“How they do yell! Where’s your patriotism, Phil, to be hanging round in this gloomy crowd when all your friends are howling their heads off outside? Don’t you know Yale won the game? Why aren’t you out there with the rest?”

Philip Poole looked up with a smile, but did not reply.

“He’s comforting the afflicted,” said Dick Melvin, who shared with Poole the ownership of the room. “You don’t want to gloat over us poor Harvardites, do you, Phil? Thank you much for your sympathy.”

“That isn’t the reason,” said the lad, after a pause, with the sober look in his big, wide-open eyes that made him seem serious even when his feelings inclined in the opposite direction. “I just don’t see any cause for such a racket. A Yale football victory over Harvard is too ordinary an occurrence to get wild over.”

The chorus of hoots and groans that greeted this explanation brought a smile of satisfaction to the boy’s face. He was the youngest of the company, only in his second year at Seaton; the others were mostly seniors. As Melvin’s room-mate, however, and in a measure still under the senior’s care, Poole was thrown as much with the older students as with his own classmates; and the intimacy thus developed had served both to sharpen his wits and to give him practice in self-defence.

Melvin himself had not been at Seaton much longer than Phil. He had entered at the beginning of the Middle year, an unknown boy, green, sanguine, eager to win a scholarship and so relieve his father of some of the expense of his schooling. Soon, however, fascinated by football and the glamour of the school athletic world, he had failed to subordinate his sport to the real objects of school life. How he made the school eleven and went down with it to defeat; how he lost his scholarship; how the care of young Phil, suddenly offered him by the lad’s uncle, sobered and steadied him and enabled him to stay in school; how he and John Curtis fought the long uphill fight to develop a strong team, and finally defeated the rival school,—all this has already been told in another book, and can only be referred to very briefly here. The great game which marked the climax of the struggle was still a recent event.

“You didn’t take it so calmly when Seaton won the victory two weeks ago, and your beloved Dick spent the afternoon kicking the ball over the Hillbury goal-posts,” said Varrell, a tall, quiet boy, with keen, restless eyes that followed the conversation from face to face.

“That’s different,” replied Poole. “I’m first for Seaton and afterwards for Yale. The college can wait until I get there—and that will be a long time yet,” he added ruefully, “if what I was told in the algebra class to-day holds true.”

The others laughed patronizingly, as befitted those who had “points” to their credit on preliminary certificates, and knew CÆsar and algebra only as outgrown acquaintances—friends they had never been.

“He’s playing off,” said Todd, suspiciously. “I don’t doubt he drew an ‘A’ on his last examination.”

For one member of the group, the conversation was taking an unpleasant turn. John Curtis talked as unwillingly about examinations or entering college as the family of a convict on prison discipline. John had been captain of the football team, a player with a record, already courted by college committees on the lookout for good material for Varsity elevens. The glory of victory still rested full and bright upon him, but neither the adulation of comrades nor his own consciousness of achievement could make up to him for his failure to be recommended for preliminaries at the last college examinations, and his present gloomy outlook.

“Let’s see what they’re doing out in the yard,” he said abruptly, lifting his two hundred pounds from a creaking chair.

Bang, bang, bump, bang! went a heavy object down the stairs. Melvin jerked the door open in season to hear a scurry of feet at the end of the corridor, and the slam of two or three doors.

“This thing must stop, do you hear?” he shouted in the direction from which the sound had come.

The corridor was silent. No one answered; no one appeared. Yet behind the cracks of doors ajar were uttered low chucklings that the monitor rather suspected than heard. From a door at the end emerged an innocent head adorned with a green shade.

“Who are you bawling at, anyway? A fellow can’t study in this place, however much he tries. First a chump fires a bowling ball downstairs, and then the monitor curdles your blood with his Apache yells. I’d rather hear the ball, a good sight. It isn’t so hard on the nerves.”

“You tell those fellows to stop that thing right off, or I’ll report every one of them.”

“Tell them yourself!” retorted the green shade; “I’m not their grandmother.”

Inside Number 9 the company roared with laughter. “There’s no more fun for the poor fellows in this hall since Dick was put over it,” said Curtis.

“No, he takes his duties seriously,” commented Todd. “What did you do to them, Mr. Monitor,” he asked, as the official returned, “put ’em on probation?”

“Warned them,” replied Melvin, with good humor undisturbed.

“Who was that you were laboring with?”

“Tompkins.”

“What!” cried Curtis, “that wild-looking, shaggy-haired man from Butte, who looks as if he had just escaped from the menagerie?”

“That’s the one,” replied Dick; “though he isn’t as bad as all that. He’s a bit freakish, I’ll admit.”

“Not so much of a freak as he looks,” said Todd. “You ought to have seen him open the safe down at Morrison’s. They’d lost the combination, and the clerks had been guessing, and twisting, and pulling at the knob all the morning. Then this Tompkins happened in and took a try at it. He had the door open in two minutes. Just listened at the lock till he heard the right sound.”

“Couldn’t have been much of a lock,” said Curtis. “Come on; let’s see what’s doing outside.”

The big fellow went whistling downstairs, followed by Todd and Poole. Varrell and Dickinson the runner still remained, the latter too much incapacitated by the sprain he had received in the great game to make any unnecessary movements, the former apparently uninterested. The Harvard sympathizers had rallied, and, making up in numbers what they lacked in righteous cause, were shouting across the yard to the Yale band, drowning cheers of exultation with more vociferous cheers of loyalty.

“The fools!” exclaimed the misanthropic Dickinson.

“Who?” cried Varrell, suddenly roused from revery.

“Why, those fellows out there wasting their time and strength on something that does not concern them at all.”

“Oh!” said Varrell, and sank back again into his chair.

Dickinson and Melvin exchanged a glance of surprise. They knew that at one time Varrell had had serious trouble with his ears, and was still a little deaf; but he got on so well, both in the class room and among the boys, that it seemed hardly possible that he was unable to hear these boisterous shouts outside.

They sat a few minutes longer in silence, listening to the cheers hurled back and forth across the yard. Soon throats grew weary, and the mood changed. The enthusiasts, beginning to be conscious, as they stamped their feet and dug their hands into their pockets, that the November night was really cold, bethought themselves of warm rooms and work still to be done, and scattered to shelter. The scamper of feet was heard on the stairs; good nights were exchanged in the entries and shouted from the windows. Then the natural quiet again prevailed.

“Dick,” said Dickinson at last, “you know that Saville has left school.”

“Yes, I have heard so,” replied Melvin. “He was your track manager, wasn’t he? Who will take his place?”

“You,” answered Dickinson, calmly.

Melvin laughed. “I see myself in that job.”

“I mean what I say,” went on Dickinson. “When I took the captaincy of the track team, it was only on condition that I should have no trouble about business matters. So they appointed Saville. Now that he’s gone, I must have another man just as trustworthy.”

“That’s mere flattery,” replied Dick, still jesting. “I’m too old a fish to nibble at that kind of a bait.”

Dickinson grew indignant. “I’m not flattering. I know that if you undertake the thing, it will be well done.”

“But I don’t want it,” pleaded Melvin, serious at last. “There are twenty fellows who would be delighted to serve, who would do just as well as I. Besides, I play football, and who ever heard of a football player acting as manager?”

“I played too, didn’t I, but that doesn’t release me from the captaincy. I’m sure I’d like to get out of the thing as much as you.”

“A man who can do a quarter in fifty seconds can’t expect to get out of it.”

“Say forty!” exclaimed Dickinson, angrily. “You may as well.”

Dick laughed. There was nothing so certain to arouse Dickinson’s ire as the assumption that he was a marvelous runner whose records could be counted on to move in a sliding scale downward with no particular limit in sight. This sensitiveness, due partly to the boy’s extreme modesty, partly to his fear of disappointing such high expectations, his comrades had played on to their amusement more than once.

“I think I’ll get out altogether,” said the runner, gloomily.

“You can’t,” said Melvin; “the school wouldn’t let you.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I will do,” Dickinson declared, giving the arm of the chair a blow with his fist. “I’ll insist that you run the mile again as you did last year.”

“No, sir!” said Melvin, and set his lips.

“You’ll have to if I insist upon it. You don’t play baseball, and you have nothing at all to do in the spring. I can bring so much pressure to bear upon you that you simply can’t resist.”

To this Melvin made no immediate reply, but quietly pondered.

“What do you think, Wrenn?” said Dickinson, turning to Varrell, who had been a silent witness to the conversation. “Isn’t he just the man to hold the confidence of the school? And he couldn’t be expected to run if he were manager, could he?”

“Of course not,” replied Varrell, promptly.

“Then will you be my assistant and help me collect the money?” demanded Melvin, turning to the last speaker.

But Varrell was not easily caught. “You don’t need any assistant,” he replied, with a grin. “You’re equal to it all yourself. The Athletic Association wouldn’t elect me, anyway.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” remarked Dickinson.

The trio parted with the question still unsettled. “That was great generalship,” said Dickinson to himself, exultantly, as he limped downstairs. “He’s scared as death of the mile run. I guess I’ll land him.”