At Good Old Siwash Part 12

I've kept up to date on college things, I've always flattered myself.

You might lose me now and then on some new way of abusing lettuce during a salad course, perhaps, but as far as looking startled at anything that might be said or done around a college campus goes, I've had a notion that I wasn't in the learning cla.s.s--which shows how much I knew about it. This morning a gosling from the old school--a Soph.o.m.ore--came in and visited with me for a few minutes, on the strength of the fact that he knew my baby brother in high school. We hadn't talked a minute before he handed me "pragmatism" and "zing-slingers." While I was rolling my eyes and clawing for a foothold he confessed that he was the best glider in college. When I remarked that I had been somewhat of a glider myself, but that I had preferred the twostep, he laughed and explained that he was captain of the aviation team--that they had three gliders and were finis.h.i.+ng a monoplane that had a home-made engine with concentric cylinders.

Can you beat it? There I was, Petey Simmons' best friend, and personally acquainted with eleven thousand forms of college excitement, listening to an infant with my mouth open and stopping him every few words to say "land sakes," "dew tell" and "what d'ye mean by that?" I never was so humiliated in my life, but there's no getting around the truth. I've been ten years out of college, and when I go back they'll pull the grandfather clause on me and wheel me in early nights. I'm a back number and I know the symptoms. When that young Soph.o.m.ore told me the boys of Eta Bita Pie had just spent twenty dollars apiece on a formal dance and house party, I put up the same kind of a lecture to him that my father gave me when I explained that we simply had to spend five dollars apiece on our party, or belong in the f.a.g end of things. And I suppose when my father's crowd blew in a couple of dollars for a load of wood, his father reminded him that when HE went to college they didn't coddle themselves with fires in their dormitories. And I suppose that some day this Soph.o.m.ore will be telling his son that when he was in college a simple little home-made aeroplane furnished amus.e.m.e.nt for twenty fellows, and that they never dreamed of dropping over to the coast on Sat.u.r.days for a dip in the surf in their private monoplanes. Oh, well, it's human nature and natural law, I suppose. No use trying to put a rock on the wheels of progress--and there's no use trying to ride the darned thing either. It'll throw you every time.

When I went to college, Billy--loud pedal on that "I"--things were different. We didn't spend our time fooling with gliders or blow ourselves up monkeying with pragmatism. We attended strictly to business. We were there for educational purposes and we had no time to chase humming birds and chicken hawks. Why, the gasoline money of a young collegian to-day would have paid my board bills then! We didn't go to j.a.pan on baseball tours, or lug telescopes around South America when we ought to have been studying ethics. We lived simply and plainly.

There wasn't an automatic piano in a single frat house when I was in college, and as for wasting our money on motion-picture shows and taxi-cabs--nonsense. We'd have died first.

You see I'm getting into practice. Some day I'll have a son, I hope, and he'll go back to Siwash. Just wait till he comes home at the end of the first semester and tries to put across any bills for radium stickpins and lookophonic conversations with the co-eds at Kiowa. I'll pull a When-I-was-at-Siwash lecture on him that will make him feel like a spider on a hot stove. If I've got to be a back number I want to romp right back far enough to have some fun out of it. I'll make him sweat as much lugging me up to date as I had to perspire in the old days to illuminate things for Pa.

After all, there is no question at college more serious than the Pa question, anyway, Bill. It was always b.u.t.ting into our youthful ambitions and tying pig iron to our coat-tails when we wanted to soar.

It's simply marvelous how hard it is to educate a Pa a hundred miles or more away into the supreme importance of certain college necessities. It isn't because they forget, either. It's because they don't realize that the world is roaring along.

I can see it all since this morning. Take my father, for instance.

There was no more generous or liberal a Pa up to a certain point. He wanted me to have a comfortable room and vast quant.i.ties of good food, and he was glad to pay literary society dues, and he would stand for frat dues; but when it came to paying cab hire, you could jam an appropriation for a post-office in an enemy's district past Joe Cannon in Congress more easily than you could put a carriage bill through him.

He just said "no" in nine languages; said that when he went to Siwash--"and it turned out good men then, too, young fellow"--the girls were glad to walk to entertainments through the mud; and when it was unusually muddy they weren't averse to being carried a short distance. I believe I would have had to lead disgusted co-eds to parties on foot through my whole college course if I hadn't happened across an old college picture of father in a two-gallon plug hat. That gave me an idea. I put in a bill for a plug hat twice a year and he paid it without a murmur. Then I paid my carriage bills with the money. Plug hats had been the peculiar form of insanity prevalent at Siwash in his day and he thought they were still part of the course of study.

I got along much easier than many of the boys, too. Allie Bangs' Pa made him buy all his clothes at home, for fear he'd get to looking like some of the cartoons he'd seen in the funny papers. "Prince" Hogboom was a wonder of a fullback, and his favorite amus.e.m.e.nt was to get out at night and try to pull gas lamps up by the roots. He was a natural born holy terror, but his father thought he was fitted by nature to be a missionary, and so Hoggie had to harness himself up in meek and long-suffering clothes and attend Bible-study cla.s.s twice a week. The crimes he committed by way of relieving himself after each cla.s.s were shocking. Then there was Petey Simmons, who was a perpetual sunbeam and greatly beloved because it was so easy to catch happiness from him. And yet Petey went through school with a cloud over his young life, in the shape of a Pa who gave him a thousand dollars a year for expenses and wouldn't allow a single cent of it to be spent for frivolity. And he had a blanket definition for frivolity that covered everything from dancing parties to pie at an all-night lunch counter. By hard work Petey could spend about four hundred dollars on necessary expenses, and that left him six hundred dollars a year to blow in on illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, student lamps, debating club dues and prints of the old masters. He had to borrow money from us all through the year, and then hold a great auction of his art trophies and student lamps, before vacation came, in order to pay us back.

But all of these troubles weren't even annoyances beside what Keg Rearick had to endure. Keg was an affectionate contraction of his real nickname--"Keghead." He had the worst case of "Pa" I ever heard of. He was a regular high explosive--one of these fine, old, hair-triggered gentlemen, who consider that they have done all the thinking that the world needs and refuse to have any of their ideas altered or edited in any particular. Keg had had his life laid out for him since the day of his birth, and when he left for Siwash--on the precise day announced by his father eighteen years before--the old man stood him up and discoursed with him as follows:

"My son, I am about to give you the finest education obtainable. You are to go down to Siwash and learn how to be a credit to me. Let me impress it on you that that is your only duty. You will meet there companions who will try to persuade you that there are other things to be done in college besides becoming a scholar. You will pay no attention to them.

You are to spend your time at your books. You are to lead your cla.s.s in Latin and Greek. Mathematics I am not so particular about. You are to waste no time on athletics and other modern curses of college. I shall pay your expenses and I shall come down occasionally to see how you are progressing. And you know me well enough to know that if I find you deviating from the course I have laid out in any particular, you will return home and go into the store at six dollars a week."

That's the way Keg always repeated it to us. With that affectionate farewell ringing in his ears he came on down to Jonesville; and when the Eta Bita Pies saw his honest features and his particularly likable smile, they surrounded and a.s.similated him in something less than fifteen minutes by the clock. And then his troubles began. Keg's father had come down the week before school and had selected a quiet place about three miles from the college--out beyond the cemetery in a nice lonely neighborhood, where there was just about enough company to keep the telephone poles from getting despondent. Moreover, he hadn't given Keg any spending money.

"Education is the cheapest thing in the world," he roared. "You don't have to keep your pockets full of dollars to live in the times of Homer and Horace. I've told them to let you have what you need at the bookstore. For the rest, the college library should be your haunt and the debating society your recreation." If ever any one was getting knowledge put down his throat with a hydraulic ram, it certainly was Keg Rearick.

It isn't hard to imagine the result. Keg toiled away three miles from anything interesting and got bluer and gloomier and more anarchistic every day. Wouldn't have been so bad if n.o.body had loved him. Lots of fellows go through college with no particular friends and emerge in good health and spirits. But we had courted Keg and had tried to make it impossible for him to live without us. We liked him and we hankered for his company. We wanted to parade him around the campus and confer him upon the prettiest co-ed in his boarding hall, and teach him to sing a great variety of interesting songs, with no particular sense to them, and s.n.a.t.c.h off two or three important offices around school. Instead of that he only got to say "howdy" to us between cla.s.ses, and the rest of his time he spent Edward Payson Westoning back and forth from his suburban lair, without a cent in his pockets and the street-car motor-men giving him the bell to get off of the track into the mud every other block.

We very soon found this wasn't going to do. Keg's spirits were down about two notches below the absolute zero. If this was college life, he said, would somebody kindly take a pair of forceps and remove it. It ached. The upshot was we made Keg steward of the frat-house table, which paid his board and room and moved him into the chapter house. He objected at first, because of what his father would say when he heard of it. But he finally concluded that anything he might say would be pleasanter than going all day without hearing anything, so he surrendered and came along.

The first night at dinner, when we pushed back our chairs and sang a few lines by way of getting ready to go upstairs and c.h.i.n.k a little a.s.sorted learning into our headpieces, Keg cried for pure joy. He buckled down to work the way a dog takes hold of a root, and inside of a week he couldn't remember a time in his young existence when he had been unhappy. He was tossing out Greek declensions to the prof. like a geyser, and Conny Matthews, our champion Livy unraveler, had shown him how to hold a Latin verb in his teeth while he broke open the rest of the sentence. And, besides that, we had introduced him to all the nicest girls in the college and had a.s.sisted the glee club coach to discover that he had a fine tenor voice. He was a sure-enough find, and fitted into college life as if it had been made to measure for him.

Of course all this pleasantness had to have a gloom spot in it somewhere. Rearick's father furnished the gloom. He was certainly the most rambunctious, most unreconstructed and most egregious Pa that ever tried to turn the suns.h.i.+ne off of a bright young college career.

Regularly once a week a letter would come to Keg from him. It always began "When I was in college," and it always wound up by ordering Keg to eat a few a.s.sorted lemons for the good of his future. He was to go to morning prayer, regularly--there hadn't been any for twenty years. He was to become as well acquainted as possible with his professors, because of the inspiration it would give him--fancy snuggling up to old Grubb. He was to take a Sunday-school cla.s.s at once. He was to remember above all things that though it was a disgrace to waste a minute of the precious college years it was equally a disgrace to go through college without being self-supporting. He should by all means learn to milk at once. He, Keg's father, had been valet to a couple of very fine Holstein cows while he was in college, and he attributed much of his success to this fact. He would of course pay Keg's expenses while he had to, but he would hold it to his discredit. He must at once begin to find work.

This last command impressed Keg deeply, for he had been sailing along with us without a cent. He'd been earning his board and room, of course, but that was already paid for for a month out on the edge of the planet; and as it was the first time the family that owned the house had ever got a student boarder they firmly declined to rebate. It's pretty hard to b.u.t.terfly joyously along with the fancy-vest gang without any other a.s.sets than unlimited credit at the bookstore, so Keg began to prowl for a job. Presently he picked up a laundry route. The laundry wagon was a favorite vehicle on which to ride to fame and knowledge in those days.

By getting up early two mornings a week and working late nights, Keg managed to put away about six dollars and forty-five cents a week, providing every one paid his laundry bill. He was so pleased and tickled over the idea that he wrote to his father at once explaining that he now had plenty of work, but had had to move downtown in order to do it.

Did this please old pain-in-the-face? Not noticeably. There had been no such things as laundry wagons in his day. Students were lucky if they had a s.h.i.+rt to wear and one to have washed at the same time. He wrote a letter back to Keg that bit him in every paragraph. He was to give up the frivolous laundry job and get some wood to saw. That and tending cows were the only real methods of toiling through college. He, Keg's father, had received his board and room for milking cows and doing ch.o.r.es, and he had sometimes earned as much as three dollars a week after school hours and before breakfast sawing cordwood at seventy-five cents a cord. It was healthful and cla.s.sic. He would send his old saw by express. And he was further to remember--there were about four more pages to memorize, a headache in every page.

Good old Keg did his best to be obedient, but he had no chance. In the first place, cordwood was phenomenally scarce in Jonesville, and anyway, people had a vicious habit of hindering the cause of education by sawing it at the wood-yards with a steam saw. There were plenty of cows in the outskirts, but they were either well provided with companions for their leisure hours, or their owners declined to allow Keg to practice on them--he knowing about as much about a cow as he did about a locomotive.

And so he dawdled on with us at the chapter house, gulping down Livy, getting a strangle hold on Homer, and pulling in six or seven dollars a week at his frivolous laundry job, some of which cash he was saving up for a dress suit. And then, one day, Pa Rearick blew in for another visit and caught his son playing a mandolin in our lounging room--far, far from the nearest cyclone cellar.

To judge from the conversation that followed--we couldn't help hearing it, although we went out-of-doors at once--one might have thought that Keg had been caught in a gilded den of sin, playing poker with body-s.n.a.t.c.hers. Pa Rearick simply cut loose and bombarded the neighborhood with red-hot adjectives. That he should have brought up a son to do him honor and should have found him dawdling his college moments away with loafers; fawning on the idle sons of the rich; tinkling a mandolin instead of walking with Homer; wasting time and money instead of trying to earn his way to success--"Bah," likewise "Faugh," to say nothing of other picturesque expressions of entire disgust--from all of which one would judge almost without effort that Keg was in bad, and in all over.

I suppose Keg attempted to explain. Possibly some people try to argue with a funnel-shaped cloud while it is juggling the house and the barn and the piano. Anyway the explanations weren't audible. Presently Pa Rearick announced, for most of the world to hear, that he was going to take his idle, worthless, disgraced and unspeakable nincomp.o.o.p of a son back to his home and set him to weighing out dried apples for the rest of his life. Then up rose Keg and spoke quite clearly and distinctly as follows:

"No, you're not, Dad."

"Wh-wh-wh-whowhowwy not!" said Pa Rearick, with perfect self-possession but some difficulty.

"Because I like this college and I'm going to stay here," said Keg. "I'm standing well in my studies and I'm learning a lot all around."

"All I have to say is this," said Pa Rearick. I really haven't time to repeat all of those few words, but the ukase, when it was completely out, was the following: Keg was to have a chance to ride home in the cars if he packed up within ten minutes. After that he could walk home or dance home or play his way home with his mandolin. And he was given to understand that, when he finally arrived, the nearest subst.i.tute to a fatted calf that would be prepared for dinner would be a plate of cold beans in the kitchen with the hired man.

"You may stay here and dawdle with your worthless companions if you desire," shouted Pa Rearick to a man in an adjoining county. "The lesson may be a good one for you. I wash my hands of the whole matter. But understand. Don't write to me for a cent. Not one cent. You've made your bed. Now lie on it."

With which he went away, and we tiptoed carefully in to rearrange the shattered atmosphere and comfort Keg. We found him looking thoughtfully at nothing, with his hands deep in his pockets, from which about six dollars and seventy-five cents' worth of jingle sounded now and then. We waited patiently for him to speak. At last he turned on us and grinned pensively.

"Do you know, boys," he said, "as a bed-maker I can beat the owner of that prehistoric old corn-husk mattress out in the suburbs with one hand tied behind me."

Of course it is a sad thing to be regarded with indignation and disgust by one's only paternal parent, but Keg bore up under it pretty manfully. He dug into his work harder than ever--and he was a good student. Latin words stuck to him like sandburrs. That wasn't his fault, of course. Some men are born with a natural magnetism for Latin words; and others, like myself, have to look up _quoque_ as many as nine times in a page of Mr. Horace's celebrated metrical salve-slinging. Keg went into a literary society, too, and developed such an unholy genius at wadding up the other fellow's words and feeding them back to him that he made the Kiowa debate in his Freshman year. He also chased locals for the college paper, made his cla.s.s football team, got on the track squad and won the Freshman essay prize. In fact, he killed it all year long and likewise he trained all year long with his idle and vicious companions--meaning us.

It beats all how much benefit you can get from training with idle and vicious companions, if you are built that way. Of course we taught him how to play a mandolin, and how to twostep on his own feet exclusively, and how to roll a cigarette without carpeting the floor with tobacco, and how to make a pretty girl wonder if she is as beautiful as all that, without really saying it himself, and dozens of other pretty and harmless little tricks. But that wasn't half he picked up while he was loafing away the golden hours of his college course in our chapter house. Conny Matthews, whose hobby was Latin verse, plugged him up to sending in translated sonnets from Horace for Freshman themes. Noddy Pierce showed him how to grab the weak point in the other fellow's debate and hang on to it through the reb.u.t.tal, while the enemy floundered and struggled and splattered disjointed premises all over the hall. Allie Bangs had a bug on fencing, and because he and Keg used to tip over everything in the bas.e.m.e.nt trying to skewer each other, they got to reading up on old French customs of producing artistic conversations and deaths and other things, and eventually they wrote one of those "Ha" and "Zounds" plays for the Dramatic Club. In fact, there's no limit to what you can absorb from idle and vicious companions. In one term alone I myself picked up banjo playing, pole vaulting, a little Spanish, a bad case of mumps, and two flunks, simply by a.s.sociating with the Eta Bita Pie gang twenty-seven hours a day.

But n.o.body had to show Keg how to get jobs after his first experience.

He had a knack of scenting a soft financial snap a mile away to leeward, and working his way through college was the least of his troubles. It used to make me tired to see the nonchalance with which he would sleuth up to a nice fat thing like a baseball season program, and put away a couple of hundred with a single turn of the wrist and about four days'

hard soliciting among the long-suffering Jonesville merchants. I never could do it myself. I had the popular desire to work my way through school when I entered Siwash, and I pictured myself at the end of my college career receiving my diploma in my toil-scarred fist, without having had a cent from home. But pshaw! I was a joke. I mowed one lawn in my Freshman year, after hunting for work for three weeks; and I lost that engagement because the family decided the hired girl could do it better. After that I gave up and took my checks from home like a little man. In Siwash it is all right to get sent through school, and n.o.body looks down on you for it. The boys who make their own way are very kind and never taunt you if you have to lean on Pa. But all the same, you feel a little bit disgraced. Why, I've seen a cotillon leader run all the way home from a downtown store where he clerked after school hours, in order to get into his society harness on time; and when the winner of the Interstate Oratorical in my Freshman year had received his laurel wreath and three times three times three times three from the crazy student body, he excused himself and went off to the house where he lived, to fill up the hard-coal heater and pump the water for the next day's was.h.i.+ng.

As I started to say, some time ago, Keg proved to be a positive genius in nailing down jobs. He hadn't been with us three months until he had presented his laundry route to one of the boys. He didn't have time to attend to it. He had hauled down a chapel monitors.h.i.+p that paid his tuition. He got his board and room from us for being steward, and how he ever got the fancy eats he gave us out of four dollars per week per appet.i.te is an unsolved wonder. He made twenty-five dollars in one week by introducing a new brand of canned beans among the hash clubs. He took orders for bookbinding on Sat.u.r.days, and sold advertising programs for the college functions after school hours. More than once I borrowed ten dollars from him that year, while I was living on hope and meeting the mailman half-way down the block each morning just before the first of the month. And I wasn't the only man who did it, either.

Perhaps you wonder how he had time to do all this and to mix up in all the various departments of student b.u.mptiousness, besides absorbing enough information laid down and prescribed by the curriculum to batter an "A" out of old Grubb, who hated to give a top mark worse than most men hate to take quinine. That's one of the mysteries of college life.

No one has time to do anything but the busy man. In every school there are a few hundred joyous loafers who hold down an office or two, and make one team, and then have only time to take a few hasty peeps at a book while running for chapel; and there are a dozen men who do the debating and the heavy thinking for half a dozen societies, and make some athletic team, and get their lessons and make their own living on the side--and who always have time, somehow, to pick up some new and pleasant pastime, like reading up for an oration on John Randolph, of Roanoke, or some other eminent has-been. When I think of my wasted years in college and of how I was always going to take hold of Psych. and Polykon and Advanced German, and shake them as a terrier does a rat, just as soon as I had finished about three more hands of whist--oh, well, there's no use of crying about it now. What makes me the maddest is that my wife says I'm an imposingly poor whist player at that.

Keg went home with one of us for the semester holidays. And at commencement time he wrote an affectionate letter home to his volcanic old sire, and told him that he was going to stride forth into the unappreciative world and yank a living away from it that summer. That was the great ambition of almost every Siwash boy. When we weren't thinking of girls and exams in the blissful spring days, we were stalking some summer job to its lair and sitting down to wait for it.

There wasn't anything that a Siwash boy wouldn't tackle in the summer vacation. The farmer boys had a cinch, of course. They were skilled laborers; and, besides, they came back in the fall in perfect condition for the football squad. Some of the town boys became street-car conductors. The new railroad that was built into Jonesville about that time was a bonanza for us. It was no uncommon thing, the summer of my Soph.o.m.ore year, to find a dozen muddy society leaders shoveling dirt in a construction crew and singing that grand old hymn composed by Petey Simmons, which ran as follows:

_I've a blister on me heel, and me beak's begun to peel; I've an ache for every bone that's in me back.

I've a feeling I could eat rubber hose and call it sweet, And me hands is warped from lugging bits of track._

_Oh, me closes they are tore, and me shoulders they are sore, And I sometimes wish that I had died a 'borning'; And me eye is full of dirt, and there's gravel in me s.h.i.+rt, But I'm going back to Siwash in the mor-r-r-r-r-r-r-rning._

One of our own boys is a division superintendent on one of the big western roads to-day, and he caught the railroad microbe in the shovel gang.

The boys got newspaper positions and clerked in the stores, and one or two of them tooted cornets or other disturbances at summer-resort hotels. One junior, during my time, aroused the envy of the whole college by painting the steeple of the First Baptist Church during vacation; and when he finished the job his cla.s.s numerals were painted in big letters on top of the ornamental k.n.o.b that tipped the spire. At least, so he announced, and no rival cla.s.s had the nerve to investigate.

But the most popular road to prosperity during the summer was the canva.s.sing route. About the last of April various smooth young college chaps from other schools would drift into Siwash and begin to sign up agents for the summer. There were three favorite lines--books, stereopticon slides and a patent combination desk, blackboard, sewing-table, snow-shovel, trundle-bed and ironing-board--which was sold in vast numbers at that time by students all over the country. All through May the agents fished for victims. They signed them up with contracts guaranteeing them back-breaking profits, and then instructed them with great care in a variety of speeches. Speech No. 1, introductory. Speech No. 2, to women. Speech No. 3, clinching talk for waverers. Speech No. 4, to parents. Speech No. 5, reb.u.t.tal to argument that victim already has enough reading matter. Speech No. 6, general appeal to patriotism and love of progress. Then on Commencement day the hopeful young collegians would go forth to argue with the calm and unresponsive farmer's wife and sell her something that she had never needed and had never wanted, until hypnotized by the cla.s.sic eloquence of a bright-eyed young man with his foot in the crack of the half-opened door.

I chose the book game one summer, and went out with about thirty others.

Twenty-five of them quit at the end of the first week. That was about the usual proportion--but the rest of us stuck. I devastated a swath of territory fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. I talked, argued, persuaded, plead, threatened and mesmerized. I sold books to men on twine binders, to women with their hands in the bread dough, and once, after a farmer had come grudgingly out to rescue me from his dog, I sold a book to him from a tree. I worked two months, tramped four hundred miles, told the same story of impa.s.sioned praise for and confidence in my book eleven hundred times, and sold sixty-five volumes at a gross profit of seventy-nine dollars--my expenses being eighty dollars even.

But it was worth the effort. I was a shy young thing at the beginning of the summer, who believed that strangers would invariably bite when spoken to. When school began I was a tanned pirate who believed the world belonged to him who could grab it, and who would have walked up to a duke and sold him a book on practical farming with as much a.s.surance as if it were a subpoena I was serving.

Keg went out with the desk crowd, and it was evident from the first minute that he was going to return a plutocrat. He sold a desk to the train brakeman on his way to his field, and another to a kind old gentleman who incautiously got into conversation with him. He raged through four counties like a plague, selling desks in farmhouses, public libraries, harness stores, banks and old folks' homes. He was the season's sensation and won a prize every month from the proud and happy company. When he had finished collecting he took a hasty run to Denver on a sight-seeing trip, and came back to Siwash that fall in a parlor car, with something over four hundred dollars in his jeans.

Naturally we would have ceased worrying about the probability of keeping Keg with us then if we had not done so long before. As a matter of fact, he was more prosperous than any of us. He had made his own money and he drew his own checks when he pleased, instead of taking them the first of the month wrapped up in a cayenne coating composed of parental remarks on extravagance and laziness. He gave away all of his little jobs to the rest of us first thing, and said he was content with what he had; but, pshaw!--when a man has the gift he can't dodge prosperity. Keg had to manage the college paper that year because no one else could do it quite so well; and it netted him about fifty dollars a month. When the glee-club manager got cold feet over the poor prospects, Keg backed a trip himself--and I hate to say how much he cleared from it. That was the first year we swept the West with our famous football team of trained mastodons; and at the earnest solicitation of about a dozen daily papers here and there, Keg dashed off something like one hundred yards of football dope at five dollars a column--sort of a literary hundred-yard dash. He used to write it between bites at the dinner table. And then to top off everything, his precious desk company came along and stole him from us early in April. It considered him too valuable a man to tramp the country selling desks, while there were other young collegians who only needed the touch of a magic tongue to get them into the great calling. So Keg made a tour of Kiowa and Muggledorfer and Hambletonian and Ogallala colleges, lining up canva.s.sers at a net profit of something like fifty dollars per head--full or empty. When he blew in at the end of the year to spend Commencement week with us he was nothing short of an amateur Croesus.

He bulged with wealth. I remember yet the awe with which the rest of us, h.o.a.rding our last nickels at the end of the long and billful year, took a peep at the balance in his checkbook and touched him humbly for advances, great and small.