Schools of journalism are doubtless excellent things in their way, but many a bright young newspaperman has had his start in helping to keep a college daily “functioning,” so to speak. Beginning with the athletic reporter’s job on the Micrometer by writing copious columns which the editor usually cut to paragraphs, Larry was learning, and Havercamp, who was slated for editor-in-chief for the next college year, kept a weighing-and-measuring eye on the big, curly-headed Freshman who was slowly but surely learning the lesson of what ought, and what ought not, to be printed in a college newspaper.

“Ever been in Yellowstone Park, Larry?” Havercamp asked, one night in May when Larry had stayed over in town to help put the paper to bed.

“Not yet,” said Larry. “Why?”

“You remind me of one of the geysers—Old Faithful. Goes off at regular intervals and never misses a lick. That’s what counts in the long run—even more than the brilliant intellect you read about—and don’t often see. You can’t write much yet, but you have the knack of being able to tell when the other fellow writes right. Do you get me?”

“I guess so,” Larry laughed. “You’re trying to feed me up a bit, aren’t you?”

“Something of the sort, yes. In a few weeks we’ll be electing the editorial staff of the ‘Mike’ for next year. Some of the fellows think you ought to run for athletic editor. The ‘Mike’s’ going to need a ‘steady’ or so next year, and you’d fill the bill.”

“Not good enough,” Larry objected decisively.

“That’s for the other fellows to say. I think you are.”

“You ought to have a frat man,” was Larry’s next objection. “The fraternities have taken a good deal of interest in athletics this year and they ought to be encouraged.”

Havercamp grinned. He was one of the most enthusiastic fraternity men in Sheddon, and it amused him hugely to have a barbarian pointing out that the fraternities ought to be “encouraged.”

“Think we need ‘hoping up’ some, do you?” he laughed. “I like your cheek. Is that the best you can offer?”

“The best, but not all,” Larry went on. “I’m willing to do what comes my way to keep any of the Sheddon activities going. Just the same, though I don’t know where I’m going to land at the end of my four years, I’m reasonably sure it won’t be on a newspaper job. Another thing is, if I don’t fall down, I expect to be on the team next year.”

“That wouldn’t make any difference,” said Havercamp. “Anything else?”

Larry looked down.

“Yes. You know it as well as I do, Havvy, that I’m not ‘popular’ in any big sense. Fellows on the Micrometer staff ought to be popular.”

The managing editor sat back in his chair with his eyes half closed.

“That little thing has puzzled me more than a few, Donnie,” he admitted.

“But you know it’s so,” Larry persisted.

“I know that some of the fellows seem to be always trying to put you in bad, yes; and I’ve never seen any reason for it.”

Larry thought he knew the reason, but he was close-mouthed enough about his own affairs not to wish to talk about this particular one. He knew he had earned the enmity of Bryant Underhill and his following, and that meant the enmity of whatever proportion of the student body Underhill and his cronies could influence.

“I guess maybe there’s reason enough—for the fellows who do it,” was all he said in reply to Havercamp’s implied question; and just then the first copies of the paper came up, and they both fell to work scanning these preliminary “pulls” for last-minute correction of errors.

“Bry Underhill is one of the fellows who has it in for you,” Havercamp resumed, after the “go ahead” order had been ’phoned down to the press room.

“I know it,” said Larry. “At first he was sore at me because my father happens to be a railroad man working for day-pay instead of a salary. And now he’s got a bigger grudge—since Dick and I caught him and Crawford looting a house for ‘souvenirs’ on the night of the flood, and I was brash enough to talk about it.”

Havercamp shook his head.

“Underhill’s a bad actor. But because he flings his dad’s money around with an open hand and drives a sporty auto and poses as a ‘free and easy,’ he has a following—such fellows always do have. What I can’t understand is how he gets by with the Registrar in his classroom record. Nobody ever hears of his doing any real work.”

“There are others, as well,” said Larry; and as he was leaving the little editorial den on the top floor of the Chronicle Building to go home: “There are times when a fellow is tempted to believe that money—enough of it—will buy most anything in this world, Havvy. So long. Got to mog over to the shack and get down to brass tacks; couple of tests coming to-morrow.”

Now, as every one who is familiar with the town of which Old Sheddon is an over-the-river part knows, the Chronicle Building is well up the hill on the left-hand side of the main street, not quite out of the business district, but well over in the edge of it farthest from the river. Turning west at the newspaper corner, Larry glanced up at the clock in the dome of the court-house. Its hands were pointing to eleven.

At the moment the streets were nearly deserted, though in the “booze block,” as a certain square well down toward the river was called, the saloons (now happily a thing of the past) were all open and doing, or so it seemed to Larry, an unusual amount of late-hour business.

Since he passed that way nearly every evening on his way to and from the Micrometer office, he went on toward the bridge without paying any attention either to the lighted dives on one hand, or to the groups of late-hour loafers cluttering the sidewalk on the other. But just as he was passing the last of the saloons a man stepped out of a group of three, followed him and touched him on the shoulder. Larry wheeled quickly, with his muscles hardening themselves; but the man, a rather burglarish-looking fellow with a week-old beard blackening the lower half of his face and a workman’s cap pulled well down over a pair of beady eyes, spoke him fair, as they used to say in our grandfathers’ time.

“Name’s Donovan, ain’t it?” said the man, shifting the stub of his cigar from one corner of his hard mouth to the other, and talking out of the corner thus vacated.

“It is,” said Larry briefly. Then, quite as briefly, “What do you want?”

The man ignored the question.

“Young fellow named Maxwell’s a pal o’ yours, ain’t he?”

“He’s my friend, yes. What about him?”

“Li’l’ too much bug-juice, I reckon,” was the half-leering reply. “Somebody ought to knock ’im down an’ run ’im off home. Thought mebbe youse’d like to know.”

Most naturally, Larry was just plain horrified. That Dick, after his one bad slip and narrow escape, should make another that was infinitely worse, seemed utterly unbelievable. Then he remembered that for the past few days Dick had been blue and discouraged for fear that, after all, he mightn’t be able to make passing grades in the year-end examinations. Could it be possible that he had let his discouragement, which, as everybody had told him, was nothing worse than the nervous scare of a fellow who has been working his brain a bit too hard, drive him into another kind of dissipation?

All this, as we may figure, flashed through one half of Larry’s mind in the few seconds during which he stood staring at the slouching bearer of bad news and trying, with the other half of the thinking machinery, to determine what possible object the man could have in lying to him—if he were lying.

“You must be mistaken,” he said at last. “The Maxwell you’re talking about isn’t the Maxwell I know.”

“I guess yes. Anyways, the last I seen o’ him he was singin’ an’ hollerin’ f’r youse to come an’ steer ’im home.”

Larry’s resolution was taken impulsively. There were a thousand chances to one that the thing was a hideous mistake, but where Dick was concerned he was not willing to take the one chance.

“Pitch out and show me,” he said brusquely; and when the man turned back toward the noisiest of the saloons, Larry followed him.

It was at the very door of the noisy place, and just as he was about to enter it at the heels of his guide, that he ran squarely into a boisterous crowd of Sheddonians heading collegeward. Then he remembered suddenly that this was the night when Sock and Buskin, the college dramatic society, was giving a performance in the town opera house. Since, for Dick’s sake, he couldn’t stop to explain anything, Larry tried to dodge into the noisy place quickly, hoping that he hadn’t been recognized. But the hope was a vain one. Welborn, the big-hearted—but loud-mouthed and not too tactful—Aggie Freshman who roomed at Mrs. Grant’s, was a member of the bunch of homing theater-goers, and he saw Larry and bawled out a half-joking warning.

“Hey, you, Donnie! Come out o’ there! You’re on the team, and that’s breaking training!”

Being pretty badly flustered anyway, Larry did the worst thing he could have done—dodged again and made no answer. And it was not until he was following the unshaven loafer into the purlieus of the place that he realized fully what his action must have meant to Welborn and the others.

Welborn’s bawled-out hail had called the attention of every Sheddonian in the bunch to the fact that he, Larry Donovan, was entering a saloon at eleven o’clock at night in company with a fellow who looked as if he might be a bank burglar at the very least. And he had ducked as if he were ashamed to be seen. As certainly as the autumn would ripen little red apples the story would go from mouth to mouth, and while a break of that kind might pass unremarked in the case of a known member of the fast set, it wouldn’t go that way when the one who made it happened to be a potential member of next year’s ’Varsity and was supposed to be in training—at least to the extent of taking respectable care of himself.

“Show me where Maxwell is, quick,” he snapped at his guide. “I haven’t any time to waste fooling ’round such a place as this.”

“I c’n show you where he was a few minutes ago,” said the hard-faced man, leading the way to a row of box-like card-rooms in the rear, and at the word he opened the door of one of the boxes.

Larry looked in and saw that the place was empty. A single unshaded electric light hung over a round table which, with a few chairs, completed the furnishings of the bare cell. The man seemed nonplussed.

“’S queer,” he muttered. “He was in here a li’l’ spell ago. Wait a minute and I’ll dig ’im up f’r youse.”

Larry’s first impulse was to make a bolt for the street and the open air. Every clean-living fiber of him was protesting against the ribald clamor of the place, the smoke-soaked atmosphere, the sickening, stifling smell of liquor and stale beer. But the thought of Dick, and that one chance in a thousand that the whole thing wasn’t some wretched mistake, held him. Besides, at the command to “wait,” the man had shoved him into the little room and shut the door; but for that he was rather thankful, since it cut him off from the bar-room and its noisy occupants.

Pulling up one of the chairs, Larry sat down to make the best of what began to seem like a mighty disagreeable job. Naturally, all he could think of, at first, was the awful thing that had happened to Dick, and as he dwelt upon it, it seemed more and more unbelievable. Surely Lansing and Dick’s other friends in the Zeta Omegas wouldn’t let things come to such a pass after they had seen what a brave fight Dick was making to “come back” after his nearly fatal run-in with the Underhill bunch and the “Mixers.” Larry asked himself what a frat was for, anyway, if it couldn’t lay hold of a fellow who was in the dumps and jolly him over the rough places.

Thinking so hard about these things, it was perhaps five minutes or so before he began to realize the breathless, half-suffocating closeness of the little card-room, and the stifling alcoholic smell that seemed to be growing stronger the longer he had to breathe it. When he did realize it, he found that his head was swimming and his eyes were smarting strangely. Starting up to go and open the door, the dizziness half overcame him, and in trying to sit down again he missed the chair awkwardly and almost slid under the table.

While he was pulling himself up and wondering vaguely what had come over him, the door opened a little way, and the stubble-bearded man stuck his head in to say: “I’ve found out where yer pally went to. Come on, an’ we’ll go get him.”

Larry tried again to get up, and again the nauseating vertigo made him see black. “If I—could have a drink of—water,” he gasped, and he was dimly conscious of the disappearance of the hard-visaged man, and of his reappearance a little later with a glass of water. Little as he cared for the opinion of this hard-bitted person, he was ashamed of the way his hands shook when he took the glass and drained it to the last drop.

For a minute or so the cold drink seemed to revive him, but the effect was only temporary. When he tried once more to get upon his feet his legs refused to hold him up, and an immense desire to sleep came over him like a smothering pall. Struggling vainly against the overmastering lethargy, he dropped back into the chair and, bending over the table, hid his face in the crook of an arm just to rest for a second or so. And that was the last he remembered.

When he next opened his eyes, the low-slanting sun was shining in his face, and he was lying on a forkful of straw in what appeared to be a deserted cow stable. Dazed and bewildered, he sat up and tried to make out where he was and how he came to be there. Dimly and like the figures of a dream his latest waking recollections came straggling back; the noisy and noisome saloon; the stubble-bearded man who talked out of the corner of his mouth; the stifling atmosphere of the close little room in which he had been waiting for the man to return, bringing Dick Maxwell.

When was all this?—how long ago? And was it the rising sun, or the setting, that was shining in on him through the open stable door? He pulled out his watch, the good old reliable timepiece by which his father had once run trains on the home railroad, and which had been given to him as a parting gift when he left for college. Not once since it had been his had he let it run down; but now it had run down, stopping with its hands pointing to half-past nine. His jaw dropped. That must have been half-past nine in the morning!

Larry propped his head in his hands and tried once more to piece the vaguenesses up into some sort of an understandable whole. Was it possible that he had slept through half a night and almost all of a day? Suddenly it came over him with a shock like a bucketing of cold water that this was, or had been, the day for the tests in Math. and Physics—and he had cut not only these, but all his other classes as well!

That shock brought him to his feet with a bound, and he was dismayed to find that he was still wobbly and uncertain when he stood up, and that he had a headache that was worse than any he had ever experienced in his healthy, clear-headed life. This started him off on another line of speculative wondering. What had happened to him in the close little room where he had waited for the return of the hard-faced loafer? Was it possible that the mere reek of the place had made him so drunk that he could sleep eighteen hours on end, and then wake up with his head feeling as big as a bushel basket?

Stumbling out of the cow stable he found himself in a part of the town that he had never visited; the poorer quarter behind the row of saloons in Main Street. The stable, which evidently hadn’t been used for a long time, stood in a neglected back lot fronting upon a dirty alley, and through the alley he made his way to the street and so across the bridge to the college suburb.

Dodging aside as soon as he had crossed the river, he hoped he might be able to reach Mrs. Grant’s and his room without meeting anybody he knew. But at the very last, as he was turning the final corner, he ran into Dick Maxwell and two other members of the Omegs. It was Dick who blocked the way and said: “Just been up to your room to see if you’d been heard from yet. Coach Brock wanted to know where you’d dropped out to. Where’ve you been, and what makes you look as if you’d been pulled backwards through a knot-hole?”

Larry steadied himself with a grip on the corner fence post, and in place of answering the double question, asked one of his own.

“Where were you at eleven o’clock last night, Dick?”

Dick’s reply was prompt.

“Up to about that time I was in the house lounge with Cranny and Stillwell here, chewing Physics with them for the test to-day. After that I was hitting the hay for a home run in my little downy. Why?”

“Nothing,” said Larry, and he went on to the Man-o’-War gate with a great light beginning to filter through the headache clouds. One thing, at least, was clear: the stubble-faced loafer had told a lie cut out of whole cloth. There had been no Dick Maxwell to be knocked down and dragged out and carried home.

In his room Larry found Purdick working over a demonstration drawing, and the small one nearly jumped up and flung his arms around the home-comer when he saw who it was that had opened the door.

“Suffering Jehu! I never was so glad to see anybody in my life!” he exclaimed, shoving the drawing-board back on the study table. Then: “They’ve had me fighting mad all day.”

“Who had?” said Larry, dropping into a chair to get back to the old trick of holding his head in his hands.

“Markley and Dugger, and that bunch. They’ve been telling it all over the campus that they saw you last night in a back room at ‘Pat’s Place’ dead drunk! I tried to lick Dugger for saying it, but he carried too big a wallop for me.”

“Huh!” said Larry, looking out between his fingers; “that’s where you got that black eye, was it? You’re a mighty loyal little rat, Purdy, and I only wish you’d been fighting for something worth while. I was in ‘Pat’s Place’ last night, and if I wasn’t drunk, there was something else mighty funny the matter with me. I just waked up a little while ago, and my head feels bigger than a barrel, right now. But what were Markley and Dugger doing in Pat’s?”

“The way they’re telling it, they had been to the Sock and Buskin show, and after it was out they stopped in the Rookery to get an ice-cream soda. As they were passing Pat’s on their way over, some fellow out in front told them that there was one of their college bunkies drunk in a back room. They say they went in and found you lying spread out on a table and so far gone that they thought it would be too much of a job to get you home. So, with the help of the barkeeper and the fellow who had told them, they lugged you out to an old barn in a vacant lot and left you to sleep it off. I didn’t believe ’em, of course. If I had, I’d’ve gone to hunt you up. It’s all a pack of lies, isn’t it? You didn’t drink anything in that miserable dog-hole, did you?”

“Nothing but a glass of cold water.”

“Tell me,” Purdick commanded; and Larry told the whole story, or so much of it as was clear enough to be recalled. Purdick heard him through without interrupting, and then, out of an experience that was wider—and sadder—than any his big-bodied room-mate had ever gone through, he grappled with the mysteries.

“You say the card-room smelled of alcohol and the smell grew stronger: I guess it was meant to. Don’t you know that a person can get drunk just breathing the fumes of the stuff?”

“I didn’t know it,” Larry admitted.

“Well, it’s so. The sawdust on the floor was probably soaked for you before you went in. Then, with the door shut, you’d soon go off your head.”

“But, listen—Markley and Dugger say they carried me out, and that couldn’t have been very long after I went off the handle. Just smelling the stuff wouldn’t make a fellow sleep eighteen hours, would it?”

“No; but the glass of water, or what was in it, probably did the rest. You were doped.”

For some little time Larry didn’t speak. When he broke the silence, it was to say: “That brings on a lot more talk, doesn’t it, Purdy? Why should those plug-uglies at ‘Pat’s Place’ want to fill me up with lies and then drug me?”

“Easy,” said little Purdick. “They were paid to do it.”

“What! You mean the Underhill push?”

“It’s beating its way into your head at last, is it? Bry Underhill’s been telling it around again, as he did a month or so ago, that you’d never play anything but practice games on the ’Varsity—never come back to Sheddon after this year. He’s cooked up the proper scheme, this time, to knock you out. The story will get around to Brock—Undy will see to it that it does get around to him—and you know how strict he is about the booze.”

Again there was a little silence in the big room, and at the end of it Larry started to his feet with his fists clenched.

“It was a ‘frame-up,’ just as you say, Purdy,” he said, speaking slowly as he always did when his temper was threatening to get out of control. “I’ve tried, all along, not to be vindictive toward Underhill and his crowd, but this thing hits the limit. I’m going after that fellow now, and he’ll be the one who won’t come back to Sheddon next year instead of me!

“Now, I want you to do me a little favor. I’m as hungry as a wolf, but I don’t want to face the bunch at the supper-table to-night. Slip down and see Mother Grant and ask her if you can’t bring my supper up to me. You can tell her I’ve got a bad headache, and you won’t miss the truth by a sixty-fourth of an inch. Skip for it while I go to the bath-room and hold my head under the cold-water faucet. I want to be able to think straight after I get a few calories inside of me.”