Rod Grant appeared at school the following day apparently none the worse for his unpleasant experience. Ben Stone congratulated him on his escape, but his distant and repellant air held the other boys aloof, if any of them were disposed to make advances.

As soon as he had concluded a hasty supper that night, Stone set out for the home of Priscilla Kent. Following the dark footpath upon which Grant had been ambushed by the hazers, Ben reached the lonely little cottage and knocked at the door.

Miss Priscilla Kent answered the summons, a lamp in her hand and her pet monkey perched upon her shoulder. As she opened the door the caller was startled to hear a harsh voice within the house crying:

“Up with the anchor! Heave ho! Shake out another reef! Salt horse for mess! Kill the cook! Kill the cook!”

“I beg your pardon,” said the spinster in a surprisingly mild and gentle tone of voice; “it’s only my parrot. I got him from an old sea captain.”

“Oh!” said Ben, plainly relieved. “I didn’t know. I thought——”

“Some one was being murdered, I s’pose,” smiled Miss Kent. “Living alone, as I have, my pets have served as company. Won’t you step in?”

Was this mild, fragile, gentle woman the person all Oakdale declared cracked in the upper story? Ben wondered; and then he remembered hearing it said that she was afflicted only at intervals.

“My name is Stone,” he explained. “I’m a scholar at the academy, and I thought I’d call on Grant.”

“You’re the first caller he’s had. I think he’ll be s’prised to see you.”

A door opened at the head of the stairs, and Grant appeared in the light that shone from a room beyond.

“Who is it, aunt?” he asked.

“A caller to see you, Rodney. He says his name is Stone.”

“Oh, Ben!” exclaimed Rod, in apparent wonderment. “Is that you, Ben? Come up.”

“All right,” said Stone, starting to mount the stairs as Miss Priscilla closed the door.

“You’re off your course, you lubber!” squawked the parrot. “Salt horse for mess! Kill the cook!”

“Polly is very noisy to-night,” remarked the spinster apologetically.

Involuntarily Stone dodged as something went darting past him up the balustrade. Then he laughed a bit, beholding the monkey perched on the newel post at the head of the stairs.

“Come down, Nero! Come back here, sir!” called Miss Priscilla. “He wants to get inter your room, Rodney.”

“And tear up my books and papers again,” laughed Grant. “Chase yourself, you Roman emperor!”

The monkey dodged, chattered, and slid tauntingly down the balustrade.

“He’s a lively rascal and sure plumb full of mischief,” said Rod. “Come into my den, Ben. Hardly expected to receive a caller here to-night—or any other time.”

The room was small but comfortable, being warmed by a tiny air-tight stove. Two Navajo rugs brightened the old-fashioned rag carpet on the floor, and there were some pictures on the walls which plainly had been hung there by Grant himself. An old oak bedstead took up considerable space, although it had been set as far back as possible in a corner. On a table, bearing a shaded lamp, were books and papers and some playing cards carefully laid out face upward in a series of small piles. A chair stood where Rod had pushed it back from the table on hearing some one at the door.

“Just amusing myself for a few moments with a little game of solitaire,” explained the boy from Texas, observing the visitor glance toward the cards. “Have to do something to pass away the time, you know. Have the easy chair, won’t you?”

“I—I’m not going to stop long,” faltered Ben. “The other chair will do just as well.”

But Rod laughingly forced him to take the easy chair. “If you’re comfortable, perhaps you won’t be in such a great hurry. It’s a sure enough novelty for me to receive a visitor, and you’ve got me wondering a plenty how you chanced to come round.”

“I wanted to see you,” said Ben slowly. “I wanted to have a talk with you, Rod.”

“Well, we can talk ourselves black in the face, and nobody to bother. Go ahead and string it off.”

“You were lucky to escape being drowned last night.”

“Sure thing. I reckon I’d gone under right there if it hadn’t been for Bunk Lander. He stood by like a man.”

The embarrassment of the visitor became more apparent.

“Doubtless Lander deserves all the credit you give him, Rod.”

“He certain does.”

“But if you had not been with those fellows——”

“Oh, I know what you’re driving at now. Look here, Stone, I like you; you’ve treated me like a white man. I can’t say as much for some other chaps around here. Just because I kept my mouth shut and minded my own business when I came here, a lot of pin-heads began to sneer about me and say I was a fake who’d never even seen the State of Texas. I was born in Rogers County, which is located in the Panhandle of the Lone Star State. Those fellows didn’t disturb me a whole lot, Ben; but, just for a joke, I decided to give them something really worth talking about. As long as they had the notion that every Texan must talk dialect and act like a half-civilized man, I took a fancy to play the part for them. It was a sort of a joke with me. I’ll say right here and now that I reckon we’ve got as decent and refined people in Texas as you can find anywhere around these parts, though doubtless it would be right difficult to pound this fact into the heads of some chaps.”

“That’s not what I’m driving at,” said Ben, “and I don’t believe your statement that you hail from Texas had anything to do with turning the fellows against you. The team needed strengthening; they wanted you to play football, and——”

“I claim, as a free and independent individual, that I have a right to play football or not, just as I choose.”

“Of course you have, but loyalty to the school——”

“Whatever I may do or decline to do, Stone, you may be sure I have good and sufficient reasons. A fellow’s motives are sometimes misunderstood.”

“That’s quite true,” agreed Stone. “I had an experience decidedly more unpleasant than yours when I first came to Oakdale.”

“But you pulled out on top. Why? Because you played football?”

“No, not that; because circumstances and events made me understood at last. I’ve never questioned your courage, Grant, but you know lots of times a fellow has to prove himself before he’s estimated correctly. I don’t believe you’re a quitter; I don’t believe you’ve a yellow streak.”

“Thanks,” said Rod, with a slight touch of sarcasm which he could not wholly repress.

“But you know how most fellows estimate a chap,” Ben went on hastily; “they judge by outward appearances.”

“Evidently my appearance is decidedly against me,” laughed Rod.

Involuntarily the visitor lifted a hand to one of his ears, half of which had been cut away cleanly at some time by a sharp instrument. He could not have been called a prepossessing or attractive lad, but there was a certain rugged honesty and frankness in his eyes and his manner which stamped him as the right sort. Nevertheless, during the first weeks of his life in Oakdale, being misunderstood and misjudged by nearly every one, he had passed through a cloudy and bitter experience.

“It’s not wholly by a fellow’s looks that he’s estimated, Rod; actions count, you know. I came here an unknown, just as you did; but you have the advantage of me, for you’re a good-looking chap, and I’m simply ugly. Now if you’d happened to hit the fellows just right at first, and you’d deported yourself according to their views regarding the code of behavior for an Oakdale Academy man, you might have become popular at once.”

Rod snapped his fingers, rising to fling a leg over one corner of the table, on which he half seated himself, the other foot upon the floor, leaning forward toward Ben.

“Who are these narrow-minded, Puritanical, half-baked New England cubs that allow they have a right to lay out a code of deportment and behavior to be followed by me?” he cried scornfully. “It was chance that corraled me in this wretched hole, not choice. What do these fellows here really know about me, anyway? Nothing. Disgusted with their nosey, prying ways, I’ve amused myself by stringing them—by telling preposterous tales of my wild adventures and hairbreadth escapes. Evidently it hasn’t helped my cause much, for the blockheads seem to lack imagination and a real sense of humor. Why, they really thought I was trying to make them believe those yarns, while all the time it was apparent on the surface to any one with the slightest horse sense that I was joshing. They think me a braggart. Bah!”

Ben twisted uneasily upon his chair. “They don’t understand you, Rod, any more than they understood me at first,” he said soothingly. “Now I’m willing to take your word for it that you had some good reason for refusing to play football—even for swallowing the slurs and insults of Hunk Rollins and Berlin Barker.”

The eyes of the young Texan flashed and a flush deepened in his bronzed cheeks.

“Rollins is a cheap bully,” he declared, “and it seems to me Barker showed himself up for a coward when he ran away from Oakdale with the idea in his head that he had been chiefly concerned in driving me dotty.”

“Your estimation of Rollins is pretty near correct,” nodded Ben, remembering his own experience with the same fellow; “and if you had come out boldly and faced Barker when he returned from Clearport I’m sure the situation would be different to-day.”

“That would have made it necessary for me to fight him,” said Rod, “and I have my reasons for avoiding anything of that sort. It may make me look like a coward, but if anybody will take the trouble to look up the records of the Grants in Rogers County, Texas, he will find there never was a cowardly drop of blood in one of them. Beginning as a nester or small rancher, my father found himself up against the big ranchers who wanted his acres and were determined to drive him out. He’s there now, and he owns a pretty sizeable ranch for these days. But he had to fight for his rights, and I don’t allow the remembrance of some of the things he went through is any too agreeable. He’s carrying a bullet in his right hip which made him lame for life, and his left arm is gone at the elbow, the result of a gun fight, in which he received a wound that didn’t get proper attention for three days. You haven’t heard me blowing about these things, but they’re straight facts, with no fancy touches added for effect. And as long as I have said this much, let me add that the other man, whose name, by the way, was Jennings, didn’t come out of it as well. There’s been a white stone standing over him for a good many years.”

“Gracious!” muttered Ben.

“This is between us, Stone. I’ll ask you not to repeat it, for if you should, the fellows around here would believe it another of my fanciful fabrications. Things are somewhat more peaceful in Texas these days, but the old grudge, a sort of feud between the Jennings and the Grants, has never died out. I was sent to school in Houston before I came here. Fred, the only son of old man Jennings, attended that same school. I won’t go into detail, but he picked his time to get at me. They took him to a hospital, and I went home to the Star D Ranch in something of a hurry. When a Grant finds it necessary to fight, usually something happens to the other fellow.”