On the Sunday after the gymnasium exhibition came a snowstorm. It began long before dawn and piled the snow higher and higher all through the hours of daylight, slackening only as the early twilight fell. Marchmont was not the only student who found in the weather an excuse for staying away from church; but he was possibly alone in preparing his luncheon at home, and so establishing his excuse on a consistent basis. At his boarding-house the Sunday dinner came fortunately at night.

Wolcott tucked his trousers into his high arctics and ploughed joyously through the heavy drifts, his cheeks tingling, his heart beating strong, his whole muscular system delighting in resistance to the elements. There were few people at church. Tompkins presently came in and dropped into a place at the end of the pew bestowing on Wolcott a nod and a droll, friendly smile. In that droll smile of Tompkins, Lindsay could measure the progress of his five weeks in school. Very different had been its effect a month before, as it had flashed abruptly over the Westerner’s puggy countenance in that same pew. Now Wolcott could receive it as from a friend, and return it with some sense of equality. Then his cheeks had burned deep red with humiliation at the trick which had been played on him.

It was a very simple trick. On his first Sunday in Seaton, Wolcott had found on entering church a pew with a single occupant, a light-haired, broad-faced fellow in the somewhat worn clothes which Tompkins clung to by preference, as to old friends. The rusty youth politely moved along to make room, and Wolcott took his seat close by the aisle. As the ushers appeared with the plates for the offering, Wolcott, whose father had instructed him to do his part toward supporting the church which he attended, glanced guardedly about to learn if possible the standard of giving which prevailed among the Seaton students. His neighbor, whose appearance certainly gave no indication of wealth, drew out a bill and held it in conspicuous readiness for the plate. The newcomer reasoned quickly, “If that fellow gives a dollar, my part is at least two.” He had just time to reach this conclusion, and hurriedly fish a bill from his pocket, when the plate was before him. Dropping his two dollars into it, with a sense of dignity maintained and duty done, he passed it on for his schoolmate’s contribution. The latter, however, had suddenly changed his purpose. He took the plate gravely, deposited a cent upon it, and solemnly handed it back. Then, with a half-perceptible wink at his gaping neighbor, and his droll smile breaking for a brief moment the expressionless expanse of his face, he composed himself for the rest of the service. As for Wolcott, he did not need to hear the smothered chuckle behind him to be assured that his neighbor had deliberately cajoled him. He did not regret the money, for it was spent in a good cause; but to prove easy game for a booby like that was a serious blow to his dignity.

The next day, knowing that the incident would go the rounds, he had decided to make the best of it and start the tale himself. Poole heard it with a broad grin of genuine delight.

“Just like Tommy! You ought to have seen him last year before Melvin squelched him. We were all dead sure he’d be fired. He’s comparatively harmless now.”

“I just wish he’d tried some one else, that’s all,” said Lindsay, haughtily.

Poole laughed and glanced keenly at his companion. “You mustn’t take it so seriously. There’s nothing personal about it.”

“I suppose he thought I looked rather simple,” said Wolcott, with a smile that seemed a bit forced.

“Not at all. He knew you weren’t used to things yet, and so he tried his little game. You ought to see him and the twins. There’s nothing simple about them!”

“Does he try his tricks on them?”

“Does he? Well, I guess! They’re giving it back and forth all the time. There hasn’t been a week since the Pecks entered school when Tommy wasn’t laying for the Pecks or the Pecks for Tommy. Just keep tabs on ’em and you’ll see.”

And for the next few days Wolcott had kept tabs, as well as was possible for a fellow who was still groping bewildered in the maze of new experiences. One evening he dropped into the Pecks’ room to ask about a lesson. The boys were laboring at their desks with a great air of diligence. They looked up eagerly as he opened the door, and then glanced at each other and laughed.

Wolcott, with the self-consciousness of a new boy, and with the recollection of his increased contribution still fresh, turned violently red. “What are you laughing at?” he demanded, determined that at any rate these two youngsters should not flout him.

“Oh, nothing,” returned Peck Number One, whom Wolcott assumed to be Duncan. “We thought it was some one else.” Then the pair laughed together, and Wolcott knew that his fears were groundless.

“Just stay here awhile and you’ll see some fun,” said Number Two. “There, they’re coming out now!”

A door opened farther up the hall, there was the sound of voices, then of stamping and loud words.

“They’re trying to get ’em up!” said Number One, giggling excitedly.

Number Two tiptoed to the door and opening it slightly let in the sound of scraping and maledictions. “For editors of the Lit, they use pretty poor language,” he said.

Wolcott could repress his curiosity no longer.

“I think I’ll go out and see what’s up,” he said. “If there’s anything doing, I should like a sight of it.”

In front of Tompkins’s door was a group of four, bending over several pairs of rubbers. Tompkins on his knees was laboring with a screw-driver to loosen one from the floor.

“Can I help you?” asked Lindsay, with mock politeness. The contribution trick still rankled in his memory.

“Yes, go and drown those two Pecks!” growled the irate Tompkins, as he freed one rubber from the floor and attacked another. “They’ve screwed down the whole lot. I’d like to wear out every blessed rubber on their backs!”

“How do you know they did it?” asked Lindsay, much interested.

“Because I saw one as I came up,” said Planter, eagerly. “I was late to the meeting and almost ran over one of them right near the door.”

“Which one?”

“Yes, which!” grumbled Tompkins, “the one with the mole on his shoulder-blade or the one without? Of course he doesn’t know which. They’re as much alike as two leaves on a tree. The only thing to do is to lynch them both.”

Lindsay returned to the Pecks’ room, where the twins were waiting in gleeful suspense.

“Who are they, anyway?” asked Wolcott.

“The editors of the Literary Monthly,” answered Donald, pompously, “meeting for the first time with the new member, Mr. Tompkins.”

“I wish they’d print their parting remarks on the rubber question,” chuckled Duncan. “I guess ’twould be the last number of the Lit that board would publish.”

The sounds from without now indicated that the rubbers had been rescued, and on the feet of their owners were travelling down the stairs. Presently the door shook under a tremendous thump, and the angry Tompkins appeared on the threshold. He was really angry, there was no disguising the fact. The twins looked and trembled,—momentarily trembled,—for the presence of their heavy-limbed caller soon reassured them, and their awe before the senior’s wrath was no match for their glee at his discomfiture. So they grinned up at him with tantalizing coolness, and Donald, who was nearest the door, invited him to sit down.

“I didn’t come here to sit down,” Tompkins began furiously; “I came to punch your two heads for you!”

“Very kind of you, I’m sure,” said Duncan. “You don’t mind telling us why, I hope?”

“I don’t need to. You know what I mean too blamed well. You screwed down those rubbers in front of my door. Planter caught one of you at it.”

“Which one?” asked Donald, with a snicker.

“How does he know?” retorted the angry senior. “It makes no difference, anyway. One’s as bad as the other, whichever did it. If I thrash you both, I can’t go far wrong.”

“That wouldn’t be square,” said Duncan. “If one of us did it, that one ought to be punished; but you’ve got to prove him guilty. Isn’t that right, Lindsay?”

Lindsay nodded; he owed Tompkins one himself.

Tompkins snorted. “If you think you’re always going to crawl out of that hole, you’re mistaken. Just keep on with your monkey tricks, and one of these days one of you’ll wake up with a black eye, and then for a couple of weeks you can be told apart.”

On this prospect the Peck brothers had no comment to offer. So Tompkins continued less violently: “I don’t care so much about what you do to me; when you strike at my friends, it’s a different matter. They come to see me, and get their rubbers punched full of holes. I tell you I won’t stand for it.”

“I’ll tell you what, Tommy!” exclaimed Duncan, swelling with a great idea, “let’s start a subscription to buy them some new ones. We’ll get two long sheets of foolscap, head them ‘Subscriptions to buy new Rubbers for the Editors of the Lit,’ and send them round. A cent apiece all over school will pay the bill and more.”

“I guess that won’t be necessary,” said Tompkins, who had no desire to become a school joke. “The thing can’t be settled in that way.”

“It’ll pay up for that gym scheme you put up on us,” suggested Donald.

“Overpay,” said Tompkins, significantly, as he turned to go. “I’m owing you now.”

Only a few weeks had passed since these things happened, and yet, as Wolcott sat in church that stormy morning waiting for the service to begin, these scenes and others flitted before his mind like recollections of a remote period. He had learned much in the short interval of ways and places and fellow-students. Poole, Durand, Planter, Tompkins, and the twins he counted friends; and with Marchmont he was intimate. The teachers he knew in name and lineage, history, peculiarities, faults, and virtues. He no longer mentioned them to his associates as Professor A and Dr. B and Mr. C; they were Peter and Swipesy and Moore, and so on down to the unfortunate latest comer, Mr. Owen, who struggled thrice daily against fearful odds in Room 10.

On the next day the sky was again clear, and Wolcott as soon as his first recitation was over put on his snowshoes and started out for an experimental tramp, in preparation for the expedition of the Snowshoe Club in the afternoon. Being out of practice, and quite well aware that he presented a not altogether graceful figure, he took a cross-cut over the garden fences to an outlying field. As he passed the boarding-house where Laughlin waited on table, he glanced up at the kitchen window, and beheld the broad chest and massive face fronting a dish pan, and the big hands working with cloth and plates. The captain nodded cordially, but Wolcott hardly returned the greeting.

Dish washing! That was certainly the limit. A school captain washing dishes! Shovelling snow, tending furnaces, could be forgiven; but dish washing, never!