“What are you fellows going to do in the summer vacation?”

It was Ollie McKnight who wanted to know, and he had just come in from the gymnasium showers where he had been cooling off after a lively practice with the Freshman team; scrimmages which, in the warm afternoon, were a little like sessions in a Turkish bath.

There were various answers from the half-dozen Freshmen lounging in the big room at Mother Grant’s which had been occupied for nearly half of the college year by Larry and Purdick. Welborn, the big Aggie, said he was going home to Missouri to work on the farm. Wally Dixon said his father was building an addition to his packing plant in Kansas City, and that he’d probably have a job wheelbarrowing concrete, or something of that sort. Cal Rogers made a similar response. His father was a contractor, and he, Cal, supposed there was a wheelbarrow or a shovel or a pick waiting for him at his home town in Iowa.

“How about you two Timanyoni Twins?” McKnight asked, tossing the question to Dick Maxwell and Larry.

“Work for me, too, if I can find anything to do,” Larry said; and Dick wrinkled his nose at McKnight.

“You’ll have to stay and see Commencement through for the rest of us, Knighty,” he said. “We’re all too industrious to hang around here for doings where Freshmen have to stick on the side lines and don’t get a look-in.”

“That’s the way of it,” little Purdick put in. “Commencement’s no Freshman game. Do you stay, Knighty?”

“Not on your life. I’ve got a job, too, strange as it may seem. It’s northern Minnesota and the iron country for mine. While you fellows are doing your little summer chores all over the lot you can get a long-distance snap-shot of me down in some open cut in the Mesaba, chucking coal into the tummy of a steam shovel, or something of that sort.”

“Yes, I think I see you with overalls on!” said Rogers sarcastically. “You’ll be doing a cross-country run in a million-dollar buzz-wagon, or sailing a brass-mounted yacht up the Maine coast, or something like that. I know you, Knighty.”

“Maybe you did know me last summer, or the summer before,” McKnight got back. “But that isn’t saying that you know me now. I’ve already asked Dad if I can’t go to the Mesaba and begin to learn the steel business from the bottom, and he didn’t write to say ‘yes.’ Not on your moving-picture. He wired it.”

Wally Dixon shook his head in mock solemnity.

“You shouldn’t ought to do things like that, Ollie; not unless you’re sure there’s no heart disease in your family. Think of the terrible shock it must have been when they got your letter.”

“That’s all right,” laughed the son of the steel magnate good-naturedly. “I’ll admit I was one of the Willie-boys when I came here last fall, but it’s only fair to Old Sheddon to say that I hope she’s done a little something for me in nine months.”

After a bit more of this good-natured joshing the fellows began to drop out, one by one, drifting away to their respective rooming places. The year-end examinations were on, the outdoor activities were stringing out to a close, and even the bright stars who had made “A’s” and “B’s” in the semester tests were cramming a bit for the final trials.

“You’re going to make the turn all right, this time, aren’t you, Purdy?” asked Larry, after the others had gone, referring, for the first time since Purdick had come to room with him, to the small one’s discouraging flunk-out of the previous year.

“Easy,” said Purdick; “thanks to you and to that other fellow whose name you won’t tell me. Can’t you take the bridle off of that promise now, Larry?”

“Permission not yet given,” Larry grinned.

“Will it ever be given?”

“Maybe—some day.”

Silence for a little while, and then Purdick began again. “I’ve been leaning hard upon what you said to me—that freezing cold night in my old room over Heffelfinger’s: that you’d have taken the money yourself if you’d been in my place. Can you say it again, Larry?”

“Easier now than I could then. The fellow who built your scholarship is a man, all the way up and down, Purdy. I’d bank on him for anything.”

“It wasn’t Dick Maxwell?”

Larry laughed. “No, it wasn’t Dickie. But you mustn’t begin to worm things out of me by the process of elimination. Let’s be fair to your ‘good angel.’ All he asks is to stay unknown. Besides, I shouldn’t wonder if he’d forgotten all about the scholarship by this time. It’d be just like him.”

Purdick looked up quickly.

“Do you mean by that he’s got so much money that two thousand dollars, more or less, don’t mean anything to him?” he asked.

Larry had a swift jab from that inner sense which is sometimes called after-wit, realizing that he had said too much.

“You shut up, Purdy; I’m not going to say another word about it. You’ve got the boost, and the other fellow’s got what does him a lot more good than the money is doing you. That’s all there is to it, and you couldn’t get any more out of me if you were to give me the third degree.”

That settled it for the time being, and during the few remaining days which led up to Commencement Week everybody was too busy to think or talk about anything but the year-end job in hand.

It was after the examinations were over, and there was not much left for a Freshman to do but to burn his green cap and go home, that Larry and little Purdick took a farewell evening hike out to the bridge which bore their class numerals. It had been a perfect June day, and the evening matched it harmoniously. A light shower the night before had laid the dust, spring green was waving from the trees and nodding to them from the fields, and the song of the cardinal was abroad in the land.

“You didn’t turn out for the bridge scrap, did you, Purdy?” said Larry, as they hoisted themselves to seats on the approach parapet where he and Dick Maxwell had sat through a pretty painful session one evening some few weeks earlier.

“You know I didn’t. About that time o’ night I was washing dishes in Hassler’s kitchen.”

“But you’ll be in the next one. We’ll be the defenders next fall, and we want to keep those old figures up there for another year.”

“Lot of good I’d be!” scoffed the small one. “If we should happen to get a few grasshoppers in the next Freshman class, perhaps I might be able to pull a leg off of one or two of ’em. But that’s about all.”

“Size isn’t everything,” Larry offered. Having plenty of it himself, he could easily disregard the lack of it in others. Then: “Have you always been off weight, Purdy?”

“Ever since I can remember. My mother was small.”

In all their close association as room-mates Purdick had rarely talked of himself or his past, and never of his people. But now, perhaps because the parting for the summer was so near at hand, he let out a little.

“We were poor folks,” he went on; “poor in the way you don’t know anything about, because your father had a trade and a good one. Mine was a day laborer, and there were seven mouths to fill.”

“Five children?” said Larry. “That’s our number at home.”

“That was our number, but it isn’t any more; there are only two of us now—my sister Alice and I.”

“And your father and mother?”

“Both dead. Mother was never very strong, and the fight was too hard for her. After the other children died, she sort of lost her—her courage, I guess. That left only father and two children; and Alice wasn’t big enough to do much. That’s how I learned to cook and wash dishes.”

“Then your father died?”

“He was killed—in the steel works. It was an open-hearth furnace, and he was on the puddler’s gang. There was a loose board in the run-way, and the hand-rail was broken. The men had complained, time and again, but nothing was done. One day father slipped.” He stopped abruptly, and when he spoke again it was to say, “Do you wonder that things have made sort of an anarchist of me, Larry?”

“Huh!” said Larry, “you’re not much of an anarchist.”

“Not the long-haired kind, maybe. But I’ve got to stay on my own side of the fence. There’s a horrible lot of injustice in this old world, Larry.”

“Sure there is,” Larry agreed. Then, to keep Purdick from running off on one of his bitter streaks: “Where is your sister now, Purdy?”

“She’s in Elsmere. You know they have a sort of an apprentice course there; a girl can work in the kitchen and have certain hours in the Domestic Economy classes. And that’s another thing: Allie’s been having just about as hard a time as I had before you took me in. You never said there were any strings tied to that scholarship money. There weren’t any, were there?”

“Not a single string.”

“Well, of course, I split it with Allie right away. That was one of the things that made me take it without making you tell me more about it.”

“Um,” said Larry. “Then you’ll have to go to work this summer to earn some more.”

“That’s all right; I expected to do that, anyway.”

“What kind of a job?”

Purdick shrugged his shoulders. “Beggars mustn’t be choosers; and little beggars have to take what’s handed out to them. I haven’t the muscle to tackle any real man-sized job. I suppose it will be office drudgery of some kind—if I’m lucky enough to land anything.”

Larry had a swift and rather discomforting picture of the small one hived in some city office building and running an adding machine, or something of that sort, through the hot months.

“You ought to have a real vacation, Purdy; some job that would keep you outdoors every minute in the day,” he said.

“Fat chance!” Purdick returned, with a hard little laugh. “None of the outdoor jobs wants a sawed-off like me.” Then, after a pause: “Don’t you sweat about me, Larry. You’ve done enough for me, as it is. Let’s go to supper.” And he slid down from his place on the wall.

They had tramped along in comradely silence for possibly half of the long mile lying between the county bridge and the university grounds when they crossed a ramshackly little wooden span over a creek emptying into the river a few hundred yards to their left. The flimsy structure shook under them as they walked across it, and Purdick made gibing comment.

“Isn’t that just like the loose ends that are let go in all public works!” he criticised. “Here is a fine, hard-surfaced highway, the main county outlet to the north, with a concrete bridge over the river that probably cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars, and right here they’ve left that old wooden trap that a man wouldn’t dare drive a ‘Henry’ over faster than a cow could walk!”

Larry turned and looked the “trap” over with a mechanical eye. It was all that Purdick had said it was. “I’d hate to put a loaded truck on it,” he remarked; and then they walked on.

They had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards beyond the creek and its ramshackle bridge when they heard the distant honk of an automobile horn. The machine was coming along the pike behind them, and they could see that it was being driven at a good clip. Moreover, it was approaching the wooden span without showing any signs of slackening the speed.

“Gee!” Larry exclaimed, “if he hits that scrap heap going like that—”

He got no farther, for at that precise instant the oncoming machine did hit the scrap heap. As the two trampers sprang aside to give a clear road, there was a ripping crash, a shrill scream from somebody in the auto, and car and wooden bridge disappeared in a cloud of dust.

“Great Moses!” gasped little Purdick, “I’ll bet the last one of them’s killed!”

“Come on!” Larry shouted, and they broke all track records in a flying sprint to the scene of the disaster.

It was a pretty bad smash. The car was a heavy touring machine. It had turned part way over on its side in the fall and was tangled hopelessly in the bridge timbers and planking.

Its occupants—there were three of them, a woman, a girl and a man—were caught under the crushed top, and when Larry and Purdick ran up, the girl was crying and trying to lift the woman, who seemed to be either dead or in a dead faint. The man, bronzed, middle-aged, and looking as if he might be a retired cattle king, was pinned between the bent steering-wheel and the back of the driving seat, but he did not seem to be badly injured.

“If you two can take a plank and pry me loose,” he said quite calmly, as Larry and Purdick jumped down into the chaos and fell frantically at work. In a jiffy the thing was done, and then the three of them tore the broken top away and got the woman and the girl out. With every chance for a fatal accident, or at least a sad array of broken bones, it proved that no one of the three was seriously hurt. The woman, a stoutly built lady with the prettiest silvering hair Larry had ever seen—so he was saying to himself—came to as they lifted her to the level of the roadway, and a torn dress seemed to be the worst of her injuries. The girl had a cut in one round arm made by a piece of flying glass when the wind-shield broke, but she tied her handkerchief around it and after that was done, paid no more attention to it than a boy would.

When they all reached a point at which they could draw a long breath and begin to straighten things out, Larry looked hard at the sunburned gentleman and said: “Aren’t you Dick Maxwell’s Uncle Billy Starbuck, from Brewster, Colorado?”

“You’ve guessed it the first time,” said the cattle-kingish gentleman with a grim little smile. “And you’re young Donovan, aren’t you?—the fellow who was with Dick last summer up in the Tourmaline?”

“Yes; I’m Larry, and this is Charles Purdick, my room-mate,” said Larry, introducing his fellow rescuer. “We’d been out for a little hike and were going back when we saw you coming.”

“How far are we from town?” asked “Uncle Billy.”

“Only about half a mile; it’s just over the top of that hill,” Larry answered. “If you’ll stay here with the ladies, we’ll run back and find an auto for you. You were going to stop at Sheddon anyway, weren’t you?”

“Again you’ve guessed it,” said the bronzed man, who seemed to be taking the smash-up as calmly as if high-priced cars grew on bushes for anybody to pick. “We were driving through from Chicago to New York, and we came around this way to spend a few hours with Dick before he starts for home.”

Purdick had stood aside while this bit of talk was going on, and he was wondering who the pretty—though somewhat pudgy—little girl was. She had apparently forgotten her cut arm and was standing on the creek bank looking down at the smashed auto. Purdick moved a little nearer because he was afraid the bank would cave in and let her down.

“That bank is pretty soft,” he cautioned. “I wouldn’t go too near the edge if I were you.”

She turned and looked him over appraisingly.

“What a funny little green cap,” she commented. “That’s Freshman, isn’t it? Are you a Sheddon Freshman?”

Purdick nodded. “For a few days longer—until the grade markings are handed out.”

“I’ve got a brother in the Freshman class. I wonder if you know him. I’m Ruth McKnight.”

“Know Ollie McKnight? I should say I do! He’s one of the best friends I’ve had this year.”

“That’s nice,” said the girl. “I guess you’re the ‘Purdy’ he’s been writing about in his letters. You’re the Red-Wagon boy.”

Purdick hadn’t the slightest idea what she meant, but he was handsomely forgetting the McKnight millions when he said: “I’m anything Ollie wants to call me.”

That was all there was time for at the moment. Larry had been down in the wreck getting one of the seat cushions for the lady to sit on while she waited, and as he was climbing out, another auto came along headed townward. The farmer driving it stopped on the farther edge of things and called across to the “survivors” of the wreck.

“Hello, neighbors! Trouble to burn, h’ain’t ye? Anybody hurt?”

“Nothing serious,” said Dick’s uncle-by-marriage. “Luck was with us.”

“But ye can’t git nowhere without your wagon. Wait till I drive round by t’other bridge and I’ll give ye a lift to town,” and he turned his car and started back to make the detour.

While they waited, Larry and Purdick pulled broken timbers out of the wrecked bridge and built warning road barriers on each side of the creek. In a short time the kindly farmer drove up and the shipwrecked ones were given places in his car. He told Larry and Dick they were welcome to standing-room on the running boards, but they thanked him and said they’d walk—that they were walking, anyway.

“Did you hear what that girl was telling me?” Purdick asked, after Dick’s uncle had told them both to be sure and look him up at the hotel in town, and the auto had sped away up the hill.

Larry shook his head. “No; I was talking to Mr. Starbuck.”

“She’s Ollie McKnight’s sister. She didn’t say how she came to be with Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck, but I suppose the Starbucks and McKnights are friends. Is Mr. Starbuck a rich man? But of course he is, or he wouldn’t ride off and leave a six-thousand-dollar car lying in the ditch without giving it a second look.”

Larry laughed.

“He can afford to, I guess. He and Dick’s father own a gold mine together, and he is a director in one of the Brewster banks.”

“Huh!” said Purdick, and the tone in which he said it meant that Uncle Billy Starbuck wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, at all the kind of rich man that he had been taught from his infancy to hate and despise.

“Mr. Starbuck is everybody’s ‘Uncle Billy’ in Brewster,” Larry went on. “He used to be a cowboy, they say, and after that he was a prospector and had all sorts of hard times.”

“Huh!” said little Purdick again, and this time he added: “He doesn’t look or act like a man that any amount of money would spoil.” Beyond this he was silent until after they had topped the hill and the university buildings were in sight. Then he said: “What d’you suppose Ollie’s sister meant by calling me ‘the Red-Wagon boy’?”

Larry choked for a minute. Here was all sorts of a chance that, right at the very last moment, the fat of the Red-Wagon scholarship was going to be spilled in the fire.

“Did—did she call you that?” he stammered, clawing desperately to gain time.

“Yes. She said Ollie had been calling me that in his letters home.”

“Just some of Knighty’s foolishment, I guess,” said Larry. “He’s taken that way sometimes.”

The reply seemed to satisfy Purdick. Anyway, he didn’t ask any more ticklish questions, then, or later when they were together in their room after supper, hustling into their oldest clothes to take part in the Freshman cap-burning, which was scheduled for eight o’clock on the campus.

Purdick had said at first that he wouldn’t go to the cap-burning; meaning thereby that he was still clinging to some of the old prejudices and was disposed to hold aloof from mingling with the class as a body. Though Larry had had prejudices enough of his own at the beginning of the year, it was he who had finally persuaded Purdick not to spoil the whole year by being “stuffy,” as he phrased it, at the very end of things.

“Reckon the Soffies’ll make any bad breaks?” Purdick asked, struggling into a shop jumper to take the place of his cast-off coat.

“They’d better not,” said Larry grimly. “We walloped them last fall and we can do it again, if we have to. But the fellows tell me that the Soffie interference at the cap-burnings has been dying out. I guess they won’t monkey with us to-night.”

Larry’s prediction proved to be a true one. When they reached the rendezvous on the campus, the big bonfire was already blazing, and the men of their class were gathering in full force for the final ceremony of their year as Freshmen. Though the cap-burning is strictly a Freshman rite, the other classes were out to look on, but there was no attempt made to interfere with the programme.

College songs were sung, the Sheddon series given, and Wally Dixon, who, besides being a promising full-back, was pretty generally known as the class joker, made a speech in which he paid what you might call left-handed compliments to every fellow in the class whose name he could remember. After Dixon had worked off every joke, old or new, that he could think of, the men formed in line, single file, and marched solemnly around the big fire. At the third circling the green caps were flung into the blaze one by one as the procession passed a given point, and the final event of the Freshman year was over.

It was at the moment of dispersal, after the last cap had gone up in smoke, that Dick halted Purdick and Larry.

“Cal Rogers has lent me his car, and I want you two fellows to go over to the Brandon House with me to meet Uncle Billy and Aunt Stella. They seem to think, some way, that you saved their lives, or something, in that auto accident they had.”

It was quite like both of the two invited ones that they should try to squirm out, but Dick was insistent, though he did yield far enough to give them time to go over to their room and change their clothes.

“All right; chase along and put on the glad rags,” he said. “I’ll be at the Man-o’-War with the car as soon as you’re ready.” And so they parted.