As the season advanced, Larry found that he had his hands full, and then some. Havercamp was unwilling to let him off from his Micrometer assignment, and what with that and his studies, and boosting Dick to make up the lost standing, and going out with the team every time Coach Brock gave it a work-out, there was little chance for him to get rusty for the want of something to do.

It was along in these early spring days that Dick had to pay for his foolishness—not to call it by any harder name. True, Uncle Billy Starbuck, his father’s partner in the “Little Alice” mine, and his uncle only because his father and Uncle Billy had married sisters, sent him a birthday check along in April that enabled him to square things with his frat brothers who were carrying him along financially, but no check, however generous, could buy him off on the score of the neglected studies.

So, at a time when every fellow in Old Sheddon who had a drop of good red blood in him was turning out for some kind of outdoor activity, and soft skies and budding trees and greening meadows were calling so that you could almost hear them in your sleep, Dick was boning away for dear life, scared stiff more than half of the time for fear he wouldn’t be able to make his final passing grades, and learning, incidentally, we may suppose, the hard lesson that we all have to learn sooner or later, that he who plays must pay.

“Gosh!” he lamented, one night after Larry had been putting him through a regular course of sprouts on some of the back work in Math., “I’d been meaning to try out for one of the track teams this spring, and now look at me—handcuffed to a pencil and a pad, and with my nose glued into a book! Makes me think of old Johnnie Mawker oiling the train trucks in the Brewster station. Recollect how he used to grin and show his bad teeth when he’d jerk open a housing and prod in it with his hook, and say: ‘Shore enough, b’ys, the way of the train’s greaser is hard’? How’s the practice coming along? I haven’t so much as looked over the fence of the field this year.”

“We’re doing fairly well. If there’s anything in hard work, Brock means to put a good team into the fight next fall. Wally Dixon’s coming out fine. I’m mighty glad Brock picked him. He’s got all-star stuff in him if he can take on a little more swiftness.”

“Wally’s all sorts of a good fellow,” said Dick, half musingly. “We call him ‘The Butcher’ in the house—I suppose because his Dad’s in the packing business, but that, or his Dad’s money, doesn’t hurt him any.”

“No,” Larry agreed. “‘Dad’s money’ doesn’t always spoil a fellow. There’s Ollie McKnight, for example.”

Dick smiled.

“Getting rid of a few of the old grouches, aren’t you?”

“Trying to,” Larry confessed. “But when I run up against a fellow like Bryant Underhill it comes pretty hard.”

“Yes, Underhill,” said Dick, and his eyes darkened. “He and his bunch of Snitty-Crawford boot-lickers! You give that gang a wide berth, Larry. They’re all bad medicine, as you and I both have reason to know.”

Larry sat back in his chair, and the wide-set eyes were half-closed.

“Do you remember, one time last summer when we were on the railroad job, I told you I had a bad temper, Dick? Well, I’ve got it yet, and a sore of the Underhill sort comes as near to getting my goat as anything can. You know how he tried to make me ‘bust’ last winter?”

“Sure I do.”

“Well, he’s at it again, in another way. He’s trying now to get me shoved off the team.”

Dick straightened up hot-eyed.

“That’s because you told the fellows what he and Crawford were doing the night of the flood,” he snapped. “But he’d better keep his mouth shut! I could tell things about him that would get him fired out of college so quick it’d make his head swim!”

“Easy, you old firebrand,” said Larry; “you’ve got your own quarrel with Underhill on that ‘Mixer’ business, but this one is mine, and I’m big enough to fight my own battles.”

“What’s he doing now?” Dick demanded.

“Telling lies about me, chiefly. Purdy gets onto everything of that sort”—little Purdick was out somewhere, and the two had the big room in the Man-o’-War to themselves.

“What sort of lies?”

“Dirty ones. You remember when the Underhill Contracting Company had a job on the Short Line a couple of years ago? Underhill was out there a while that summer, stopping at the hotel in Brewster most of the time, I guess, and he claims that he found out a lot about me and my people. Shubrick had his mother and sister down here last week on a visit, and Underhill told Shuby he’d better not introduce me; that I wasn’t the kind of fellow he’d want his folks to meet.”

Dick got up, and his eyes were blazing out of a face that was as white as a sheet of paper.

“There’s a limit to all things, Larry!” he broke out furiously. “Do you suppose I could break into Prexy’s house at this time of night?”

“Of course you couldn’t,” said Larry calmly. “Why should you want to?”

“You know good and well why I want to. Underhill’s smashed every rule and every tradition of Old Sheddon ever since he first hit the campus last fall. He’s not only a boozer and a gambler—he’s a cheat. I stood in for him and his crowd that time when the police caught us, and mighty nearly got canned for it. But now I’m going to tell everything I know!”

“You’re not going to do anything you say you will,” Larry put in, decisively. “As I told you a minute or so ago, I can fight my own battles.”

“Not with that kind of carrion, you can’t,” Dick denied; “you’re too open and aboveboard. He’ll do you up if you don’t let me kill him off.”

Any further talk about the Underhill come-back had to stop just here, because Welborn came in, wishful to know at what place in the book the English assignment for the next day paused; and shortly afterward Dick took his leave.

Like a regular fellow, Larry tried to forget the Underhill-Shubrick incident; tried, also, to keep from watching his team-mates to see if the lies had spread to the extent of making any difference, so far as he could determine, but he was wise enough to understand that a practice field would be exactly the place in which a bunch of fellows wouldn’t draw any hard-and-fast social lines.

But the dirt-throwing bobbed up again early in May on a Saturday when the newly organized ’Varsity was to put on a practice game with the Sophomores, and this was the way of it.

As everybody knows, visitors are not usually invited to witness the spring training games, but on this particular day there were two outsiders, a middle-aged gentleman and a girl, in the grand stand, guests of a Senior named MacClay, and at sight of the girl Larry was carried swiftly back to a day in the year-before summer; to a mountain canyon scarred and shattered in spots by the ripping of dynamite blasts, and to the foot-board of a big locomotive gingerly towing two Pullmans up the heavy grade.

“Remember ’em?” asked Dick, who was by this time far enough along in his make-up work to take an occasional Saturday afternoon off on the field.

“Sure,” Larry nodded. “Vice-president Holcombe of our line and his daughter—the girl who wanted to know if my last name wasn’t German.”

Dick grinned.

“You’ve got a long memory—for little pin-pricks,” he laughed. “Mr. Holcombe is MacClay’s uncle. He and Bess were passing through in the V-P’s private car, and Mac got ’em to stop over. You haven’t met ’em yet, I take it?”

Larry shook his head. “No; and I’m not likely to. I’m out here to play foot-ball.” And, as Coach Brock put him in just here, he did play foot-ball; played it so well that the scattering of more or less enthusiastic student spectators in the stands gave him ear-splitting credit by name every time he scored.

It was after the practice game that MacClay invited some of his friends and the members of the ’Varsity to come around to the little college inn, “At the Sign of the Samovar,” to meet his uncle and cousin; and Dick, who was watching things like a hawk hovering over a chicken yard, noticed that the team invitation was given to the various members individually, and that MacClay dodged Larry. Dick’s suspicions were aroused at once, but all he did at the time was to ask Larry to come over to the Samovar later in the afternoon; did this without saying anything about the impromptu reception for MacClay’s guests—and without saying anything to MacClay.

At the appointed time there was a gathering of the invited ones in the club room of the little inn, with Dick—who had naturally been included in the bidding, since his father was the general manager of the railroad of which Mr. Holcombe was the vice-president—among them. Apart from this, however, Dick knew the Holcombes well from having spent part of a summer with them at a mountain resort in Colorado.

It was rather early in the reception affair that Bess Holcombe got Dick aside to ask him a question.

“Tell me, Dickie,” she said; “who was the ‘Donovan’ who was playing at right half and scored so many times. Surely he isn’t our Donovan, is he?”

Dick knew quite well what she meant by the personal pronoun possessive. On that never-to-be-forgotten day in the mountain canyon less than a year before, the Pullman car, holding only Miss Holcombe, four women and the porter, had slipped its brakes for a runaway down the grade, and it was Larry’s quick wit and cool courage in chasing it with one of the construction engines that had saved the lives of the imperilled ones.

“He is our Larry, all right,” Dick replied. “Didn’t you know that he came here to Old Sheddon with me?”

“There are lots of things I don’t know about him,” was the quick rejoinder. “For one thing, I never could find out why he ran away that day last summer and wouldn’t let us even so much as thank him for saving our lives.”

“Bashful,” Dick laughed, though he knew very well that it was grouchiness and workingman prejudice rather more than bashfulness that had made Larry take to the woods on that memorable afternoon.

“Where is he?” the girl asked. “I think I’ve met all the other members of the team, haven’t I?”

“He’ll be over, after a little,” said Dick; and just then MacClay butted in and took his cousin away to meet another group of his classmates.

It was shortly after this that MacClay took his turn at drawing Dick Maxwell aside.

“You were talking to Bess a few minutes ago: it was about Donovan, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t I hear you say that he was coming here?”

Dick was beginning to be a trifle nettled.

“You might have, if you ‘listened in’ hard enough.”

“Who invited him?”

“I did.”

“Now see here, Maxie; you’re not a dead one, and you must have heard the stories that are going around about Donovan. For that matter, you come from the same town, and you must know what sort of a fellow he is.”

Dick straightened himself belligerently.

“You’re just the man I’ve been looking for, MacClay; somebody who can tell me precisely the sort of fellow Larry Donovan is. It’s just possible that I don’t know; I haven’t been acquainted with him more than ten or a dozen years.”

MacClay looked embarrassed. He was a very decent fellow in the main, though somewhat inclined to take himself and his own little world a trifle too seriously.

“I’ll just ask you one question, Maxie: have you any sisters?”

“Yes; two of ’em.”

“Would you be willing to have Donovan meet them?”

“Rats! They’re only kids, but, barring the difference in ages, he’s known them as long and as well as he has me.”

“And he’s accepted by your people—in your home?”

“Of course he is. Why shouldn’t he be?”

MacClay looked still more embarrassed.

“There’s a mistake out, somewhere,” he said. “Shubrick was telling me—”

“Who told Shubrick?” Dick cut in.

“Underhill, I believe. The story goes that Underhill lived for some time in your home town and knew all about the Donovans.”

“Exactly,” snapped Dick. “Just after the Rockford Poly game last fall, Bry Underhill took occasion to black-list Larry to a bunch of the fellows for no better reason than that his father was a workingman. Larry happened to overhear what he said and was going to lick him, but the other fellows got in and stopped it. Bry bragged then that he’d run Larry out of Old Sheddon, and he tried to do it, using Snitty Crawford for a cat’s-paw. Now he is trying, in another way, to get him shoved off the team. There isn’t a single word of truth in the stories he’s telling around about Larry and his people, and I’d be willing to bet my next year’s allowance that he never so much as heard of Larry until he came here to Sheddon.”

MacClay spread his hands.

“Of course, I’m taking your word for it, Maxie, straight from the shoulder,” he said, heartily enough. “I didn’t want to believe this mess of gossip about Donovan; but at the same time, Bess is my only girl cousin, and—well, you know how a fellow feels about such things.”

“Sure I do,” Dick acceded cheerfully. “All I’ll say is that you owe Larry something for singling him out as the only man on the team that you didn’t invite here this afternoon; also, you owe him something for saving Bess’s life last summer. You can make a payment on both debts by giving Underhill’s lies a bash in the face every time you get a chance.”

“I’ll do it,” MacClay promised, and then Dick went to the door to watch for Larry’s coming, knowing pretty well the Donovan disposition to break and run at the most remote first view of anything like a social function.

For the purpose Dick had in mind, it was lucky that he was waiting at the door when Larry turned in from the street. Having been so carefully ignored in the invitation-giving, Larry knew nothing about the small “informal” at the Samovar. But like the war horse in the Bible, he scented the battle from afar just about as soon as he left the sidewalk, and Dick’s unworded prophecy that he would duck and run would have had its fulfilment if the watcher at the door hadn’t chased out and grabbed him.

“No, you don’t,” Dick laughed; “I was laying for you, you old dodger.”

“But what is it?” Larry wanted to know. “And where do I come in?”

“By the front door, if you’re asking me. I was afraid you’d forget and not come at all.”

“If it’s some social doings, I wish I had forgotten. You know well enough that I’m no earthly good at that sort of thing.”

“I know you’re going to be good at this one. Come on in and take your medicine like mamma’s little man.” And Larry had to go, because Dick had such a firm grip on him that a frantic wrestling match was about the only thing that offered any chance of escape.

Now, with Richard Maxwell, junior, a purpose usually held much more than was suffered to appear on the surface. From the moment at the close of the foot-ball practice when he had discovered that Larry was left out of the invitation list, he had been plotting like the villain in a play, and thus far there had been no hitch. What was particularly needed was an audience of sufficient size, and this he had secured by taking it upon himself to add handsomely to MacClay’s biddings, telling as many of the men as he could reach in the time afforded that they owed it to MacClay to come around and do honor to his guests.

Therefore and wherefore it was a pretty well crowded club-room that Larry was presently dragged into, and Dick didn’t give him a moment in which to cool his heels—or his courage. Almost before he knew what was happening, Larry found himself shaking hands with a tall, well-preserved gentleman with a mop of graying hair which looked as if it might once have belonged to a foot-ball captain, and the gentleman was saying, evidently following up something that Dick had said:

“So you’re that Donovan, are you? Well, now—this is a pleasure that I’ve been promising myself ever since last summer. Why did you run away without giving us a chance to thank you for the splendid thing you and Dick did when our Pullman broke loose?”

Larry said, “I don’t know, Mr. Holcombe,” which was about as near the fact as he could come without going into an explanation a mile long, and that probably wouldn’t be understood after it was made.

“I believe you are right,” smiled the tall man; and then he was wise enough, or kindly enough, to steer away from that subject and start another upon which Larry was much more at home. “I was watching your play this afternoon with a great deal of interest. We used to play a sort of game that we called foot-ball in my college days, and there was a time when I thought I was something of a dabster at it myself. Do you play on the ’Varsity next year?”

“If I can make good in the practice.”

“I guess there is no fear but what you’ll do that,” and while the visitor went on talking about foot-ball and the tremendous improvements—“differences,” he called them—which the game had taken on since his own time, the second layer in Dick’s purpose uncovered itself. With a deft cleverness all his own, he was contriving to get just as many of those present as possible to observe the cordial footing upon which the vice-president of the Nevada Short Line (no inconsiderable railroad, if you please!) was meeting Larry Donovan. And the cap-sheaf to that was placed when the great man finally called his daughter and turned Larry over to her.

“I think it is high time you were letting me say ‘Thank you,’ Mr. Donovan,” was the way Miss Bessie began on him; and there was a dog-like plea in his eyes when he blurted out:

“Oh, say—please don’t ‘Mister’ me; I—I’m just ‘Larry’ to my friends, and—and——”

“And we are your friends; you can certainly count upon that. But tell me, how did you ever have the nerve to chase that runaway car?”

“Why-ee, I don’t know. I guess it didn’t take so very much nerve. You see, it had to be done. The car was running away.”

“Oh! So things that have to be done don’t require extra courage. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? It’ll take more than the bare saying so to convince me. Let’s go somewhere and sit down.”

Again Dick uncovered that purposeful second layer. “You see,” he said to one of the fellows who he knew had been carelessly spreading Underhill’s calumnies; “you see how people who really know Donnie appreciate him. Bess Holcombe met him last summer out in Colorado, you know, and, incidentally, he saved her life on a runaway car—no, not an auto—a Pullman on the railroad. You couldn’t tell the Holcombes anything against him, and get away with it.”

Oddly enough, after the first few minutes, Larry found himself getting along very well indeed with the daughter of, perhaps, the richest man he had ever shaken hands with. Which was something to Miss Holcombe’s credit, too, for she was rather fond of taking “rises” out of bashful young fellows. Most naturally, their talk went back to that day in the Tourmaline Canyon at first, but it got around to more modern things after a bit.

“You are taking the Mechanical course in Sheddon?” the girl asked, when things present had been given a chance.

“Taking at it,” said Larry modestly.

“And Dickie Maxwell’s in Civil?”

“He is. His father is a C. E., you know.”

“Mr. Maxwell is a Sheddon old-grad., isn’t he?”

“Yes; that is how Dick and I come to be here. It’s a good old dump.”

The girl laughed.

“If you go on playing foot-ball the way you did this afternoon, you’ll put Sheddon on the map,” she said. “Where did you learn?”

“Brewster High. We had a corking team for a bunch of kids. I’ll say that much for it if it did have to count me in as right half.”

“That is where you’ll play on the ’Varsity, isn’t it?”

“Surest thing you know—if Coach Brock doesn’t find a better man.”

If any one had told Larry one short hour earlier that at half-past five that same afternoon he would be talking thus chummily with a girl—any girl, let alone Miss Elizabeth Holcombe—he would have taken a chance and called that person a hopeless pipe-dreamer. More than that, he went on talking with her, and still more, when the time came for the guests to go to the eastbound train to which their private car was to be attached, he made one of a group of Dick’s and MacClay’s intimates who went to the station to see them off.

It was while they were walking together back to the college side of the river over the reconstructed Main Street bridge that Larry said to Dick: “Did you hear what Miss Bess said to me as I was putting her on her car?”

“Asked you to come to see her if you ever came to New York, didn’t she?”

“That was it. I wonder if you could tell me if she really meant it.”

“Meant it? Of course she did. Why shouldn’t she?”

Larry’s answer was no answer at all, but what he said marked a distinct milestone in his changing—and broadening—attitude toward the moneyed minority.

“The Holcombes seem to be just ‘folks’ like the rest of us,” was his summing up of the plunge into the social amenities; and Dick was wise enough to let the remark stand just as it was made.

That evening Larry went over to the Omeg house to help Dick “bone” a little more against some tests that were coming. After the work session was over, Dick sat back with a quizzical smile and said: “I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with the Underhill lies now, Larry—after what happened this afternoon.”

“Ump,” said Larry. “I’ve been thinking: I guess it wasn’t so much of a ‘happening’ as it might have been. Didn’t you know that I was the only member of the team that wasn’t invited to the Samovar?”

“Maybe I did.”

“And you ‘framed’ it so I’d have to meet the Holcombes anyway, even if MacClay didn’t want me to?”

Dick’s smile broadened into a mischievous grin.

“What you don’t know won’t ever hurt you one little bit,” he replied banteringly; adding, as Larry got up to go: “I owe you more than I can ever pay, anyhow. Let’s let it go at that. But there’s one other little thing I’d like to say. I happen to know that Bry Underhill is perfectly savage about the thing you let out on him—stealing those mottoes from the flooded house. The next time he takes a lick at you he’s going to make it count, if he can. Just thought I’d mention it so you could watch out. Night-night.”