They entered the campus, now the campus of the busy day. Across by the chapel, the fence was hidden under continually arriving groups of upper classmen, streaming to it in threes and fours in muscular enthusiasm. There was no division there. Gradually the troubled perceptions of the night before faded from Stover’s consciousness. The light he saw was the clear noon of the day, and the air that filled his lungs the atmosphere of life and ambition.
At every step, runners for eating-houses, steam laundries, and tailors thrust cards in their hands, coaxing for orders. Every tree seemed plastered with notices of the awakening year, summons to trials for the musical organizations and the glee club, offers to tutor, announcements of coming competitions, calls for candidates to a dozen activities.
“Hello, Dink, old boy!”
They looked up to behold Charley De Soto, junior over in the Sheffield Scientific School, bearing down upon them.
“Hello, Tough, glad to see you up here!”
De Soto had been at Lawrenceville with them, a comrade of the eleven, now prospective quarterback for the coming season.
“You’ve put on weight, Dink,” he said with critical approval. “You’ve got a bully chance this year. Are you reporting this afternoon?”
“Captain Dana asked me to come out for the varsity.”
“I talked to him about you.”
He asked a dozen questions, invited them over to see him, and was off.
They elbowed their way into the Co-op to make their purchases. The first issue of the News was already on sale, with its notices and its appeals.
They went out and past Vanderbilt toward their eating-joint. Off the campus, directly at the end of their path, a shape more like a monstrous shadow than a building rose up, solid, ivy-covered, blind, with great, prison-like doors, heavily padlocked.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” said McCarthy.
“Which is it?” said Stover, in a different tone.
“Skull and Bones, of course,” said McCarthy defiantly. “Look at it under your eyelids, quick; don’t let anyone see you.”
Stover, without hearing him, gazed ahead, impressed despite himself. There it was, the symbol and the embodiment of all the subtle forces that had been disclosed to him, the force that had stood amid the passing classes, imposing its authority unquestioned, waiting at the end of the long journey to give or withhold the final coveted success.
“Will I make it—will I ever make it?” he said to himself, drawing a long breath. “To be one of fifteen—only fifteen!”
“It is a scary sort of looking old place,” said McCarthy. “They certainly have dressed it up for the part.”
Still Stover did not reply. The dark, weighty, massive silhouette had somehow entered his imagination, never to be shaken off, to range itself wherever he went in the shadowy background of his dreams.
“It stands for democracy, Tough,” he said, as they turned toward Chapel Street, and there was in his voice a certain emotion he couldn’t control. “And I guess the mistakes it makes are pretty honest ones.”
“Perhaps,” said McCarthy stubbornly. “But why all this mumbo-jumbo business?”
“It doesn’t affect you, does it?”
“The trouble is, it does,” said McCarthy, with a laugh. “Do you know what I ought to do?”
“What?”
“Go right up and sit on the steps of the bloomin’ old thing and eat a bag of cream-puffs.”
Stover exploded with laughter.
“What the deuce would be the sense in that, you old anarchist?”
“To prove to my own satisfaction that I’m a man.”
“Do you mean it?” said Stover, half laughing.
McCarthy scratched his head with one of the old boyish, comical gestures Stover knew so well.
“Well, perhaps I mean more than I think,” he said, grinning. “In another month I may get it as bad as that little uselessness Schley. By the way, he wants us over at his eating-joint.”
“He does?”
“He’s a horsefly sort of a cuss. You’ll see, he’ll fasten on to you just as soon as he thinks it worth while. Here we are.”
They pressed their way, saluted with the imperious rattle of knives and plates, through three or four rooms, blue-gray with smoke, and found a vacant table in a far corner. A certain reserve was still prevalent in the noisy throng, which had not yet been welded together. Immediately a thin, wiry fellow, neatly dressed, hair plastered, affable and brimming over with energy, rose and pumped McCarthy’s hand, slapping him effusively on the back.
“Bully! Glad to see you. This is Stover, of course. I’m Gimbel—Ray Gimbel; you don’t know me, but I know you. Seen entirely too much of you on the wrong side of the field in the Andover-Lawrenceville game.”
“How are you, Gimbel?” said Stover, not disliking the flattery, though perceiving it.
“We were greatly worried about you,” said Gimbel directly, and with a sudden important seriousness. “There was a rumor around you had switched to Princeton.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, we’re certainly glad you didn’t.” Looking him straight in the face, he said with conviction: “You’ll be captain here.”
“I’m not worrying about that just at present,” said Stover, amused.
“All right; that’s my prophecy. I’ll be back in a second.”
He departed hastily, to welcome new arrivals with convulsive grip and rolling urbanity, passing like a doctor on his hospital rounds.
“Who’s Gimbel?” said Stover, wondering, as he watched him, what new force he represented.
“Hurdler up at Andover, I believe.”
In a moment Gimbel was back, engaging them in eager conclave.
“See here, there’s a combination being gotten up,” he said impersonally, “a sort of slate for our class football managers, and I want to get you fellows interested. Hotchkiss and St. Paul are going in together, and we want to organize the other schools. How many fellows are up from Lawrenceville?”
“About fifteen.”
“We’ve got a corking good man from Andover not in any of the crowds up there, and a lot of us want to give him a good start. I’ll have you meet him tonight at supper. If you fellows weren’t out for football, we’d put one of you up for secretary and treasurer. You can name him if you
