrads at the frat house
sitting around in circles and lapping it up.
All this time we were plugging away down at the plant, early and late, with
every ounce of steam we had. There's one good thing about business in this
Bedlam—when you break in you keep right on going. By the time
Commencement rolled around we were getting checks with two figures on
them, and had a better job treed and ready to drop. Ask for a vacation? Why,
we wouldn't have asked for four days off to go home and help bury our
worst enemy. That's what business does to the dear old college days when it
gets a good bite at them. There we were, one year out of Siwash, breaking
forty-five reunion dates, and never even sitting around with our heads in our

hands over it. This business bug is a bad, bad biter all right. Just let it get its
tooth into you, and what do you care if some other fellow is smoking your
two-quart pipe back in the old chapter house? And for that matter, what do
you care about anything else until you get up far enough to take breath and
look around? Sometimes, after a couple of weeks of extra hard work, I've
taken my mind off invoices long enough to wag it around a bit and I've felt
like a swimmer coming up after a long dive.
We landed those promotions in July and went right after another pair. I got
mine in August—Allie in September. And along in December they called us
both up in the office, where the big crash was. He said nice things to us
about getting a chance to fire our own chauffeurs if we kept on tending to
business, and first thing we knew we had offices of our own in the back of
the building, with our names painted on the doors, and call-bells that
brought stenographers and the same old brand of office boys that used to
blow us out of the other offices along with their cigarette smoke. And we
realized then that if we worked like thunder for thirty years more and saved
our money and made it earn one hundred per cent, perhaps some of the real
business kings would notice us on the street some day. That's about the way
the college swelling goes down.
All this time we hadn't seen much of Jarvis. He'd stopped coming to the
café and we'd really been so busy that we almost forgot about him. It's
simply wonderful the things business will drive out of your mind. It wasn't
until late in the winter that we realized that we'd probably lost track of
Jarvis for good—that is, until we climbed up into his set and discovered
him at some dinner that was a page out of the social register. We mixed
around a lot more now. We went to the million-candle-power restaurants
every now and then, and ate a good deal more than sixty-five cents' worth
apiece without batting an eye; and we went to see a play occasionally and
didn't climb up into the rarefied atmosphere to find our seats, either. And
whenever we broke in with the limousine crowd we kept a bright lookout
for Jarvis. We wanted to see him and show him that we were coming along.
We wanted him to be proud of us. I'd have given all my small bank balance
to hear him say: "Fine work, old man; keep it up." I'll tell you when a big
chap like that takes an interest in you, it's just as bracing as a hypodermic of
ginger. Baccalaureates and inspirational editorials can't touch it.

I was holding down the proud position of shipping clerk and Allie was my
assistant the next spring, and it seemed as if we had to empty that
warehouse every twenty-four hours and find the men to load the stuff with
search-warrants. Help was scandalously scarce. We couldn't have worked
harder if we had been standing off grizzly bears with brickbats. I'd just fired
the fourth loafer in one day for trying to roll barrels by mental suggestion,
when the boss came into my office.
"Can you use an extra man?" he asked me.
"Use him?" says I, swabbing off my forehead—I'd been hustling a few
barrels myself. "Use him? Say, I'll give him a whole car to load all by
himself, and if he can get the job finished by yesterday he can have another
to load for to-day."
"Now, see here," said the boss, sitting down; "this is a peculiar case. This
chap's been at me for a job for months. There's nothing in the office. He's a
fine fellow and well educated, but he's on his uppers. He can't seem to land
anywhere. I'm sorry for him. He looks as if he was headed for the bread
line. He's too good to roll barrels, but it won't hurt him. If you'll take him in
and use him I'll give him a place as soon as I get it; let me know how he
pans out."
"Just ask him to run all the way here," I said, and put my nose down in a bill
of lading. After a while the door opened and some one said, "Is this the
shipping clerk?" It was the ghost of a voice I used to know and I turned
around in a hurry. It was Jarvis.
I don't suppose it is strictly business to cry while you are shaking hands
with a husky you're just putting into harness at one-fifty per. I didn't intend
to do it, but somehow when your whole conception of fame and glory
comes clattering down about your ears, and you find you've got to order
your star and idol to get a hustle on him and load the car at door four
damquick, you are likely to do something foolish. I just stood and sniveled
and let my mouth hang open. Neither of us said a word, but presently I put
my arm around his shoulders and led him out into the shipping room.
"There's the foreman," I said, in a voice like a wet sponge. "And you report
here at six o'clock sharp." Then I went and hunted up Allie and for once we
let business go hang in business hours. We couldn't work. We kept clawing

for the solid ground and trying to readjust society and the universe and the
beacon lights of progress all afternoon.
When quitting time came we waited for Jarvis. We didn't say anything, but
we loaded him into a cab and took him up to the old café. Then he told us
his story, while we learned a lot of things about glory we hadn't even
vaguely suspected before. He was one of the greatest football players who
ever carried a ball, Jarvis was. Of that there was no doubt. He admitted it
himself then. I might say he confessed it. He'd come to his university
without any real preparation—you know even in the best regulated
institutions of learning they sometimes get your marks on tackling mixed
with your grades on entrance algebra. He'd spent two hours a day on
football and the rest of his time being a college hero. He'd had to work at it
like a dog, he said. How he got by the exams, he never knew. It seemed to
him as if he must have studied in his sleep. By the time he graduated he'd
had about every honor that has been invented for campus consumption. He
belonged to the exclusive societies. All kinds of big people had shaken
hands with him—asked for the privilege. He had a scrapbook of newspaper
stories about his career that weighed four pounds. He knew the differences
between eight kinds of wine by the taste and he had a perfect education in
forkology, waltzology, necktiematics, and all the other branches of social
science.
He would never forget, he said, how he felt when he was graduated and the
university moved off behind him and left him alone. It was up to him to
keep on being a famous character, he felt. His college demanded it. He had
to make good. But there he was with a magnificent football education and
no more football to play. His financial training consisted in knowing when
his bank account was overdrawn. His folks had pretty nearly paralyzed
themselves putting him through and he wasn't going to draw on them any
further. He went to New York because it seemed to be almost as big as the
university, and he started all alone on the job of shouldering his way past
the captains of finance up to the place where his college mates might feel
proud of him some more.
The result was so ridiculous that he had to laugh at it himself. He lost five
yards every time he bucked an office boy. His college friends kept inviting
him out and he went until they began offering him help. Then he cut the

whole bunch. He didn't care to have them watch the struggle. He'd been in
New York two years when he met us, he said, and he hadn't earned enough
money to pay his room-rent in that time. There were times when he might
have got a decent little job at twelve dollars per, or so, but he would have
had to meet the boys who had looked up to him as a world-beater and
somehow he just couldn't tackle it. When we had come over and paid
homage to him he saw we had taken him for a successful man of the world,
as well as a member of the All-America team, and he hadn't been able to
resist the desire to let two human beings look up to him again. He hadn't
invited us to his room, he said, because part of the time he didn't have a
room; and he even confessed that once or twice he'd walked up to our
rooms from downtown because he was crazy for a smoke and didn't have
the price.
I guess there never was a more peculiar dinner party in New York. Part of
the time I sniveled and part of the time Allie sniveled, and once or twice we
were all three all balled up in our throats. But after a while we braced up
and I told Jarvis what the Boss had told me, and we drank a toast to the glad
new days, and another to success, and another to Jarvis, the coming
business pillar, and some more to our private yachts and country homes,
and to Commencement reunions, and this and that. Then we chartered a sea-
going cab and took Jarvis home with us. We made him sleep in the bed
while we slept on the floor, and the next morning we loaned him a pair of
overalls that we had honorably retired and we all went down to work
together.
The next three months were perfectly ridiculous. We simply couldn't order
Jarvis around. Suppose you had to ask the Statue of Liberty to get a move
on and scrub the floors? We couldn't get our ingrained awe of that freight
hustler out of our systems. Of course when any one was around we had to
keep up appearances, but when I was alone and I had something for Jarvis
to do I'd call him in and get at it about this way: "Er—say, Jarvis, could you
help me out on a little matter, if you have the time? You know there's a
shipment for Pittsburgh that's got to go out by noon. I think the car is at
door 6. Those barrels ought to be put into the car right away, and if you'd
see that they get in there I'd be very much obliged to you. I'd attend to it
myself, but they've given me a lot of stuff to go over here."

Then Jarvis would grin cheerfully and hustle those barrels in before I could
get over blushing. If you don't believe football has its advantages in after
life you ought to watch a prize tackle waltzing a three-hundred-pound barrel
through a car door.
By day we ordered Jarvis about in this fashion, and made him earn his one-
fifty with the rest of the red-shirted gang. But at six o'clock we dropped all
that like a hot poker. Nights we were his adoring young friends again. We
sat together in restaurants and said "sir" to him to his infinite disgust, and
made him tell over and over again the stories of the big games and the
grand doings of the old days. When his promotion came, three months later,
and he went into a small job in the office, with a traveling job looming up in
the offing, we held a celebration that set us back about half the price of a
railroad ticket home. It meant more to us than it did to him. To him it was
three dollars more a week, congenial work and a chance. But to us it was
the release of a great man from grinding captivity—a racehorse rescued
from the shafts of a garbage cart; a Richard the Lion-hearted hauled from
the gloomy dungeon, where he had had to peel his own potatoes, and set on
the road to kingly pomp and circumstance again. Excuse me for this
frightful mess of language. I can't help getting a little squashy with my
adjectives when I think of that glorious banquet night.
I'm glad to say that Jarvis kept coming along after that. He developed into a
first-class salesman, and in a couple of years he came in from the road and
took a desk in the house with his name on the side in gilt letters. When this
happened we made him look up every one of his old college friends again.
He hesitated a little, but we got behind him and pushed. We pushed him into
his college club and back to Commencement, and we really pushed him out
of our life—for every one was glad to see him, of course, and to his
amazement he found that he was still a grand old college institution among
the alumni. So he trained with his own crowd after that, but even now we
go over to his club and dine with him at least once a year—always on some
anniversary or other. And for the last two years he has been sending his
machine around for us.
Oh, no, you don't! I'm paying for this lunch, young fellow. Don't fight any
one about paying for your lunch just because you still have the price. It's a
privilege we older chaps insist on with you newcomers anyway. And

remember, there is always a bunch of us before the fire at the club Saturday
evenings, and we don't talk business. While you're waiting for that job,
don't you dare miss a meeting. And say—one thing more. Don't be afraid of
those blamed office boys. They're all a bluff. I'm getting so I can fire them
without even getting pale.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Minor changes have been made to make punctuation and spelling
consistent; every other effort has been made to remain true to the original
book.

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