March at Old Sheddon, which had come in like a lion, was promising to go out like a lamb. By the middle of the month the snow was all gone and the athletic field was beginning to dry out enough to let the teams get a little outdoor work.

Keeping up his job as athletic reporter for the student daily, Larry was always on hand when there was anything doing on the field, and as soon as Coach Brock began to organize the teams and squads, he was given a chance to train for the next year’s ’Varsity foot-ball.

Ordinarily, you’d say, any fellow would jump at a chance like that, coming while he was still in his Freshman year, and Larry, who had all along been hoping he might make the team, was ready enough to jump.

“If you think I’m good enough,” was the way he took the bid; and after Brock, who never coddled any of his men, had said he would probably grow to be good enough if he worked hard, Larry left the field feeling about three inches taller than any self-respecting measuring machine would have recorded his stature. One of the ambitions he had begun to cherish, as soon as he had acquired a little of the “college spirit” that Dick Maxwell had tried so hard to hammer into him at the beginning of the year, was to make the ’Varsity foot-ball, and all through the year he had been hoping that Coach Brock wouldn’t forget the November game with Rockford Poly and the part in it that one Larry Donovan had taken.

Little Purdick, who had an almost uncanny knack of face-reading, knew instantly what had happened as soon as Larry entered their joint room in the Man-o’-War.

“So Brock has picked you, has he?” he said, as Larry flung his cap and dropped into a chair. “Where’s he playing you?”

“I don’t know,” said Larry; “I guess it will be right half. That’s the job I know best.”

“Tickled purple, I suppose?” put in Purdick with his queer little grin.

“You’ve said it, Purdy; hits me right where I live. It’s going to take a lot of time, but I’d rather sit up nights than miss it.”

“I’ll help you all I can in the ‘boning,’” Purdick offered, out of the depths of a loyalty to his big room-mate which had been steadily growing ever since the night when Larry had bundled him in blankets and carried him down two flights of stairs to chuck him into the hired auto. “You must turn all your copying and problem drawing over to me. I can do ’em just as well as not.”

“You’re a pretty good little old rat, Purdy, and I’ll lick the fellow that says you’re not. Has Dick been over?”

“Not since last night, after you’d gone to the ‘Mike’ office.”

“Did he say he wanted to see me for anything particular?”

“No, he didn’t say much of anything; just asked for you, and then mooned around a bit with his hands in his pockets and went away.”

Knowing well Purdick’s peculiar gift for reading faces, Larry pushed the inquiry farther.

“You’re pretty good at guessing what’s in the back part of a fellow’s head, Purdy. Was there anything the matter with Dick?”

“If you ask me, I’ll say there was. He looked mighty sober—for him.”

Larry hung upon his heel, so to speak. Though he had had a number of invitations, he had never yet set foot inside of the Zeta Omega house. Should he go and look Dick up? At this time in the evening he would probably be in the frat house. Larry thought he’d better go over. For old times’ sake, if for nothing else, he might take that much trouble.

It was just coming on to dusk when he left Mrs. Grant’s, and as he was unlatching the gate a slender figure with its head down and its hands in its pockets came along the sidewalk.

“Dick!” exclaimed Larry; “I was just going over to the Omegs’ to hunt you up.” Then, as he got his first good look at Dick’s face: “Great cats!—what under the sun have you been doing to yourself?”

Dick turned his face away.

“Would you—would you mind taking a little hike with me, Larry?” he asked.

“Sure I won’t; it’ll seem like old times. Which way?”

Dick set the direction and the pace without saying anything. The course led out Maple Avenue to the country road leading to the bridge whose portal arch bore in figures two feet high the numerals of their class. For the entire mile they tramped along side by side in silence. Dick did not speak, and Larry, borrowing something from that manhood which he was just touching on its hither side, respected his companion’s silence.

It was quite dark when they came to the bridge, though there was a slender sickle of a new moon hanging a few degrees above the western horizon. The bridge approach was guarded by a low concrete wall, and when they reached the wall Dick sat down on it.

“You haven’t had your supper yet, I know, and I won’t keep you very long,” he said in a sort of strained voice. Then he went on: “I—I’ve brought you out here to tell you good-bye, Larry. I’m canned—sent home.”

“What!” Larry almost shouted the word.

“It’s so. One of the profs.—Morton, he was kind of sorry for me, I guess—gave me a hint yesterday. That’s why I went around to Mother Grant’s last night to try to find you. I got the faculty letter to-day.”

“But, Dick—what on top of earth have you been doing?”

“The letter says it’s something I haven’t been doing—keeping up with my classroom work. But that’s only a part of it, and not the worst part, either. You see, Dad’s a Sheddon old-grad., and they’re trying to let him down easy.”

“What is the worst part of it, Dick?”

“Don’t you know?” the canned one asked, in the same dull monotone.

“No more than the man in the moon.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of ‘The Mixers’?”

“Just the name; that’s all.”

“Well, you might as well know; it’s all out now. There was a bunch of us, with more money than was good for us, I guess. We’ve been going over the river to a room in the Brandon House to play cards. Night before last the town police raided us. The others all skipped through a window and down the fire-escape, but I was bonehead enough to stand my ground and try to bully it out. For the sake of the college it was kept out of the newspapers, and the police contented themselves with handing me over to the faculty.”

“And you’re the only one to be expelled?”

Dick nodded.

“They gave me a chance that I couldn’t take; said they’d make it suspension to the end of the semester if I’d tell who the others are. It’ll just about break Dad’s heart, Larry.”

“Don’t you know it,” said Larry, with a franker emphasis than he meant to put upon it. Then: “Have you told it all?”

“No; not quite all. I’ve lost money—lots of it. I owe pretty nearly everybody in sight. Worse than that, I’ve used up all my year’s allowance and I’m overdrawn at the bank. I’ll have to wire Dad for money to get home on.”

For a few minutes Larry was just about as badly crushed as Dick seemed to be. That Dick, the chum he loved almost as a brother of his own blood, should make such a frightful smash of himself and his prospects in just a few weeks or months seemed utterly unbelievable. Then there was Dick’s father.... Just here Dick broke in again.

“You mustn’t charge it up to the Omegs, Larry; that’s one of the things I got you out here to say to you. I know some of the fellows in my frat are pretty swift, but I was the only one that was in the ‘Mixers.’ It’s only fair to say that Carey Lansing and some of the others have done all they could to hold me down and keep me from getting tangled up with fellows of the Underhill sort. But it didn’t do any good. I was just an easy mark, all around the block.”

“I could have held you down,” Larry maintained, with his jaw set.

“Yes, I guess you could have. But I never gave you a chance to try.”

Larry sat quietly for a few minutes, kicking his heels against the concrete wall. This was the time of day when, ordinarily, nothing would have kept him from thinking of his supper. But now he was not remembering that there were any such things as suppers.

“What will you do after you get home, Dick?” he asked, more to be saying something than for any cogent purpose behind the words.

“I don’t know; get Dad to give me a clerkship or something on the railroad, so that I can earn money enough to pay my debts. I’ve had my fling and I’m out of it for the rest of my life.”

If you are a little older than Dick you may smile at this, if you like, but it was the end of the world for him, or he thought it was—which amounts to the same thing.

“Does that mean that the fight’s all out of you?” Larry asked.

“Golly, I’d fight if I didn’t have just sense enough left to know that I’m down and out. I’ve taken the count, all right.”

“Let’s see if you have. What would you do if you had a chance to stay here and live it down, Dick?”

“What would I do? I’d black the shoes of the fellow who could tell me how it could be done. But it can’t be done. I’m fired, I tell you.”

“Wait a minute,” Larry put in. “Supposing the faculty could be persuaded to reconsider. Whereabouts would that leave you?”

Dick gave a wry little laugh.

“It would leave me wondering where I was going to get the next meal. Didn’t you hear me say that I’m broke, and head over ears in debt besides?”

“How much are you in debt?”

Dick named a figure which wasn’t so crushingly big, though it doubtless seemed as big as the National debt to a fellow with only a few silver coins left in his pocket.

Larry made a swift mental calculation. Without intending to be especially economical, he had lived well within the amount set apart for his first-year expenses, and he still had a comfortable balance in the college bank; in fact, there was something more than enough to pay Dick’s legitimate debts. But there were three months of the semester left, with board and lodging for two to be provided for.

“Supposing you didn’t have to quit and run for it, Dick,” he suggested, “would you stay on in the Omegs?”

“No; I’ve disgraced the fellows good and plenty, and the least I can do now is to get out.”

“I’ve just been thinking,” Larry went on, unconsciously using a phrase that he’d copyrighted the summer before on the railroad job in the Timanyoni Mountains. “I’ve money enough in the bank to pull you out of the hole, but there’ll be nothing left to live on.”

“Oh, good gorry, Larry—do you think I’d let you do a thing like that?” Dick burst out. “Besides, can’t you get it into your head that I’m fired, canned, sent home in disgrace?”

“Oh, yes; I’m remembering all that. But I’m still thinking. You said this thing would break your father’s heart, and we mustn’t lose sight of that. Here’s what comes next. Gorman, in Prac. Mechanics, has lost his assistant, and two weeks ago I was offered the job. So far as I know, the chance is still open. With that, I could earn enough money to—”

There was the best reason in the world why the sentence broke itself short off in the middle of things. Up to that moment Larry had clean forgotten the great event of the afternoon, when Coach Brock had backed him into a corner of the locker-room in the gymnasium to tell him that if he’d promise to work hard on the practice field there would be a place for him on the next-year ’Varsity. If he should become Gorman’s shop assistant for the remainder of the semester, that would settle foot-ball practice, and every other outside activity, for good and all. There would be time only for work, study, eating and sleeping. If he didn’t hesitate, it was chiefly because he was afraid to hesitate.

—“Could earn money enough to keep us both,” he finished, with a little gulp to come between. “We’ll call that part of it settled.”

“Like a fish we will!” Dick rapped out, jumping down from his place on the wall. “What do you take me for, anyway, you soft-hearted old geezer? Do you suppose I’d let you mortgage yourself that way when you’re booked for next year’s ’Varsity? Oh, yes; I knew all about it before it happened. Not in a month of Sundays, Larry Donovan, and don’t you forget it! Now then, climb down off that wall and let me walk you back to your supper. I’ve made my little bleat, and that’s all there is to it.”

In a silence that was even thicker than the outward-bound one, they retraced the mile of county road, and at Mrs. Grant’s gate Dick went straight on down the street with only a brief “Good-night” for his hike companion. But a little later that same evening a muscular, square-shouldered fellow with curly red hair might have been seen pressing the bell-push rather timidly at the door of the President’s house on the opposite side of the campus; pressing the button gently and looking a bit shocked or awed or something when the door swung suddenly open to admit him.

Some half-hour later the red-headed one was thinking most pointedly of this door again, only this time he was eager to pass through its portal the other way. A middle-aged, sober-faced gentleman in scholarly black had risen from behind a huge table littered with books, in a room that was walled and plastered with more books, to shake hands with him at parting.

“You’ve made out a strong case, Donovan,” the president was saying. “It was principally your friend’s stubbornness that made the faculty take drastic action, but you are quite right in suggesting that we should recognize a sense of honor, even when we find it in bad company. If Maxwell is really in earnest—and after what you have told me I can hardly doubt it—I think I can promise you that we shall be willing to review his case—with a recommendation to mercy. Come and see me again, when you have time and opportunity. You will always be welcome.”

So, when Larry left the big house in Chestnut Street, he was walking upon thin air, and the crisp, starlit, late-in-March night seemed to sing for him as he strode along. And at the western portal of the campus he did not go aside to take the short cut across to Mrs. Grant’s. Instead, he broke another precedent and turned his steps toward Main Street and the house of the Zeta Omegas.