“I think I do.”
“No matter what happens, no criticism of the captain—no talking outside. You may think he’s wrong, you may know he’s wrong, but you’ve got to grin and bear it. That’s all. Remember it—a close mouth!”
But it required all Stover’s newly learned stoicism to maintain this attitude in the weeks that arrived. After a week he was suddenly returned to his old position, and as suddenly redrafted to fullback when another game had displayed the inadequacy of the regular. From a position where he was familiar with all the craft of the game, Stover suddenly found himself a novice whom a handful of coaches sought desperately to develop by dint of hammering and driving. His name no longer figured in the newspaper accounts as the find of the season, but as Stover the weak spot on the eleven. It was a rude discipline, and more than once he was on the point of crying out at what seemed to him the useless sacrifice. But he held his tongue as he saw others, seniors, put to the same test and giving obedience without a word of criticism for the captain, who, as everyone realized, face to face with a hopeless outcome, was gradually going to pieces.
Meanwhile Dopey McNab was just as zealously concerned in the pursuit of his classic ideal, which, however, was imagined more along the lines of such historic scholars as Verdant Green, Harry Foker, and certain heroes of his favorite author, Charles Lever.
The annoyance of recitations by an economical imagination he converted into periods of repose and refreshing slumber behind the broad back of McMasters, who, for a certain fixed portion of tobacco a week, agreed to act as a wall in moments of calm and to awake him with a kick on the shins when the summons to refuse to recite arrived.
Having discovered Buck Waters as a companionable soul, congenially inclined to the pagan view of life, it was not long before the two discovered the third completing genius in the person of Tom Kelly, who, though a member of the Sheff freshman class, immediately agreed not to let either time, place, or conflicting recitations stand in the way of that superior mental education which must result from the friction of three such active imaginations.
The triumvirate was established on a firm foundation on the day after Kelly’s ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to hit the moon with a pool-ball, and immediately began a series of practical jokes and larks which threatened to terminate abruptly the partnership or remove it bodily to an unimaginative outer world.
McNab, like most gentlemen of determined leisure, worked indefatigably every minute of the day. Having slept through chapel and first recitation, with an occasional interruption to rise and say with great dignity “Not prepared,” he would suddenly, about ten o’clock in the morning, awake with a start, and drifting into Stover’s room plaster his nose to the window and restlessly ask himself what mischief he could invent for the day.
After a moment of dissatisfied introspection, he would say fretfully:
“I say, Dink?”
“Hello!”
“Studying?”
“Yes.”
“Almost finished?”
“No.”
“What are you doing, McCarthy?”
“Boning out an infernal problem in spherical geometry.”
“I gave that up.”
“Oh, you did!”
“Sure, it’s too hard—what’s the use of wasting time over it, then? What do you say to a game of pool?”
“Get out!”
“Let’s go for a row up on Lake Whitney.”
“Shut up!”
“Come over to Sheffield and get up a game of poker with Tom Kelly.”
At this juncture, Stover and McCarthy rising in wrath, McNab would beat a hurried retreat, dodging whatever came sailing after him. Much aggrieved, he would go down the hall, trying the different doors, which had been locked against his approach.
About this time Buck Waters, moved by similar impulses, would appear and the two would camp down on the top step and practise duets, until a furious uprising in the house would drive them ignominiously on to the street.
Left to their own resources, they would wander aimlessly about the city, inventing a hundred methods to accomplish the most difficult of all feats, killing time.
On one particular morning in early November, McNab and Buck Waters, being refused admission to three houses on York Street, and the affront being aggravated by jeers and epithets of the coarsest kind, went arm in arm on mischief bent.
“I say, what let’s do?” said McNab disconsolately.
“We must do something new,” said Buck Waters.
“We certainly must.”
“Well, let’s try the old clothes gag,” said McNab; “that always amuses a little.”
Reaching the thoroughfare of Chapel Street, McNab stationed himself at the corner while Waters proceeded to a point about halfway down the block.
Assuming a lounging position against a lamppost, McNab waited until chance delivered up to him a superhumanly dignified citizen in top hat and boutonnière, moving through the crowd with an air of solid importance.
Darting out, he approached with the sweep of an eagle, saying in a hoarse whisper:
“Old clothes, any old clothes, sir?”
His victim, frowning, accelerated his pace.
“Buy your old clothes, sir, buy ’em now.”
Several onlookers stopped and looked. The gentleman, who had not turned to see who was addressing him, said hurriedly in an undertone:
“No, no, nothing today.”
“Buy ’em tomorrow—pay good price,” said McNab peevishly.
“No, no, nothing to sell.”
“Call around at the house—give good prices.”
“Nothing to sell, nothing, I tell you!”
“Buy what you got on,” said McNab at the psychological moment, “give you five dollars or toss you ten or nothinks!”
“Be off!” said the now thoroughly infuriated victim, turning and brandishing his cane. “I’ll have you arrested.”
McNab, having accomplished his preliminary role, retreated to a safe distance, exclaiming:
“Toss you ten dollars or nothinks!”
The now supremely self-conscious and furious gentleman, having rid himself of McNab, immediately found himself in the hands of Buck Waters, who pursued him for the remainder of the block, with a mild obsequious persistency that would not be shaken off. By this time the occupants of the shop windows and the loiterers, perceiving the game, were in roars of laughter, which made
