The Christmas vacation brought Sam a chance to consider his school experiences away from the school atmosphere. He did this in part deliberately, in part by an unconscious process of comparison of school standards with home standards, the hard facts of student life with the fine and high ideals of his father and mother. Certain phases of schoolboy morality he talked over with Mr. Archer, who, pleased to receive the confidence of his son, met frankness with frankness and cleared Sam’s mind of many a harassing doubt. The quiet trust of his parents braced the boy strongly against the influence of evil.

Sam went back to school resolved that if he could not have the intimacy of the best he would at least not associate with the worst; if he could not be popular with those whom he respected, he would not seek the favor of those whom he could not respect. He was convinced that he was not marked for great distinction in his school career. He might, by keeping eternally at it, in course of time make a fair showing as a hurdler; he could always get good marks in mathematics and history; he could maintain friendly relations with a good many fellows. More than this, however, was not to be hoped for. He could not, if he would, go on a still-hunt for honors after the calculating fashion with which Mulcahy was scheming to gain possession of the Yale Cup. He was not made that way.

The work of the winter was for Sam uneventful and plodding. He toiled with sullen aversion on his French, with devotion on his Greek, with calm satisfaction on his mathematics and history, with resignation on his other subjects. In the gymnasium he practised pole-vaulting; and on the wooden track outside, with Collins’s assistance, he struggled with dashes and starts and hurdles, and met discouragement with a laugh. He managed also to find free intervals for a little reading. On the whole the laborious life proved not unpleasant, and time slipped rapidly away.

Besides himself, Jones and Mulcahy were the chief exponents of the art of pole-vaulting. Jones was the star of the school, brilliant and unapproachable. He could do ten feet whenever he wanted to, and was deemed capable of very much better performances. Mulcahy started with nine feet, and Sam with eight feet six. After a month’s work, Mulcahy had climbed to nine three and Sam to nine feet. They practised at different times, but each listened greedily to reports of the other’s progress, and while openly depreciating his own powers, hoped from day to day to discover the precious knack of combining spring and throw, which would put him well ahead of his rival. Mulcahy was handicapped by his weight, Sam by his length and slowness.

The intimacy between the two was lapsing. The process was slow, because Sam was too good-natured to quarrel openly and Mulcahy too thick-skinned to be sensitive to ordinary chilliness of treatment. Sam put himself to some inconvenience to be absent from his room when he thought Mulcahy might call; he likewise cultivated a friendship with Kendrick, whom Mulcahy disliked. In time Mulcahy awoke to the fact that Archer’s neglect was intentional, and accepted the rebuff as he would have accepted the final refusal of an expected purchaser to take a book. While there was no open break between them, Sam shrewdly suspected that to reject Mulcahy as a friend was to invite him as an enemy.

“Where’s your friend Mulcahy these days?” Peck asked, one evening early in February. “You don’t seem to be so thick with him as you were a while ago.”

“No,” answered Sam, indifferently. “I don’t seem to be.”

“What’s the matter?” pursued Peck. “Been scrapping?”

“No. We just don’t see as much of each other as we used to.”

Duncan fidgeted about a little, and then blurted out, “Of course it’s none of my business,—except as I’ve a little claim in the room and have some interest in knowing whom I’m likely to find here,—but I’d really like to be told whether you’re just taking a vacation from him or have got through with him for good.”

“Well, I guess I’m through with him for good,” confessed Sam.

Duncan’s face broke into a smile. “Glad to hear it! Only you ought to have done it long ago. When you ran up against him in the pole-vault, you probably began to see what sort of a fellow he is.”

“I haven’t run up against him in the pole-vault,” replied Sam. “We don’t practise together. It was something that happened last term that opened my eyes.”

“Oh, it was!” said Peck, in a tone between a question and an exclamation. He waited a little to see whether Archer was going to explain, but as Sam volunteered no information, he continued: “It’s about time for me to begin to work, if I’m going to pass off those exams in June. I couldn’t study here with that fellow hanging round.”

“I’m sorry if I drove you out,” said Sam, rather stiffly.

“Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t have to go unless I wanted to, and you had just as good a right to have your friends round as I did to have mine. I couldn’t really expect you to take up all my prejudices.”

“There was prejudice all round, I’m afraid,” responded Sam. “I had my share. I thought you were down on Mulcahy just because he was a poor fellow who was pushing his way up, and it made me so mad I couldn’t see anything wrong with him. It wasn’t till after he’d played me a dirty trick with Alsop that my eyes began to open. Then I thought it all over during vacation, and made up my mind that he wasn’t a safe person to fool with.”

“I didn’t hear anything about any trouble with Alsop,” said Duncan, with evident curiosity.

Sam saw that he was committed, and told his tale. Peck listened with deep interest and frequent exclamations. “I don’t think I should have taken that as sweetly as you did,” he said at length. “No fellow has a right to put you in that position. Why didn’t you say: ‘Mr. Alsop, I told you the truth. I don’t smoke,’ and let Mulcahy get out of it as well as he could?”

“I didn’t like to do that,” replied Sam. “It didn’t seem honorable.”

“I don’t know but you’re right,” said Duncan, thoughtfully. “You couldn’t play the mucker because he did. It wouldn’t have done any good, either. He’d have lied you right down.”

“Perhaps so. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make it worse.”

Duncan nodded agreement. “I suppose it would. You’ve got a lot more sense than I thought you had.”

Sam smiled grimly at the dubious compliment.

“Look here,” went on Duncan, taking up a brown-covered book from the table. “You’re a shark in geometry, aren’t you?”

“I got B plus for a term mark,” said Sam, complacently.

“Well, I wish you’d explain this formula. I can understand equation 3, but how you get 5 from it, as the book says, is beyond me.”

It wasn’t a difficult thing to explain, nor was Duncan as stupid about geometry as he thought himself. Sam turned the clean white pages of the book.

“New?”

“Yes!” ejaculated Duncan, with indignant emphasis, “the third I’ve had this year. It’s a scandal the way books disappear in this school. You might as well throw ’em away as leave ’em out on the hall racks. The last one I had, I put my initials in at the bottom of the next to the last page. If you ever see a book with ‘D. P.’ in it, confiscate it—it’s mine.”

Duncan stopped that afternoon for a few minutes at the room of Fuzzy Woods in Odlin House.

“How’s Shirley?” he asked in the course of gossip. “Done anything queer lately?”

“I guess not,” drawled Woods. “He’s got two or three duels on.”

Duncan giggled. “What for?—insults?”

“Yes,” returned Woods. “It’s always for insults.”

“Will they fight?”

“Naw, the duels never come off—at least none has so far. They think it’s a great joke till he gets fierce as a pirate and asks ’em which they’ll take, swords or pistols. Then most of ’em try to sneak out of it. He told Lauter he’d shoot him anyway, and scared the life out of him.”

“Has he challenged you?”

“Naw, I let him alone.”

“What’s the matter with the fellow?”

“He was in school a long time in France and Switzerland; he got a lot of crazy ideas there about honor and insults and settling things by duels.”

“Can he really fence?” questioned Duncan.

“How should I know!” answered Fuzzy, indifferently.

Just then some one knocked and was yelled at to come in. It proved to be Shirley himself, a slender, well-groomed boy with an English accent, who had come to borrow a translation. On Woods’s invitation he stayed. Duncan fell to asking him questions about foreign schools and schoolboys. The two got on finely until Duncan wanted to know what kind of athletics they had in these foreign places, and Shirley confessed that there were no regular sports.

“What do they do for exercise?”

“Oh, they walk and fence and play tennis a little.”

“No track athletics, or football, or baseball, or rowing?”

“No. Football wouldn’t be allowed.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t a gentleman’s game.”

Duncan sniffed. “It isn’t a lady’s game. Don’t they even have cricket?”

“No, they don’t know any more about cricket than they do about baseball.”

“I suppose they all go to walk two and two, like the girls in a convent. They must be a choice lot of little mollycoddles!”

“I shouldn’t advise you to call one of them by that name!” declared Shirley, warming up.

“Why not?”

“You’d have a duel on your hands.”

“Rats!” said Duncan, contemptuously. “No one but a barbarian fights duels these days.”

“That shows how little you know about it,” said Shirley, stiffly.

“Would you fight a duel?” demanded Peck.

“Certainly, if honor demanded it.”

“Then you’d be a barbarian. Don’t you think so, Fuzzy?”

“I don’t think anything about it,” answered Woods, who had been vainly trying to catch Duncan’s eye and warn him that he was entering dangerous ground.

“Half barbarian and half fool,” continued Peck.

Shirley rose and stood erect, gazing straight at the visitor, with indignant eyes and reddening cheeks.

“I am not used to being called a fool!” he said solemnly.

“Who called you a fool?” asked Duncan, coolly. “I didn’t.”

“You said a man who would fight a duel was a fool and a barbarian,” repeated Shirley.

“Half a fool and half a barbarian,” corrected Peck.

“But I said that I would fight a duel.”

“Then you must be it,” asserted Duncan, with nonchalance, stretching himself out in his chair and putting his hands in his pockets.

“Those are insulting words to apply to a gentleman. You will take them back!” cried Shirley, hotly.

“I didn’t apply them—just made a general statement. You took ’em yourself. Perhaps you felt they fitted.”

“That’s quite enough!” said Shirley, slowly, taking a step forward. “It’s evident that you mean to insult me. We will settle the point of honor in a gentleman’s way. Name your weapons and the place of meeting. Shall it be swords or pistols? The choice is yours.”