The Boy Scouts Book of Stories Part 29

"How many?"

"Twenty."

Mr. Beaver closed his little book and stood a moment by his desk looking quietly over at Harrington. His face was serious, but even his victim could not help feeling that there was a certain affectionate sympathy behind the quiet sternness.

"Look out, Harrington," he said at last with a return of that curious smile of his. "Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction and the milestones are always spreads--of one sort or another. You may sit down."

The boy sat down and the work of the cla.s.s proceeded. Two boys, for widely divergent reasons, heard the other boys go through their paces as though it were all a bad dream of wriggling _x_'s and _y_'s like snakes darting in and out of the placid waters of Mr. Beaver's endless questioning.

The bell clanged at last, indicating the end of the period. Three or four boys went forward to confer with Mr. Beaver about certain vexing algebraic problems. Needless to say, neither Burton nor Harrington was among these. They drifted out into the cloister with the rest of the cla.s.s, having certain problems of their own, not algebraic. One or two boys addressed Burton and were rebuffed with a curt word, which was unusual, as Burton was almost painstakingly friendly to everybody.

"Say!" whispered one to the other, "Burton's got a grouch on. He's sour at Beaver, I guess."

"Beaver is awfully fresh sometimes. After all, Bill Burton's captain of the football team."

"He's a good deal more important to the school than Beaver'll ever be."

"That's no joke either."

The two boys parted. Neither ventured to intrude again upon Burton's sacred resentment. For Burton was a very great man at The Towers.

No one spoke to Harrington. No one cared whether he had a grouch or not.

For Harrington was a new boy who had as yet failed to "fit in." He was emphatically not an athlete. But he was not a "sissy" either. He was quite as emphatically not a student nor a literary light; but he was as quick as a jack rabbit in his physics "lab" work and not to be scorned as a guesser in reading Caesar at sight. He was not openly religious--which kept him out of the Y. M. C. A. But, on the other hand, in a quiet way, he deeply loved the out of doors, and that love, like all love, is a kind of wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d. Harrington was unquestionably "hard to place." The boys as well as the masters, when they spoke about him at all, agreed on that. The only pigeon-hole into which he seemed to fit was the pigeon-hole of the "Queer d.i.c.ks." His first name happened to be Richard, which helped to settle the cla.s.sification.

Burton pa.s.sed through the West Wing, being a Sixth Former, with a room on the top floor of the New Building, and, chewing his lips, crossed the wide level lawn--with its strip of bright green gra.s.s that showed where the hot water pipes ran--and disappeared through a door in the western end.

Harrington did not go to his room. Young men who get demerits were not privileged at The Towers to study in their own rooms. They spent periods not occupied with recitations in the school room, a long room containing some two hundred desks, with a raised platform and an organ at the southern end; the place had once been used as the school chapel and was still used for the morning song-service which enlivened the daily grind.

Plaster busts of the great of all ages, from Homer to Longfellow, peered from their plaster brackets. There was a verse also on the southern walls:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is G.o.d to man: When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The Youth replies, I can.

d.i.c.k Harrington didn't like that verse. In fact, he thought it was rot.

He disliked even more the black tablets on the opposite wall containing in gilt letters at least four inches high the names of the exemplary youths who in their time had been Heads of School. And in this place, surrounded by Models of Good Conduct, he was supposed to study four, five and sometimes six hours a day! Two hundred bent forms and Mr.

Watrous, the day's jail-keeper, wandering aimlessly about, pretending not to be the spy that he was! Altogether, the schoolroom was a horror.

Harrington bent over his desk like the rest and pretended to study French. But he did not study. He did a little mathematical problem instead. Twenty demerits and thirty demerits made fifty demerits. And fifty demerits meant probation, and probation meant that he could not go to Chancellor's Hill to see the big game to-morrow afternoon. That was a tragedy. All the autumn the game with Chancellor's Hill had been held before him by the old boys as the last word in thrills; for a week there had been talk of nothing else. You would have thought that the final whistle of that game was going to bring the heavens cras.h.i.+ng down on creation. No one seemed to be planning anything beyond that Sat.u.r.day afternoon. The general notion seemed to be that if The Towers won, the rapture of that victory would make any trial thereafter bearable; and if The Towers lost--well, torture and death would, in comparison, be sweet.

And now, he, d.i.c.k Harrington, who loved thrills as much as any man, was not to see the game. For days his nerves had been at a sharp tension of antic.i.p.ation. Now suddenly they relaxed, leaving him weak and despairing. Life had lost its meaning. Of course, the game would be held anyway, and there would be the excitement of getting the telegraphic reports at the end of the periods; but the real thrills would all be at Chancellor's Hill; and he would be at The Towers.

He luxuriated in misery; he reveled in despair. Just because of a bit of a spread with Sammy Oakes and Chet Burrowes, just because of one unprepared lesson! Of course there had been other spreads before this fatal one; and of course there had been one or two unprepared lessons also--therefore the original twenty demerits. But why ruin a boy's happiness forever because of a missed recitation?

d.i.c.k Harrington was exceedingly sorry for himself.

His indignation was violent while it lasted but it did not last long, for there was sharp regret of another sort hovering all the while at the rim of his consciousness. It was a regret not so pleasant to indulge as the other. He had been made the b.u.t.t--the laughing stock--of the algebra cla.s.s. He tingled and flushed at the memory of it. Bill Burton had also flunked his lesson; but Burton had been able to say that he had at least prepared it, and the whole proceeding had been dignified and everybody loved and admired Burton all the more because with all his greatness he was just like other boys about lessons. But he, d.i.c.k Harrington, had been disgraced. And in the presence of William Burton!

That, after all, was the hardest thing to swallow. That was worse than missing the game with Chancellor's Hill. For d.i.c.k Harrington wors.h.i.+ped Bill Burton, because he was physically and socially everything that d.i.c.k never could hope to be. He was the school's crack athlete, the president of the Sixth Form, the chairman of the Student Council, the president of the Y. M. C. A. He was the One Great Hero of the boys, and the Headmaster himself consulted him whenever he had a knotty problem of boy-nature to solve. Before d.i.c.k had been at school a week, he knew that he would rather find favor with "Colonel" Burton than see his name in gold letters in the schoolroom, or, for that matter, on the Common Room tablets, where the athletic records are kept. "The Colonel" was rather used to adoration, and, being human, liked it. But he was no more attentive to this particular adorer than to any one else, which intensified d.i.c.k Harrington's "case."

d.i.c.k did not study much French on that morning in late October. For suddenly a new, insidious question jumped into the forefront of his thoughts: Why had he blurted out everything to Mr. Beaver? _Why hadn't he just lied?_

That question thrust at the very roots of life, and d.i.c.k Harrington knew it. He went cold and hot by turns. Somehow it had never occurred to him to lie. He did not know why. It was possibly because his father was such a s.h.i.+ning figure of truthfulness personified. He remembered something he had overheard his mother say to his father a long time ago--"I never realized until I married you that it is really awful to lie."

Was it really so awful? A lie in time certainly simplified life a lot.

And as long as it did not hurt anybody else--what was really the difference? A goody-goody Sunday-school teacher had told him, when he was five, that the lightning would smite him if he told a lie. Whereupon he had told a lie deliberately during the course of the next thunderstorm to test Mr. Goody-Goody's veracity, and proved _him_ a liar, first thing.

Staring at French irregular verbs, d.i.c.k clenched his hands, trying to figure it all out. Suddenly, forgetting where he was, he pounded the desk-top with his left fist. Then he gave a yowl which rang through the schoolroom, providing exhilarating diversion to two hundred lifted heads. For in his cogitations his right hand had clutched the edge of the desk on which the top closed.

He explained the accident to Mr. Watrous, who proved skeptical, though the Spy was forced to admit that the hand looked red enough to hurt.

The schoolroom settled again into quiet. The excitement, from start to finish, had covered about ninety seconds. No one suspected that the unshaven, disheveled boy was, in that studious, quiet place, having his first great wrestle with life.

The football team, accompanied by the coaches, the Headmaster Brewster and his wife, a half-dozen masters, and the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Forms almost in a body, in auto-hacks and horse-hacks, on foot and by trolley, departed for the railroad station and Chancellor's Hill next morning at eight, to the sound of cheers.

d.i.c.k Harrington stood in the great Archway with the Lower School and a handful of other boys, like himself on probation (or just "broke"), cheering the school, the team, "The Colonel," the manager, the school, the team, and again and again "The Colonel," until the last boy was out of sight. The team was hopeful of victory; the school was confident of it. But "The Colonel's" face was curiously grave. He smiled and joked; now and then he tossed some gay piece of derision into the crowd of woe-begone stay-at-homes. But the gravity remained in the eyes all the while. Harrington saw it, and it occurred to him that it was natural that the Captain of The Towers football team should feel the weight of a great responsibility; he was quite sure that "Colonel" Burton had never seemed to him so heroic as to-day. There was no question about it. There was an unusual n.o.bility in Bill Burton's eyes and in the carriage of his head. But there was also a curious impression of suffering there and about the lips. d.i.c.k saw Mrs. Brewster look at Burton with a friendly, somewhat quizzical, smile. Then in two minutes the fortunate ones were gone and The Towers became a St. Helena, where a chill wind played shrilly all day long around corners of buildings and in and out the cloisters.

Lessons that morning were a gloom and dinner in the huge, half empty dining-room offered an opportunity to satisfy the boy's hunger and--that was all. As a social function it was a flat failure. Everybody talked of the game, as wrecked sailors drifting in an open boat talked of sh.o.r.e.

Life was unreal somehow, everything so empty, so quiet. If, as some one had once remarked, The Towers was a very furnace of flaming life and energy--some one had certainly dumped the grate.

The game was to be called at Chancellor's Hill at one-thirty; and at one-thirty the first stragglers appeared in the chilly Archway to take their position at the bulletin board, where the score was to be posted as it came along the wire.

d.i.c.k Harrington, in sweater and cap, arrived at one-forty-five. The first score had just been posted:

Chancellor's Hill 5 The Towers 0

The Headmaster's secretary, a studious but otherwise attractive young man, who posted the notice, volunteered the information that the Chancellor's Hill left end had turned the trick with a fifty-five yard run when The Towers eleven had tied itself into a knot through a jumbled signal.

"That's an awful beginning!" said Runt Woods, who was standing next to d.i.c.k Harrington. He was a little, flat-faced, brownie sort of boy, whom everybody loved. "Must have been in the first five minutes of play."

"They won't get any more," d.i.c.k answered confidently. "It's too bad they scored, but they won't get any more."

His optimism was unwarranted. There was a long wait without news. Then Mr. Tuttle, the secretary, reappeared from the Main Building, wearing a rueful smile. He picked up the eraser under the bulletin board, but he did not disturb the zero which stood to the credit (or debit) of The Towers. He rubbed out the 5 that followed Chancellor's Hill and set down 11.

"Something's happened!" cried d.i.c.k.

"Two touchdowns and a goal have happened," said Runt Woods gloomily.

"I don't mean that. I mean that something's happened to the team! Lost their heads, or something."

He wondered whether "The Colonel" had been taken ill. "The Colonel" was so completely the heart and soul of the team. If for some reason he were out of it----

They must be playing the second period by now. There was another long wait. Then at last Mr. Tuttle, looking grave, reappeared.

At the edge of the Archway, he stopped. "Don't mob me, now," he said, trying to grin.

"What's the score? Score!" cried a hundred voices.