Meantime the school had heard the proclamation of the sin and its punishment, and looked upon Wilmot’s vacant seat. The exile was missed. Dunn chuckled ecstatically over the amusing fact that the official lightning had passed by the bold man of action and struck the crafty suggester. His merriment was coldly received.

“You’d better shut up, Jason,” said Trask, roughly. “Any fool can stick a match into a sand box when he’s given the match and told how to do it.”

“And no one but a fool would have put that one into the bag,” declared Eaton. “I believe that’s what gave poor Steve away.”

“That’s right,” said Sumner, in confirmation. “And Steve said one, not three. If only one had gone off, Cary wouldn’t have suspected anything, and Steve wouldn’t have got stung. You gave the thing dead away.”

Dunn, who had by this time lost all pride in his handiwork, glowered across the table. “If he was afraid of getting stung, he ought to have kept clear of the thing altogether,” he growled. “He took his risk, and I took mine. It isn’t my fault if he left his matches in the drawer!”

“He wouldn’t have left them there if Cary hadn’t forced him to, and Cary wouldn’t have been standing over him if you hadn’t tried to burn the whole box at once.” This, from Trask, was but a repetition of Sumner’s argument.

“You both ought to be spanked,” remarked Talbot. “It isn’t fair that one should be soaked and the other not.”

“Would you have me go to Westcott and say, ‘I’m guilty, please sting me too?’ I see myself doing that!” Dunn gave a derisive laugh at the idea.

“No one who knows you would expect that of you,” replied Talbot, significantly. “It wouldn’t do any good, either. Hardie tried to help Steve out by confessing that he brought the matches to school and offering to take part of the punishment, but it wouldn’t go.”

Dunn sniffed his contempt. “And old Westcott soaked him for it.”

“No!” answered Talbot, shortly. “He isn’t that kind of a man.”

After this conversation Dunn avoided all reference to the laboratory incident, and would have been glad to have the others forget it, but they continued to regard him as responsible for Wilmot’s misfortune, and withdrew their favor from him. Those were unpleasant days for Archibald Dunn; no one at Adams’s would have much to do with him, and the conviction, in part justified, that he was not receiving from the boys a fair deal kept him morose and sulky. Moreover, frank letters concerning his work were going home to his parents, which served to plunge him more deeply in trouble. Having shirked and trifled so long, he was well-nigh incapable of doing anything else.

About the time of Wilmot’s return to school, Talbot called out the candidates for the crew. They came in a flock, ranging in size from Bumpus the fat to McDowell the small, and in degrees of chance according to the popular estimate, from Talbot the sure-to-make-it to any one of a half-dozen equally sure not to make it.

“What’re you doing here, Bump?” asked Mac. “You don’t suppose any crew could pull you, do you?”

“I’m out for the exercise,” responded Bumpus, unruffled. “What’re you doing here? You don’t suppose you could pull any one, do you?”

“I’m out for the fun,” explained Mac. “There’s nothing doing, and I’m tired of the gym.”

These two, of course, were among those considered sure not to make it. Where Hardie stood, no one could tell until he began to row on the machines, and then the experts opined unanimously that his chances were slim. The captain arranged the candidates in fours to suit himself. There was a first four, which Talbot stroked, made up of the fellows left in school who had rowed in the first or second boat the year before. Then a second containing those of unofficial rank but known experience; and after these, squads of four taken without much care in grouping. All the instruction they received was such as could be given by the captain or his aids.

Roger got a place at two in the third squad, and did what he could to carry out the directions given him—pull his stroke through hard all the way, recover sharply, start his slides back with a gradual, deliberate movement, and use his legs. It was all new and strange to him, so totally different from anything he had tried before that experience in rowing in an ordinary skiff with an ordinary pair of oars seemed of no help whatever. He perceived his awkwardness quite as clearly as the bystanders who whispered together as they watched him,—and he felt it besides, as they could not. The secret ambition which he had cherished since the day when Deering made the speech in school assumed the form of an absurd presumption. But he had no thought of giving up.

Bumpus got his exercise, and Mac his fun. The others got fun, too, when Bumpus rowed, for he proved the jolliest clumsy porpoise that ever tried to sit in a boat. He was too big for his seat. He couldn’t get forward to begin stroke, and when he finished, the chances were even that he couldn’t recover at all. His candidacy was of short duration. Talbot had to get rid of him to keep his squad under control.

Mac, on the other hand, took to the practice as if he had done it for years. Every suggestion made to him was translated immediately into his stroke. From catch to finish, from recovery to catch, his stroke seemed one blended, graceful movement.

“What a pity he isn’t bigger!” said Talbot to Eaton, who stood beside him. “He’s a natural oarsman.”

The second day McDowell stroked the third crew, while Hardie blundered along on the fourth. A fortnight later he was still blundering along, with nothing to sustain his courage but a resolution to hang on as long as there was anything to hang to.

And now Dunn received a blow that hurt. The call had gone forth for candidates for baseball, and Dunn’s name appeared near the head of the list. Mr. Westcott then summoned Dunn to an official interview, in which he informed the sanguine ball player that in consequence of his continued poor performance of school work, he could not be allowed to play on the nine. “We have kept you here,” said the head-master, “in spite of your neglect, only because we were not willing to believe that a boy could be six months among us without catching from teachers and boys something of the spirit of serious work. So far, we have apparently failed to make any impression upon you. At the present time there is not a single subject in which you could be recommended for college examinations. This being the case, we cannot allow you to assume new responsibilities which would interfere still further with your study.”

And then the teacher made a serious attempt to bring home to the misguided boy the wrongfulness and folly of his course, but Dunn heard nothing but the fact that for him there was to be no baseball. His answers were given in stolid monosyllables; he went forth suffocating with rage.

No one knew better than Dunn that his school life had been a failure, but his point of view was very different from that of his teachers. Dunn’s scholastic ideal was formed somewhat on the lines of Kipling’s Stalky. To dodge one’s work, outwit one’s teachers, and triumph at examination by luck and cleverness represented to Dunn the only truly desirable way of conquering school drudgery. The real thing was to be popular, to be in the important set, to play on the teams, and be talked about. When Stalkyism, as exemplified in Dunn’s recitation career, proved a flat failure, and the expected popularity turned out to be only a kind of contemptuous freedom to disregard him, he had consoled himself with assurances of a different experience on the baseball field, where he should shine with no uncertain light. Now with a single word Mr. Westcott had robbed him of his opportunity. He felt like a soldier who at the critical moment of defence finds that his cartridges have been stolen and that he is at the mercy of the enemy.

Stover listened to his tale, deeply disgusted. Braggarts are usually liars or victims of delusion, but occasionally one is found to make good some of his boasts. Stover had investigated Dunn’s baseball career and believed in him.

“It’s a low-down trick!” he burst forth. “That’s the way they do here. If they find a fellow who can play something, they scare up some excuse to rule him out. Anything to discourage athletics!”

“I suppose it’s no good to kick,” said Dunn, despairingly.

“I’ll tell you what to do. Go to the old man and play the penitent. Tell him that you’ve done wrong, and that you’re going to study hard from now on. If you can put it up to him strong enough, he’ll fall on your neck and forgive you. You’ll have to make a good bluff at work for the next two or three weeks until you get your reputation up, but it won’t hurt you any to do that. Some of the fellows out there at Adams’s will give you a lift. There’s Hardie, now; he’s a good-natured fellow and a pretty good scholar; he’d help you out if he knew what you’re up against.”

“I guess not,” said Dunn, hopeless. “He’s always been down on me.”

“I don’t believe it. He got you that invitation last fall for the dancing school. I don’t see why he shouldn’t help you now.”

“It wasn’t Hardie. Ben Tracy got it,” corrected Dunn, quickly.

“Ben Tracy nothing! It was Hardie. I heard Sumner talking about it at the time. It was Hardie that did it. He isn’t so conceited as some of that crowd. If you go at him right, he’ll help you. Now do as I say, and see what comes of it.”

This news concerning the invitation to the dancing class—he had not forgotten his anxiety at the time—set Dunn’s thoughts in a new direction. The more he recalled the circumstances, which included Ben’s clumsy disclaimer, the more he was inclined to believe that Stover was right. For the first time during the year Dunn clearly perceived that he had been in some respects a silly fool. For the first time it dawned upon him that some of these fellows whom he had been so ready to disparage might be in reality better and more deserving of honor than he. He was honest enough to recognize that if he had been in Hardie’s place he would have acted in a far different way.

Following Stover’s counsel, he went to Mr. Westcott with an artificial penitence on his lips; but there was already a half-formed, half-real penitence in his heart. By what means Mr. Westcott pierced his shell and made this half-penitence wholly real, we may not inquire. The head-master had a skill in such interviews, the product of much experience and a genuine desire to help rather than to punish; and Dunn’s career offered few points capable of defence, when considered with frankness and honesty. That his repentance was indeed real, and his resolution to face about, was, for the moment at least, genuine, is proved by two circumstances: first, he acquiesced, though sadly, in Mr. Westcott’s decision that if he was to regain lost ground, he could not afford the time and the thought which school baseball required; secondly, he confessed, unsolicited, many of his misdeeds, including his part in the episode of the sand bath.

“I suspected it,” said Mr. Westcott, “but we won’t consider that now. That belongs to the past. We start anew to-day.”