"Come, hurry up, Haviland," said Cap. He felt a brutal impatience to see what the barrel staves had done to the fellow's back. "Get bathed and put on your dry clothes and be ready for the feed."

The initiate raised his hands slowly and untied the bandage. He blinked a moment at Smith, then he said huskily, "I am not Haviland, Mr. Smith, nor do I want any 'feed.' I want to know what this means." There was no anger in his voice, only great weariness.

The freezing truth dawned on the horrified student. His first impulse was to rush out of the house and to keep running. He managed to stammer:

"Where's Haviland?"

"I don't know where Haviland is," muttered the tired instructor. "I don't know who Haviland is. If I have taken his place I am ready to change again." He looked down upon his clothes, stuccoed with tarweed burrs and wet mud.

Then Jack Smith laughed aloud.

"Professor, when we've found Haviland, and you've seen him, you'll understand the whole horrible mistake, and——"

"There was no mistake," said the other, coldly, "you called me Professor while you were beating me."

This only set Smith off again.

"That's our name for Haviland. You see he looks like you—oh, I can't explain it to you, Professor; but when you've seen the man you'll forgive us, I know you will. And you've simply got to stay to our feed now, if we have to tie you up again to keep you here."

Professor Lamb, of the botany department, smiled wanly.

"I think I will take a bath, anyway," he sighed.



THE SUBSTITUTED FULLBACK.



The Substituted Fullback.

"Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain! I know not, faith, not I; Is it more strange the dead should walk again Than that the quick should die?" ALDRICH.

"Frank Lyman, Football Manager, Stanford University:

"Blake died three forty-five. Body going East. I return five train. DIEMANN."

When he had sent this message to the University, the instructor in Psychology went gloomily down to the Third and Townsend Street station.

There was nothing more to be done just then. He had telegraphed to the dead athlete's parents; the undertakers had their instructions about shipping the body to Ohio, and the hospital bills would be arranged for later. He slipped into a single seat at the back of the car to avoid the chance of a travelling acquaintance. Now that the business part of it was over, he could not talk to anyone.

The whole thing had been so sudden that it was hard to feel the truth. Barely a week ago he had stood on the practice field at the University, following Blake's splendid play and listening to the shouting of the crowded bleachers, who idolized their great fullback with the absolute idolatry of a college crowd. It was not easy to believe that all this physical manhood, all this intellectual promise, had been snuffed out like a candle before their very eyes.

Diemann pressed his face against the car window and stared out at the terraced produce gardens slipping dimly by in the early November dusk. Between him and the dead fullback there had been such companionship as comes now and then to an instructor under thirty and a man nearing the end of his college course. When Diemann, just home from Germany, came West to teach Psychology, he found young Blake the college hero. The new instructor had himself been a noted back; he still hovered somewhere between enthusiast and fiend. At Stanford he at once identified himself with the football men, and they welcomed him gladly as assistant coach. During that first season, two years ago, he had come to know and like Fred Blake. Later, the fullback took Diemann's course in Psychology, and to the elder man's gratification, developed a passion for the subject. The instructor recognized the quality of the athlete's mind, and before long the two were working together, reading and discussing along the line of the teacher's special interest.

Coming home from the sober materialism of Leipzig, Diemann had realized more fully than ever how thoroughly the interest in matters occult had pervaded the mind of his native country. To this department of Psychology he turned with an admitted interest in things unseen and a confidence in the restraint of his University training. He felt that he stood barely upon the threshold of the subject, held back by material prejudice and the conservatism of little faith; yet his enthusiasm grew daily. He weighed the evidence of phenomena with an impartiality that other people pronounced belief. The attitude of those about him was for the most part unsympathetic. Some to whom he had made furtive confidences called him "spooky," a spiritualist; but he was merely an investigator, trying to be fair. It was an alluring study; perhaps he ran the risk of over-enthusiasm—he had known people who had spiritualized the palpably material—but he was guarding against this danger; it would take an exceptional impulse ever to get him to that point.

It might be that some such temptation was coming to him now. He had just seen his friend pass into perfect knowledge. Blake had said something to him at the last that still ran in his ears, above the rumble of the train. "I will come back, if there is anything in it all."

Diemann, peering out into the deepening gloom toward the bay shore faintly white in the luminous mist, thought over this last interview of theirs; he was finding it hard to realize that their friendship had ended.

Only eight days before, he remembered, Blake first complained. It was at the practice, and Diemann had given him a shot about his listless work. Fred had answered:

"I can't help it, Die; I feel dead, somehow. I'm afraid I'm going stale, after all."

He recalled the drawn look on Fred's face. But the boy would come out the next night, for there was only a week before the team would leave for the Springs, and so much had to be done that the captain simply couldn't lay off. Toward the end of the practice, he collapsed. With his arm over Lyman's shoulder he had gone back to the Hall, dragging his feet heavily, while the crowd sat on the bleachers, quiet and frightened. Then the pain came, tearing its way into the heroic body, and the specialist hurriedly summoned from San Francisco had said that they must get him to the hospital.

Now it was all over, and Diemann was following his melancholy telegram to college. He could guess the effect of the news. A week ago the knowledge of Blake's illness had staggered them; the college had grown sick at heart; the city papers published details and the hopes of Berkeley bounded to certainty of victory, for there was only one Blake. Without him the Stanford team was nothing exceptional, and common estimate gave the chance to California. The Stanford management did the only thing they could do by putting in Ashley, the scrub fullback; but this did not help matters materially. Ashley was a man of beautiful physique, and the most conscientious player on the field. There he stopped. He utterly lacked the head-work that Blake put into the game.

For the star fullback had possessed the football instinct. Beyond his quickness and dash, he had the mysterious faculty of staying with the ball. If he were breaking the line, he placed the hole the fraction of an instant before anyone else perceived it. They used to put him at quarterback in defensive work, and he knew by inspiration where the play was going, so that the line felt confident with him at their backs.

Tom Ashley had nothing of all this. He punted as well as the 'Varsity man, generally better, at the beginning of the season; but was slow with his kick, often fatally slow when the 'Varsity broke through the scrub line. He was late in starting, too, though a strong runner when out in the field. The chief beauty of his game was a quick and certain straight-arm. At another time he might have easily been the 'Varsity fullback, for he put up a hard, steady game from one end of the season to the other; but he had come to college with Blake, and the position had been out of the question. Besides, there were a couple of star halves; he was not good at end, either. So he staid on the Scrub eleven, and worked doggedly for three years.

Diemann lay back in the car seat and aimlessly thought of his work with the substitute the week of Fred's illness. He had done his best with Ashley, trying to instill into him something of the other's style and dash. He had talked with him long and carefully, showing him the subtle points of Blake's game. During the few practices following the star's departure he had watched the new man faithfully through every play, giving him all his time. He was sorry for the sub. A man could be placed in no more exacting position.

Ordinarily, such a chance would have been a god-send to a scrub player, for the second-eleven man is the type of the Great Unthanked. Diemann thought of the three months through which the scrub trains religiously, sacrificing beloved pipe, or sorority dance, or week's end trip to Mayfield, or to the Orpheum in town; leaving the "gang" singing in the moonlit Quad, while he turns in at ten according to pledge; faring day after day on the same service of rare beef and oatmeal water; getting pounded and battered about over a hard field every afternoon. Ashley had had three years of this sort of thing—and all for what? At best, to squat in football clothes on the side-lines, Thanksgiving day, with Blake's or Smith's sweater around his neck, waiting for the accident that may give the game to Berkeley at the same time that it lets him trot out on the field, while the crowd calls out to him encouragingly, although they are sick at heart. He goes through each season borne up by the excitement, working breast to breast with the honored 'Varsity, but lost in their mighty shadow. When the big day comes he slips back into the great, wild crowd that lifts the team to its shoulders; worship is not for him, no, nor remembrance either, in that hour of homage. Such men, to the bleachers, are but working material for the 'Varsity; the scrub player is part of an inorganic thing—until his chance comes.

Yet, when fortune gave Ashley his chance he was not to be envied. To be put suddenly, at the last moment almost, into the shoes of the college hero, when the hopes of the University had been centered in that one man, this was too much for any fellow. In his docile way the substitute went into the trying place, working along as faithfully, and to all appearance with as little concern, as in his old position. Secretly, the responsibility wore upon him. It was a hopeless undertaking to be like Blake; but everybody expected it of him. He tried his best to grasp the patient coaching of Diemann and to put it in play at the right time, but he never seemed quick enough; that cursed slowness of his came in to show how futile it all was. Everything he did or could do as a football man was made negative by the fact that he was in Blake's place. It was a hard graft.

Diemann had known all along what the fellow was suffering, and he pitied him. According to Ashley's room-mate, the boy talked in his sleep, all night sometimes, chiefly about Blake and the play. If they did not look sharp, the coach said to himself, there might be another stale man on their hands.

Diemann had been thinking of this that very morning when he got the doctor's telegram. The shock had driven out every thought of Ashley and the team. All through his work with the sub it had not occurred to him that anything fatal could come to Blake, he had been doing so well; then, without warning, came the message saying that he was sinking. He had got there just in time. Now it was all over and he was going back to college, where Fred would never hear them shout for him again, never feel an arm about him in the long walks over the hills.

When the train drew into Palo Alto, Frank Lyman, the football manager, quiet and sober-faced, stood under the station-light.

"Can you come to dinner with me?" asked Diemann.

The two rode along under the oaks to the instructor's Palo Alto boarding-house. When they were alone upstairs, the manager said:

"Will you tell me about it? You got up there all right?"

"Yes," said the other, slowly; "not any too soon. The boy was conscious at the last, and knew me and talked a bit. It was all football, pretty much. I don't think he was quite clear enough to talk about other things."

"What did he say—that is, anything special?"

"No; he said he was more than sorry that he wasn't going to get in the game; it was his last and he wanted to play, but, of course, it wasn't his fault, and the college wouldn't think he had thrown them down. He'd never been a quitter, he said."

"No, never," said the manager.

"He went on in that strain a good deal; said that he wished that he could have stayed longer, just to play for them again. At the end he pressed my hand and said: 'I'll come back somehow, Die, if there is anything in it.'"

The Psychology instructor had spoken half in revery. He added quickly: "He was pretty well gone then, poor old chap, and wandering a little, and soon after that, why, he went over the line."

He was sorry for having let that sentence slip out. The student would not understand it; he could not know what those last words of Blake's had meant to him, who saw their meaning. Lyman would only think it a bit of ghastly humor that need not have been repeated. But the manager did not take it so, evidently.

"That reminds me of something, Diemann," he said. "I haven't talked it over with anyone yet, because everybody is sour-balled enough as it is. It's about Ashley. I'm afraid he is going stale."

"Yes?" said Diemann, with dull interest, "I've rather been afraid of it."

"Of course, I knew he was up on his toes about his job, but I didn't know just how bad it was until this afternoon. You see, you weren't here, and after practice there were things to speak about, so I walked over to the Hall with him. Then I thought I'd rub him myself, because Billy is overworked, you know. He didn't answer questions for a time, but lay quite still and looked at me, yet I don't think he saw me at all. He began to talk away, speaking of himself, in the third person, mind you, and about his poor play and all that. He was as clean nutty as any man you ever saw; as near as I could make out he thought he was Fred."

Diemann faced the manager.

"What time was this, Frank?"

"About five, I think. Shortly afterward I got your telegram. He went on giving the straightest kind of football talk; but he was no more himself all the time than I am he. This went on for several minutes; then he got clear again. Pretty soon he rose and said he was faint, but guessed he was all right. I didn't know whether to speak to the doctor or not. Now, that sort of thing won't do; the man can't have such attacks and keep in shape. If he goes stale, where will we be?"

"He talked like Blake, did he?"

"Yes, really he did. He had even Fred's little way of sliding over his r's. Being troubled about having Fred's place has unstrung him. You've noticed his absent-mindedness out on the field? I know Ashley pretty well; he's always been sensitive as to what people think about him; he likes to feel that he's doing what you expect of him. He was struck on the head to-day; I don't doubt that's what made him a little off. Still, his nervous condition must be bad."

Diemann rose and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"Yes," said he, thoughtfully, "we must watch him. Perhaps we ought to speak to Dr. Forest; but I'll look after him a while first."

"Very well. We won't have any practice to-morrow, out of respect to Fred; we couldn't stand it, any of us; that will give Ashley a rest, then Friday we have the last practice before going to the Springs."

"I am going up there with you. I think I'll turn in early to-night; I'm pretty well knocked. I'll see you in the Quad before noon to-morrow."

Lyman went, and the Psychology man, refilling his pipe, stared at the fire and smoked until midnight.

"I don't know," he thought, as he settled into bed, "it may be only a case of dual personality, it may be something greater. I've got where I must guard against myself."

With an intensified interest, the coach resumed his work over Ashley. He waited for a recurrence of the phenomenon which Lyman had marked and he yielded again to the general excitement over the approaching contest. Absorbed in the two unrelated interests, he gradually came to connect them. This he kept to himself.

The last campus practice was half over, the bleachers were crowded. Across the field the confirmed fiends were standing along the ropes to get a nearer view of that tangle of human bodies, not a movement of which escaped them. On the side-lines the privileged advisers, from rubbers and Freshman manager up to associate coach, squatted on the adobe, careless of their clothes.

The whole University had come out. An air of sorrow hung over everything, the rooters were silent, and the teams played listlessly.

Frank Lyman went over where the wildest howlers usually sat.

"Boys," he said, "we can't send the men away like this, it would take them a week to get over it. We must have some yelling. We're not honoring the memory of Blake this way. Do you know what his last words were? He said to Professor Diemann, 'They know I never was a quitter.' Do you think he would like a practice like this?"

Then the crowd started up and gave the yell as one man, and the others joined in until something like the usual demonstration arose about the field, and the 'Varsity, feeling the inspiration, bent down and hammered away at the Scrubs as they meant to do against the Blue and Gold on Thanksgiving day. Here and there a fraternity dog, showing his head between a pair of golf-clad knees, joined the quick, sharp yell of the people about him with an imitation that raised a laugh. When the bleachers were still just before a big play, one could hear in the breathless silence the slap of the canvas suits, the thud of heavy shoes, the sniffling of men just out of a scrimmage. Far across the bay, the hills that were cool and blue when practice began, grew luminously red in the level light of the dying rays; against the fading color of the west, the power-house chimney rose picturesquely dark; the swift, elusive twilight of California settled down on Santa Clara's broad acres, so that Diemann had to stare hard to follow Ashley's play. Then the whistle sounded, sharp in the still air, and the teams came trotting to the side-lines to take their sweaters and caps from devoted admirers and to stroll off, arm over shoulder, with people who minded not in the least the campus dirt those heroes had been gathering.

Diemann took Ashley's arm. "Let's walk together," he said.

The substitute fullback had been playing hard ball. The gloom hanging over the first half of the practice had affected him strongly and he had flung himself into the game, trying to forget, to cast off the foolish sense of an implied reproach. Diemann could see that he was very tired. He made him lean upon him, and they started for the Hall. Suddenly he realized that the football man was not answering questions, that the weight on his own shoulder was growing heavier. He glanced up into Ashley's face; there was an absent look in the man's eyes.

"Fred!" whispered Diemann sharply in his ear.

"Yes?" answered the fullback; then he shook himself and said:

"It's chilly, Die, I'm wet. Let's get in."

Some fifteen minutes later, the two came down the corridor toward the training table.

"Good-night, Ashley."

"Won't you stay to dinner, Diemann?"

"No, I must go down, and you are late as it is. Hurry along in."

"All right. I'm not going stale if I can help it. I just felt a little faint over there; I got pretty tired."

Diemann stepped up closer to him beside the curving balustrade and looked the football man steadily in the eyes.

"You are playing more like Blake every day," he said.

"I wish I were."

"We are going to the Springs to-morrow," went on the coach, "and you can rest. By the way, if I were you I wouldn't say anything about your feeling faint just now. It would only trouble Lyman and the rest of the boys."

"What does it all mean?" Diemann mused as the palms bordering the bicycle path flashed by him. "There was something about him like Fred, in his way of speaking, and some of the things he said about the game, but it stopped there. With all my questioning, I never got a word that belonged to us two alone. I suppose I must admit that it is merely the memory of the subjective mind, a case of dual personality brought on by hyper-aesthetic conditions. Oh, if it were only the other thing, if I only could know! But it can't be; he would give me some clue, some sign. Then again the substitution has not come at a critical time, only after the practice, when Ashley is tired. If it were Fred, he would appear in the play, he would come at a time like that, if there is anything in it."

Diemann gripped his handle-bar tightly as he shot through the sandstone gates.

"Oh," he thought, "whatever it is, if it would only come stronger, if I could only be sure!"

* * * * *

On Thanksgiving morning when the long special runs up on the University track and stops between the Library and Encina, the flaming bunting looped along its sides starts the excitement of the day. Everybody is out on the walk, bristling with the College cardinal, from Professor Grind and his wife to the Jap who cleans house Saturdays. If there is anyone who cannot or does not want to go up to town to-day, he has hidden himself in grief or shame. The President wears a ribbon in his coat, and talks gravely with Professor Diemann, who has been at the Springs with the team. A knot of students have already determined to get the Doctor to lead the yell when he comes in to the grounds. They know he will do it; he is as full of the spirit of the day as any of them.

"Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Stanford!"

The engine whistles it, the crowd shouts it, and the hills give it back again as the laden train slips down to the main line and starts on its way to town. Streaming with cardinal bunting, it looks like a burning thing as it rushes over the marsh land, sending the horses in the field snorting away, and bringing women to the doors of cottages along the tracks. In their excitement the delirious Sophomores and Juniors hang out of the windows and throw kisses wildly to these women, who grin and wave back, doubtless saying something about "them crazy students." A placid red cow is greeted with cheers, the scarlet under-flannels of hard-working South San Francisco, flapping merrily from the line in the November breeze, fan the frenzy, while the engine toots the yell and the car-windows are aflame with gleaming flags.

From now on the students besiege the city, and the town is theirs as surely as if the Mayor had met them at its entrance with a symbolic golden key. Shop windows are brilliant with the rival colors, the streets are a shifting riot of red and blue and yellow, with a plague-spot here and there where some fanatics have striped their derby hats with blue and gold ribbon, or a color-blind Stanford man flaunts a villainously purple chrysanthemum. On the curbing, fakirs are selling shining red Christmas berries and violets and great bursting carnations, and chrysanthemums like yellow ostrich-plumes.

Through all this splendor you keep close to Professor Diemann, for you know he is going to the hotel where the team is, and that stalwart lineman you are thinking of most to-day is up there with them. You slip upstairs under the protecting shadow of the associate coach, passing the suspicious eyes of the trainers and the hurried, unsympathetic glance of Lyman, the manager, and you find your particular hero lying on his bed in all the glory of his new sweater with its clean white S, a great fresh specimen of the lustiest student-body in the world. You take his hand, almost afraid to squeeze it tightly, lest you cause some harm to the big frame in which your hopes are centered, and you tell him how glad you are he has made the team and that we are bound to win. And if this is his first game, or if some man has pressed him dangerously for the position he had last year, he will smile and say, "We'll do our best." Then the rubber comes in and you slip away, wondering why the beneficence of the Creator to man on earth should have made one fellow like your idol up there on the bed and another like you, crawling unnoticed into the street, throwing out your thin, incapable legs in a quick walk to join your crowd at the restaurant.

Diemann found Ashley quiet in his room. The fullback was in splendid fettle; the week at the Springs had done him a world of good. There was no staleness about him now. It had helped him to be away from the College, away from that excited crowd that sat on the bleachers and watched him play, demanding that he be like Blake, who had died. He breathed more easily in the quiet air of the mountains where the team had secret practice. People stopped urging him to be like Blake; only Diemann went over the thing again and again, explaining, reminding. Now Thanksgiving had come, and the substitute fullback had never felt better in his life. He would do his best, and they could not say he had not tried.

The manager was radiant over Ashley's condition, and the other men slapped Tom's big shoulders and said that he would put up a good game for the College. Diemann alone seemed sour-balled. The rest of them knew how Blake's death had broken him up, but that was no reason, Lyman said, why he need keep nagging the new fullback about Fred. The College realized that the two men were hopelessly different, and they were fairly reconciled by this time. If the boy played the best that was in him, the team might make it in spite of the odds. It was too bad to take the spirit out of him by constantly suggesting that he play like Blake. The manager said this to Diemann, but the coach only shook his head and answered:

"It won't do any harm, Frank, and it may possibly work him up to something like Fred's game."

But a week's watching at the Springs had made Diemann despondent. The phenomenon he had witnessed the evening of the last practice had not appeared again. He had allowed his theories to lead him away into impossible hopes. The man on the bed was Ashley, slow, normal, in perfect condition, hopeless, and Ashley he would remain. The chance for a psychic manifestation ceased when Ashley's football worry was over. Opportunity had come and gone, unfruitfully.

That afternoon, the athletic grounds were banked with great flower-beds of people, where red and blue and yellow blossomed and faded and burst out again as the teams swayed back and forward on the white-lined gridiron between. The wild noise of the college yells greeting the teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands, the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the hoarse bellow of the brown paper megaphones,—all this tumult had hushed suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other for the kick-off.

The uproar boomed forth again, and presently the Stanford bleachers became silent from breathless watching. The first five minutes of play meant most to the cardinal. In that dozen rushes, they could tell whether there was a chance of winning or whether the hope of victory had died with Blake. The first Berkeley play went at the line and crumpled up without gain; again it held and again, until the crowd felt that there was more than hope, that the Stanford stone-wall defense would win out once more. Yet so closely were the teams matched that they swung back and forth without score for a good half.

When the game was almost at the end of the second half, the score was tie, 6-6. But Berkeley was sure of the day. She had forced her adversaries to their five-yard line, and there were only six minutes left to play. Stanford took a desperate brace and Berkeley lost the ball on downs. If only Stanford could gain ground now, or if time could be called. Nobody wanted a tie, to be sure, but defeat was hard to accept,—the first time, too.

Diemann of Stanford crouched on the side-lines with a heart of lead. The game was lost. What he had looked for, hoping against hope since play was called, had not happened. Ashley had played his usual hard, consistent game, straining every muscle, punting longer and higher than ever before, but missing stupidly some golden chances, the chances Blake would never have let slip by. Diemann had talked to him between halves, a few eager words, urging him to quickness, reminding him of Fred. The substitute had only shaken his head, and muttered that he was doing his best. Toward the end of the second he had shown the severity of the strain. Playing his hardest, with despair in his soul, it had told on him. In the last scrimmages his work had been very ragged. Indeed, the whole team seemed to have slumped, and the Berkeley line had hammered them down toward their own goal while precious seconds slipped by.

Now the men lined up rapidly. Stanford tried an end play. No gain. Diemann stood back of the team at one side of the goal; he was struggling hard to be calm, but he did a strange thing. He seized a small megaphone from the hands of an urchin beside him, and just as they lined up after Stanford's unsuccessful trial at end, he stepped to the white goal line and raising the funnel to his lips shouted in a voice audible to every man on both teams:

"Now, Fred Blake, play your game!"

Lyman heard and looked back, wondering.

Ashley heard. He stared at the grandstand with a bewildered, appealing face. Then the signal was given. It sent Ashley through tackle. The boy, feeling as though he had lost the game for his College where the other man would have won, went into the line with the energy of a forlorn hope. The Berkeley men gathered their superior force, and the Stanford team was lifted up and borne back, a gradually shifting mass, to its own goal line.

Were they over? The Berkeley crowd yelled, and an exultant sub threw his sweater in the air. No, the teams were up, and the ball was almost on the line, not quite. There remained a chance to punt it out of danger. Could Ashley do it quickly enough? He had been punting too slowly; the other line could surely get through and block his kick, and there were only two minutes to play.

Diemann, rigid with anxiety, saw that a Stanford man still lay on the ground. Straining his eyes through the dusk, a glance at the team told him that it was Ashley. The drawn muscles of the instructor's legs trembled, the blood beat in his temples. Was it coming, at the last moment?

As the trainer shot out from the side-lines with bucket and sponge, Diemann saw Ashley spring up, slap the grimy moleskins of the men nearest him, and get back into position to kick. Stanford was standing on her own goal line. He saw the ball snapped back; the fullback kicked it, in time; then, instead of the long, curving drive that was to save the day, he saw the ball rise almost straight in the air above the teams, and he groaned aloud as the Berkeley men broke through, and people with delirious laughter waved the blue and gold frantically about him.

The ball comes down among the struggling players. Suddenly, out of that jumble of men darts a red-sleeved figure, dashing through the scattered field, bounding like a stag toward the Berkeley goal.

The expert eye of the associate coach tells him that, by a marvellous piece of football instinct, Ashley has found his way through the confused teams, realizing that he is the only Stanford man on side, and has caught the ball on the fly and got clear with it. Though they understand nothing of this, the vast crowd goes shrieking to its feet. The bewildered teams turn and follow close upon the flying figure, the speedy Berkeley right-half leading them. Back in the field stands the U. C. fullback, grimly waiting. The two collide, and the chasing halfback gains; but the Berkeley back drops to the tackle a fraction of an instant too late and runs fair against a straight-arm. Tom Ashley, with the ball clutched tight against his breast, his set face gleaming white in the half-light, sprints down the long barred space toward victory, keeping the distance between himself and the straining pack, running as only one man has ever run for Stanford.

And Diemann, tearing along the side-line, knows that Ashley himself never could have done it.

The fullback falls across the line, the ball gripped in his convulsive hold, just as the linesman's whistle blows. Diemann is there almost as soon. He keeps back the frenzied men crowding about them, and bends over the unconscious player, calling him "Fred" irrationally, while the place catches fire with the cardinal and Stanford goes mad on the field.

* * * * *

Ashley came to consciousness at the hotel. Diemann sat beside him, and Lyman and Dr. Forest stood by the window. The substitute fullback sat up.

"I felt faint just then," he said. "I couldn't help it; you know about it, Diemann." He looked at the other men.

"Did they get it over?" he asked.

Lyman ran across the room.

"Tom, old man," he said, choking, "you won it for us, and you'll never be forgotten, you and your run!"

The fullback looked at him blankly.

"My run?" he faltered.

Diemann came between them.

"Better lie down and rest a bit, my boy; you can talk later."

Then, turning to the others:

"You see," he whispered, "he's wandering a little yet."



TWO PIONEERS AND AN AUDIENCE.



Two Pioneers and an Audience.

"The Mother sits beside the bay, The bay goes down to wed the sea, And gone ye are, on every tide Wherever men and waters be!"

On the Sunday night following the Game the smoking-room at the Rho house held the greater part of the Chapter. As a rule, there were not so many loafing there Sunday nights; that time was generally given either to sentiment in other places, or to digging out Monday's work upstairs, while the fire burned for the two or three who seemed never to have any work more important than magazine reading or solitaire. To-night, however, nearly every one was gathered there, for two "old men" were visiting.

These old men had been out of college for two whole years. One of them was Ralph Shirlock. If you were at college in his days you knew him by sight, at least, though you were the mossiest dig that ever kept bright till morning the attic window of a prof's house on the Row. If you have come up to College since then, and are sufficiently posted to know that there have been other annuals before this one just issued by your friends the Juniors, you have found his picture or his name on every other page of the earlier editions. Harry Rice, who came with him, was not half so well known, save to the Faculty and the circle of the chapter. He was doing very well in business, people said, better than Shirlock, probably. Rice was a keen fellow, the new men could see that at a glance; but they did not put an arm about him instinctively in the after-dinner stroll, as they did about Shirlock.

The two alumni had spent Sunday calling upon the Faculty in Palo Alto and the Row, and in post-mortems with some of the football men in Encina. After dinner, the fellows sat out on the porch, strumming mandolins and singing. Shirlock had been a star on the Glee Club two years before, and he sang again the songs the college hummed after him in those days, while the upper-classmen looked at the Freshmen with a "now-you-see-what-you've-joined" expression, or nudged each other reminiscently, until the live-oaks in the pasture almost blended with the long shadows under them, and hoarse-throated frogs were tuning up in the irrigating ditches. Then they formed four abreast and went down for the mail, humming a march song and lifting their hats in concert to Professor Stillwell and his wife, smiling from their porch. At the post-office the lines broke and the entire body, except the alumni, struggled into the over-crowded room ("the daily press" Pellams called it). This was hardly necessary, since one man could have opened the fraternity box and distributed the letters; but this is a distinct charm of Sunday evening at the post-office. Moreover, you never know who may be standing inside, and if you have forgotten to arrange things ahead it is sometimes well to be first.

The pleasant uncertainty of the evening mail being over, the fellows mixed a while with the sundry groups about the low red building, then joined forces again, and marched once around the Quad, arm in arm, a line of sixteen, while Bob Duncan, who had been prepped at a military school, shouted, "Change step, march," and "Left wheel, march," then home together, all but two or three, who were called the "Incurables," and who had plunged back into the shadow of the Quad for Chapel, perhaps, or some other form of Sabbath evening devotion. This breach of hospitality the alumni forgave, made indulgent by a sweet sympathy.

Alas for you, old worshippers at empty shrines! Those divine presences are gone, new and unknown deities queen it in the ancient temples. Go back to the hearth where some still know you and talk to the few who gather around you there, of the old days when you, too, placed your offering at celestial feet. These men of a new generation, sitting in places that once were yours, will listen indulgently to your stories of the past, and hear with patience the odious comparisons you inevitably make; they will thank you for the advice you give them, and say something pleasant about your college spirit; then in the morning when you have taken the early train back to the World, they will go down to the Quad with their books under their arms and something in their minds that is anything but your talk of the evening before; the College life will go on very much as if you had not been back, O wise fossils, and there will be new graduates going out to learn your lessons and new undergraduates who will pay no attention to them in turn. So be thankful for this brief hour before the fire, with its chat as light as the tobacco smoke floating over "old" man and Freshman lounging together, be glad of the fellowship that welcomes you, and be content.

Each couch in the smoking-room had its load of sprawling figures. The lights were out by this time and the Incurables had come back to the house and ferreted places for themselves among the tangled golf suits and 'Varsity sweaters. Duncan had a lamp on the table where he was "bossing a rabbit"; Pellams said this was the only kind of lab-work in zoology in which Bob could get credit. A pile of plates warmed before the fire where Smith was toasting crackers at the end of a sharpened stick. At the piano, Pellams was softly playing "barber shop" chords. It was all very lazy and comfortable. The alumni grew reminiscent.

"This noon while we were walking up from Palo Alto," said Shirlock, "Mrs. Stanford passed us in her carriage, coming from Chapel, I suppose. I asked Harry if he remembered how they used to drive about the place inspecting things, when the Senator was alive."

"Of course I do," spoke up Rice, "it seems odd that there are so few in college now who remember them together. To you fellows, I suppose, Mrs. Stanford is the source of the University. To us who saw them stand together on the platform that day in October, '91, it is the two always."

"Harry, do you remember our serenade at the residence, after they returned from Washington the first time?"

"No," answered Rice, "I remember, but I wasn't there. We played a game somewhere that day and I stayed over and missed the fun."

"Tell us about it, Ralph," said Duncan, as he emptied the cubes of cheese into the chafing-dish.

"Well, you see," said Shirlock, unbraiding himself from two affectionate under-classmen on the couch and sitting up in the light, "the story really begins with the first football game, which came off in the spring of '92, and was ours, as every Freshman can tell you, even though he doesn't know just what is meant by 'Pioneers.' The day of the game, Whittemore, the captain, got a telegram from Washington wishing us luck in our first encounter, and that afternoon we sent back answer in much the same style that Caesar used on one occasion—I suppose the little man to my left here can give me the Latin words?" he added, rumpling the hair of a horizontal Freshman.

"Not long afterward the Senator and Mrs. Stanford came back from the East and someone over in the Hall proposed that we give them a welcome home. We could get a bigger demonstration there in those days than you can now, I'll bet; you know everybody who was anybody at all lived in Encina then; that was the center of the College life, politics began and grew up there, and it was over there in the old lobby that we started the Stanford spirit. Things were great, that first year. It's all right enough here by our own fireside, with our own little gang, but I tell you honestly if things could have lasted as they were that first year, I wouldn't have wanted to come over here. We were all together, right in line for everything, wise or foolish."

"It was the student body then, all right," put in Rice, "and we had the Faculty with us too whether we were around the gridiron, where they first had it, east of the cinder path, you know, learning the yell and incidentally getting the team into condition for that 14-10, or whether we were crawling by our lonelies through the fence over in the vineyard."

"The days of grapes, The days of scrapes,"

sang Pellams from the piano.

"Were there any profs on that flat-car?" interrupted Duncan. He had come into College while a memory of that pioneer adventure yet lingered.

"It's unkind to remind us of that affair! No, I don't think there were. The Faculty had their fun later, and we put mourning wreaths on several chairs in the dining-room."

"And you came mighty near getting a bouquet of the same kind, yourself," said Rice.

"What was it about the flat-car?" inquired a voice from the pillows.

"Oh," said Rice, "that was about the first of those senseless ebullitions of youth that the Shirlock person usually identified himself with. There was a flat-car standing outside Encina on the track there, just about where it turns and slopes down crosslots to the main track. This is just what Ralph and his precious gang wanted, of course; they thought it would be a bit of innocent, boyish play to have a little free railroading, so they piled on and turned her loose and slid down to Mayfield. They barely stopped the car before she switched into the main line, and they all fell off into the gopher holes along the side and made for Mayfield, red-eyed. The Faculty raised Ned when they heard about it, which was proper."

"I hope the Freshmen will pay particular attention to Mr. Rice," said Shirlock. "He is a noble influence to any sweet, unfolding soul. I feel that I should have escaped a great deal of enjoyable sin had I only known him better those first few weeks."

Ralph got up for some cigarette tobacco from the skull on the mantelpiece.

"Well, the Faculty were with us in about everything," he went on, rolling a cigarette; "many of them lived in the Hall then."

"Yes, a number did," put in Rice. "Do you remember, Ralph, the night that Professor Torts had his little beer-and-skittles party in his lair, and Burns, who roomed across the passage and who was the worst bummer in Encina, went down to Fessler, and complained that he couldn't study because of the noise in that number? And Fessler forgot who roomed there and came up and gave them Tartarus through the keyhole and nearly dropped when Torts opened the door?"

"We all enjoyed that," answered Shirlock. "Why, the profs used to come to our feeds and jolly up with the crowd. Often they were the best fun there. It's different now."

"Oh, I don't know," said Duncan, "they come over off and on, now. Doc Jordan was here last Sunday to dinner, and Diemann drops in sometimes; last year he came a lot."

"Oh, they come over all right," sighed Pellams from the piano. "I had a report to make one day. I didn't have it done, and I bribed Ted to go down and tell Engbee I was sick in bed. I was playing cards in here when Sniffles rushed in and told me the old boy was coming up the street. I smelt danger and tumbled into bed like a six-day bicyclist, and fixed my face up with some grease paint and magnesia. Sure enough, he came in, darkly suspicious, thought he had me all right, but he found a wreck that melted him. His wife sent me a bunch of violets next morning. For my part I don't like the Faculty for intimate friends," and Pellams played "Comrades" with the soft pedal down.

"It's not the same thing, though, really," persisted Shirlock. "They may come over here to dinner or perhaps to a smoker, but it's always Professor So-and-So; his chair is a little higher than any of yours, and he never forgets the family waiting for him in the Row; in those first days the family was in most cases beyond the Rockies, or as yet a dream, and it wasn't always easy to pick out the professor from the jumble of story-tellers on the bed.

"Of course, it was all too good to last," the alumnus went on thoughtfully, "and it wasn't natural it should. We weren't so many then. When the number increased, I suppose the relations had to change and the different cliques must separate. I'll admit that there is more in the life now, it's more complex, there are more institutions and more ways of having joy; but those were good old days, those first days in Encina when the crowd was one.

"I can see them now, can't you, Harry? out on the veranda and the steps of the Hall after dinner, with the fellows playing ball on the lawn, and other men sitting up on their window-ledges. The night I started to tell you about, when we went to serenade Mr. and Mrs. Stanford, we got the mandolin fellows, the beginning of your present club, and fell in behind them and started off down the road, past the mausoleum and through the vineyard—never broke ranks there, either, we were on our good behavior, besides, it was Spring—and so on over to the house, where we drew up, and the mandolins played their piece, then we gave the yell—it was only a few months old, that yell, but it had been loud enough to knock out a twenty-five-year-old one we met up in town not long before, and we were proud of it.

"During the pause that followed, the front door opened and the Senator stepped out on the porch; a lamp shone on his gray head and on us fellows in a big black crowd on the gravel below, looking up at him and cheering. When we stopped he said, very much as though a friend had driven up, "Gentlemen, will you come in?" and the whole two hundred of us piled over the piazza, getting a grasp of his hand as we came into the hall, and a word from Mrs. Stanford, who stood beside him. They took us into the library; we formed a hollow square, two rows deep on the sides, and the Founders came into the square and talked to us. I remember that Mrs. Stanford said, 'We were very glad, young gentlemen, to hear of your success in baseball,' and what a chill it gave us, just convalescing from the football fever; but we forgave the mistake when she asked, a minute later, 'Which is Mr. Clemans?' That blushing hero with the other ten we forced into the center to be congratulated, and we sang the new song, 'Rush the Ball Along,' until the bric-a-brac trembled.

"When we were quiet again, the Senator talked to us informally, as though we were in reality his children as he had said we were to be. It was an earnest talk, about his ideals of what the University was yet to be, and his hope for their fulfillment; of economy and judicious living; and of endeavor to be of use to the world. It was a privilege to stand there listening. He appealed to each one of us individually. We could not know then how few more such opportunities we were to have. When he had finished, the dining-room doors slid back—it was a put-up job, that serenade—and it was Mrs. Stanford's turn. After the supper, we gathered for a little personal talk with both of them, then we had some more mandolin music, and Baker sang 'Suwanee River' to Capron's accompaniment.

"That evening brought the Founders pretty close to the crowd. It was a good thing to have happen, it began things right. Then, you know, he died suddenly, in vacation. I was in Yosemite. When term opened, it was hard to get used to seeing her driving around the campus alone. I don't think any of the people who came after those early days can ever be so loyal to the Founders, to the person of one and the memory of the other, as we are. I'm sure none of us who went over serenading that night will ever forget it. It's one of the Pioneer memories."

Both graduates were looking into the fire. Freshman Haviland snored softly in the window seat. The eyes of the rest of the chapter were fastened on the chafing-dish. Shirlock's story had seemed pretty long and the rarebit sent out a tantalizing odor.

Duncan called out, "Supper's ready, children," and the heated plates came clattering up from the hearth, bringing the visitors back from the far echoes of their own beginnings to the noisy unconcern of a Freshman year that knew a kind, white-bearded face from pictures only, and never could understand.



FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT.



For the Sake of Argument.

"For we are frank and twenty And the spring is in the air!" HOVEY.

"Well!" said Miss Meiggs, spreading across her lap one of the Beta Rhos' new monogrammed napkins, "I must say your being here is a surprise."

Pellams answered in vague interrogation, not a little surprised, himself, to be caught at a "girl-supper." Now that he was cornered, it would be uselessly impolite to tell her how the Chapter had reasoned and pleaded with him until at the last minute "Cap" Smith ruined his clever escape by catching him midway down a porch pillar. Smith, sitting on the other side of Katharine Graham and wearing the smile of satisfied revenge, would doubtless enjoy telling it. There was so much of genial malevolence in that smile that Pellams, the woman-hater, who knew only enough of the co-eds to avoid them, wondered what sort of a girl he had been placed next to at supper. He had an intuitive idea that she had been given him by general consent. An experienced society man would have scented this at once in the company of Mrs. Perkins, for when there is a choice of tables, chapter-mothers are apt to sit where there is the least sentiment; but this was the Junior's debut, practically, and he was conscious of little more than that the fellows had it "in" for him, and that this girl had begun the conversation by a personal remark.

"I judged," the girl was saying, not having waited for any explanation, "that in the milder forms of social entertainment you were somewhat out of your element."

Pellams had missed his guess. On sitting down to their small table, he had decided that the conversation would naturally split into two divisions of three rather than into three couples, for Mrs. Perkins, Professor Grind and this Meiggs girl would enjoy themselves together, leaving him to share Smith's talk with Miss Graham, whose eyes had somehow an engaging twinkle. The idea was rudely dispelled by Miss Meiggs's immediate and decidedly personal attack. At least, he would have preferred to talk about other people, but he faced the music.

"Oh, I disapprove of them only for myself," he replied, "not for others."

"And why for yourself, particularly?"

The face of the Glee Club's comedian had assumed just the right seriousness.

"Because I'm more than susceptible and I don't want to run risks."

"Your time has come at last, then," put in his captor, Smith, with a gallant look at Miss Meiggs.

"Not at all," retorted Pellams, whose combative sense was less rusty than his skill in compliment. "If I'd been afraid of one exposure like this, do you think I'd have suggested being on deck to-night?"

Smith, with a fresh memory of their struggle, laughed at this blocking move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of late there had been a little rift in their sisterly love.

The older girl was not disconcerted. She had her estimate of Pellams Chase, and he was not disproving it. There were certain things she had long wanted the chance to say to him.

"I admire your self-restraint under temptation," she said; "it is characteristic of you in other circumstances, I believe"—this with discreet emphasis—"but, really, why should you dread letting this susceptibility get the better of you?"

Pellams caught the faint sneer in the words. He hoped that Mrs. Perkins had been talking just then to her Faculty partner. Increasing his affected earnestness, he replied:

"Because, when you get gone, it is bound to knock scholarship."

Here Smith giggled audibly, for Katharine and he were really feigning talk, being more entertained by the couple across the cloth. Katharine knew that by this last statement Pellams had sounded a dominant note in the soul of her opinionated sister. She was not surprised, then, when Miss Meiggs turned more fully toward the woman-hater.

"Tell me, are you one of these people who think co-education an evil?"

"I'm afraid I am." The speech gave Pellams a certain pleasure. There was nothing about this partner they had given him that tended toward converting him to the Chapter's point of view as to the advantage of girls at college.

"Of course," continued she, "I do not take your remark about scholarship as worthy of consideration in your case, because I am in one or two of your classes, when you attend them," and Pellams, listening, gave thanks that he and Professor Grind opposite had no such relation; "but monopolized time is really the cry of a good many who would wish to work, and it is all wrong. There is no reason why we should not come here and work with you, combining friendship and study. Our presence here is, in a way, preventive of many worse things."

Pellams turned his empty salad plate between his fingers.

"Well," he drawled, "I'm not sure I know what you mean by the worse things, and I've never been to another college, except Berkeley but I can't believe as much time is spent on them as some people here give to girls," this with a dreamy look over Smith's head; "the cigarette heart can't be much worse than what takes men out of college here, and if you refer to beer——"

"I do refer to beer," said Miss Meiggs, in an iced voice.

"Oh, no!" expostulated the Junior, spreading his hands, "they couldn't do it!" He looked at her frankly. "You get a head after too much beer," he went on, reckless as to pronouns and listening professors, "and you stay sober and work, for awhile, any way. In co-education you don't get any such call-down until the Committee meets."

"Don't let him tease you, Miss Meiggs," put in Mrs. Perkins, frowning mildly at Pellams because of Professor Grind's sphinx-like smile; "he's making it all up out of his inner consciousness, like the German philosopher and the—elephant, wasn't it, Professor Grind?"

"Yes?" answered Miss Meiggs, with a world of irony packed into the syllable; "your inner consciousness, then, Mr. Chase, proves rather forcibly that in one case the influence is against refinement, while in the case of co-education it is all for it. You will grant that, I think?"

Quite by accident, Pellams caught Miss Graham's eye. The twinkle there was a sort of glorified "sic 'im!"

"On the contrary," said he, perfectly composed, "I think it's the girl that's refined."

Miss Meiggs's "What!" was almost a shriek. Foo, the table-boy, brought her just then a plate of creamy rarebit. He had a jacket of luminous green silk, with the fraternity monogram in white, and he wore his cue hanging. But the fragrance of the rarebit and the splendor of Foo's toilet were alike lost upon the aroused Miss Meiggs. Such a statement, from this man of all others!

"You are judging us with yourself as a basis of contrast, I fancy!"

Not displeased at having put her in ill-humor, and refusing a gentle attempt on Mrs. Perkins' part to lead the conversation elsewhere, he went on with aggravated seriousness:

"But there is hope for me here, with the Faculty and with books"—he choked a little over this; "a man doesn't need to go through from one to eight love-affairs."

The champion of co-education sniffed.

"Nothing was further from my thoughts," said she. "The association of men and women in an atmosphere of study does not mean sentimentality. The relation should be normal and helpful, not spoiled by extremes." Katharine had heard these views before.

"But they can't dodge the extremes, you see," persisted Pellams. "It's the place here, the walks and drives in the country and all. Your theory might work all right at a city college or even at Berkeley, but on this campus, not so!"

"The reasoning of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature than boy-and-girl foolishness—unless one is idle. Where it results in that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"—with these words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in the country at the same time."

"But all the girls are not like you," began Pellams, and stopped at the sound of the words. They were not in the least intended to be taken as he felt that the table-full had taken them. Miss Meiggs put her fork viciously into the neglected rarebit. In the uncomfortable pause, Mrs. Perkins flutteringly passed her the cayenne pepper, but Miss Meiggs ignored the courtesy. She turned to Pellams.

"Even a love-affair," she snapped, "would benefit you more than the substitute you have chosen! You are a nice one to argue the refinement of the college girl! Are you refining yourself, your fraternity or your favorite side of the student-body by carousing at Mayfield and carrying the viciousness of that town to others where you may represent the University?"

"Oh, I say!" protested the Glee Club man, uneasily, for Grind was on the Committee; "don't be too hard on me."

"I'm sure you're unjust to Pellams," said the Chapter-mother, with a troubled look at her black lamb, who wondered what was coming: "I don't believe he——"

Miss Meiggs, peppering her rarebit deliberately, interrupted, with a little toss of the head.

"I will ask Mr. Chase one question then." She gathered some of the cheese upon her fork, and, balancing it midway to her mouth, went on with a gloating clearness of enunciation. "Please tell us why you came to the afternoon concert at the Chico Normal School this summer in a colored shirt and your dress suit, and why you did not sing your part of the program?"

"That's two questions," murmured Pellams. He could not look at Mrs. Perkins, to whom he had made certain solemn promises before that very trip; but his adversary had turned toward her with a look of righteous triumph. So deftly that even Pellams barely saw it, Katharine reached across him and peppered the forkful of rarebit just before the lips of Miss Meiggs closed over it. His answer was overlooked.

Mrs. Perkins took the sufferer up to her own room and Katharine vanished somewhere with Smith. When the tables were removed, a girl sat at the piano; her song finished, she struck briskly into the "Hot Time," and every one turned to Pellams. He sang the rag-time as though he were bursting with fun, while the Chapter sat before him, beaming its innocent gratitude. But the Glee Club man was singing to one guest alone, and he could not see her, or Smith either. When two songs had failed to bring her into view, he stole off upstairs unmolested and lay for some time with his door locked, grinning before sleep.

They hammered at his door next morning with appeals for his appearance at first-hour recitation, and fraternal reminders that he hadn't sufficient stand-in to cut. Foo went clanging the bell through the halls, dodging the shoes that flew at him through the door of a man who had nothing before the fourth hour, and the rush and hurry of late breakfast-time filled the house. But Pellams lay smoking in his narrow bed, engaged in the novel task of solving a point of etiquette. The affair of the night before was to be his final appearance in local society. His experience in small-talk with Miss Meiggs confirmed his decision to live a college life into which co-education did not enter outside his class-rooms. Yet, having once departed from the mode of such a life, he found himself under an obligation. A co-ed had found him in trouble and had done the "white" thing by him at a critical moment; even Jimmy Mason, over at the Hall, could not have stood by him any better. In an obligation to Jimmy there was no problem—only the matter of time to do his part—but with a co-ed, Pellams felt that it was different. She was not a feature of his life. To the woman-hater's mind, if a man has become indebted to a girl, honor bids him pay the debt, the sooner the better. He need never see the girl again, once the score is even. This philosophy evolved, it took another cigarette to decide just how the balance could be struck, and then Pellams went downstairs to wheedle a remnant of breakfast from the indulgent Foo.

Applied to the new element into which he had ventured, something of the keen observation which the Junior devoted to football practice might have made the payment of his debt to Katharine Graham a transaction of less public note. He would have waited, probably, with the brazenness that characterizes local courtship, at the door of the library and caught her as she emerged. Or he would have learned what mails she usually waited for at the post-office and would have lingered until she had opened her box and had started back toward the Quad pretending to look over her correspondence. Or else he would have watched her classes and happened along by accident just as she was coming out for a vacant hour. But these established forms had escaped his notice. Instead, he did what he considered the "proper," and drove dashingly up to Roble in Paulsen's best single rig and his own new fall suit.

Roble caught sight of him beyond the flower beds, over the heads of the tall pampas. The news electrified the dormitory. A Freshman stopped her experimental lab-work with the piano, and joined the others behind the lace at the parlor windows. A group of girls, chatting on the yellow railing of the steps, watched the approach of the apparition. Pellams Chase coming to Roble! Not since the morning Mt. Hamilton was covered with snow had there been such a phenomenon.

"I believe he's coming to take Florence to drive!" said a mischievous Theta Gamma, looking toward Miss Meiggs, who sat frowning at the approaching buggy.

"He ought to," laughed Katharine Graham's roommate, "for not telling her how much red pepper she had put on her rarebit while she was absorbed in talking to him!"

"If he's coming for me," said the Senior grimly, "I shall not disappoint him."

"What!" cried Katharine; "you wouldn't go with him, Florence! Why, we none of us met him until last night."

"Last night I was unfortunately absent-minded," answered Miss Meiggs, "and I did not say all I wanted to. It wouldn't be a pleasant drive!"

"He would have you at his mercy—you shan't go!" laughed another girl, "it would be flying in the face of Providence as well as of Propriety!"

"I can't imagine whom he's coming for," said Katharine, who was sure that he was coming for her. She thought out the severe little refusal she should make him when he had drawn her aside.

The stranger scraped his buggy wheels delicately along the curbing of the Roble walk. The group of girls on the steps was an unexpected ordeal. He caught sight of the amused faces behind the curtains above him and almost lost his nerve.

"Rubber!" he growled. He had made many a clever entrance in the student theatricals, but to-day in climbing out of the buggy he got badly tangled in the reins. In spite of his desperate will, his face was growing red. With painfully fixed gaze he came up the steps toward the Theta Gammas; standing uneasily before them, he blurted out, with no preliminaries whatever:

"Miss Graham, would you like to go driving?"

Katharine straightened and looked at him coolly. One of the girls gave a little gasp at his impertinence.

"It isn't customary, I believe," said Katharine, "to ask to go driving with a girl you have met once, at a supper."

"Isn't it?" faltered Pellams. There was not a vestige of his usual bravado about him. Katharine met his honest gaze, hesitated, then said:

"But I shall be delighted to go, just the same. Will you come in and wait till I get my things?"

They curved round the Dormitory lawn and away toward the La Honda redwoods, leaving the astounded young women on the porch to discuss, as women sometimes do, the peculiar behavior of their departed sister.

She explained it to Pellams during the drive. To his surprise, he learned that he had been hopelessly ill-bred to ask her at all; that had the invitation not been given before the other girls he should have driven away alone. As it was, she was in for no end of criticism. She discouraged any conversation upon the subject of cayenne pepper. Furthermore, she declared herself in full accord with Florence Meiggs as regarded love affairs; she believed in them as little as her elder sister; good-fellowship, without sentiment, was possible and quite sufficient. Pellams, having resolved upon the utmost good-nature during the drive, put the pride of the livery stable through her best paces and allowed his companion to declare her views unquestioned. Toward the end of the afternoon, he deposited her at the Roble door with a pleasant feeling that he had done his duty and was through with co-eds forever.

A wild uproar filled the Rho dining-room when the gallant came in to dinner, late. With an exasperating readiness of conclusion, the crowd congratulated him upon his change of heart, they welcomed to their ranks, with much clinking of water glasses, another true lover, and Smith sang derisively an adaptation of his own:

"Pellams Chase, the Glee Club Man, Swore upon the book For wife he'd have a cider-can, For bed the ingle-nook— Petticoats he thus forsook!"

Instead of raising the expected storm of denial, Pellams looked guilty and uncomfortable. In spite of their knowledge of the man, they did not divine that their teasing had given him an inspiration.



His idea for a josh involved Miss Graham. So he waited for her deliberately outside the door of the French class next morning; she had stopped to talk to the instructor after the class had left. Jimmy Mason and four or five of the regular Quad loafers were talking football on the curbing. Pellams joined them. Then the gravity of the step he was about to take came over him with a sense of oppression. He felt much as on that Easter morning, years before, when his mother had dragged him out to be confirmed.

"The Berkeley faculty won't let Dudley play," Mason was saying. "He hasn't—where are you speeding in such a rush?" he added and then stopped, paralyzed.

It is probable that if her eyes had not laughed at him with that twinkle of good-fellowship which he had noted on the night of the supper, Pellams never would have had the nerve. That look hauled him over the Rubicon; they went down the arcade together, in the face of Jimmy Mason, the loafers, the whole crowd shifting between lectures. Yet the sun shone as brightly on the palm-circles, the Quadrangle pillars kept their perpendicular. A little later Mason saw the couple sitting under the 'Ninety-five Oak. He whistled to himself with a look that meant: "You wait, old josher till you get into the Knockery again!"

"Now," said Pellams, under the Oak, "you have about the same ideas on love-affairs as I have and you'll sympathize with me in this thing. When I got in to dinner last night, the gang gave me the hottest jolly of my misspent life. They're all alike; they can't understand having a straight friendship for a girl without it's being a puppy-love. So they tumble at once that my driving you means I'm yours for keeps. That sort of a thing makes me tres fatigue and I've a scheme."

"Not your first, is it?"

"In what way do you—"

"I know something of your 'schemes,' young man; that fake fraternity and the snipe-hunts and an examination in English 1 c."

"Oh, those!" Pellams did not blush at the record. Instead, he smiled. His smile was always worth seeing. It was the point of one of his Club stunts. Every muscle got into the interference and his round face grew rosy into the roots of his thick brown hair.

This grin was not lost upon Katharine.

"What am I to do, pray?" asked she; "pose as Professor of Domestic Economy?"

"This is a bird of a josh on the house," he cried. "You'll come in on it, won't you?"

"Plans first, before I commit myself. You might want me to elope in a buggy."

"Never again!" declared Pellams; "my idea is, why can't we pretend to have a case on each other—not any passing fancy, but a real peacherino, like the best of them?"

Somewhat to his surprise, the girl was not visibly enthusiastic.

"Just how do I profit, please, if I butcher myself to make your Roman holiday?"

"You can die happy, knowing we've pulled their le—bluffed 'em beautifully. You're down on love-affairs yourself, you told—"

"Your philosophy of heaven includes a josh on the other fellow, I verily believe," returned Katharine, smiling; "but it is just possible, you know—shall I be very frank?"

"You have been, before!"

"Well, then, I might, you know, prefer the society of some other men in college to the exclusive privilege of yours, even with this wonderful josh thrown in."

"Who, Smith?"

"There are others."

"I know I'm not much of a sq—ladies'-man," he persisted; "but I can learn, can't I?"

"Your manners are not very dreadful when you think about them; but oh, you have lots to master, the little things, you know."

"I let you carry your books this morning—"

"Bravo!—if you only learn to think of them sooner—all the little ways a girl—"

"Sure—you can teach me and rap my knuckles—"

"That would be a pleasure. I've wanted to do it for months."

"And, you see, you'd have the distinction of being the only one I couldn't hold out against."

"Oh, above all things, don't be conceited, or I can't think of it."

"That means you will think of it?"

"You're really not half bad! You caught that on time. Yes, I'll help you in your joke, to punish their silliness, but only for a week, on trial you understand."

Pellams, gratified, put out his hand, not in fashionable wise, but as he would grip a man's. Yet in doing so he noted, looking at her fully for the first time, that the light hair on her temples came down low on the sides, as his mother's did.

On the way up to her room, Miss Graham stood for some moments smiling at an irrelative picture of Westminster Abbey, hanging in the parlor. Having gone driving before their faces, it was more presentable not to be dropped. Also, there was an undeniable pleasure in refuting any of Florence Meiggs's arguments, the one concerning love-affairs and scholarship, for instance. Besides, he was a dear, amusing thing, and a perfect novice.

During the week that followed, Pellams learned a few things. The experiment was by no means a bore. He discovered that it is easier to be joshed than to josh—when you know in your heart you have the joke on the other fellow. He learned the revengefulness of Perkins' nature, old Ted, who was ragged to death when his case on Lillian Arnold developed and who now paid him back with interest. He found how great an object of interest to the co-ed element a man becomes when he is in love. All this was good for the woman-hater, giving him new views of things and teaching him patience. Many times during the ordeal he blessed his dramatic talent. It helped him to pretend a chap when he did not feel it. It served him in assuming an air of "the game is worth the candle," when the whole tableful at the house requoted to him certain scathing remarks on the girl-habit which, in the day of his single blessedness, he had made to each one of them separately. It was more than useful to him when he rolled into the "Knockery," the second evening after his sad condition had become patent, and the assembled company rose to smother him with sofa cushions and lecture him, with decided seriousness, on the evil effect of girling. There were times, indeed, when he didn't have to assume any chap at all, when it came of itself; for example, when the crowd punned on the girl's name, "Graham gems" was a favorite. Somehow, he wished that they wouldn't drag in names that way.

The week ended. He had done beautifully. Looking it over, he was proud of his achievements. Two evenings at the library; a brazen walk every day at the 10.30 period, which both had vacant; a stroll in the moonlit Quad, planned to interest the crowd at the Tuesday evening lecture; two calls at Roble—that was going it pretty heavy. The whole college was smiling at them, and the foolish Rho house hugged itself in the blissful silence of his sarcastic tongue.

This review of the week delighted Pellams. He hunted up Katharine the last afternoon and asked for a renewal of the contract.

She laughed.

"Are you sure you can help the extremes? You know the Quadrangle and the walks in the country—"

"Listen to the Mocking Bird!" gurgled Pellams. He was feeling very well pleased with things in general.



"The product of the means is a bully good josh," he laughed, "and I'm not afraid of the product of the extremes; it's only equal to the same thing—now there's higher mathematics for you!" and Pellams danced the and she made him be serious and take up his work. The first quarter of an hour she called him to order twice—first for trying to trap with a lariat of grass an inquisitive gray lizard spying at them from a fence-rail; second, for enticing into conversation the huge Danish hound, whose bark is so much worse than his bite, and who, having been a pup with the University, knows something of every Stanford "case" ever developed in the pleasant shade of his domain. After fifteen minutes of impeccable behavior, Pellams whispered:

"Say—"

"Silence!"

"Well, I'd like to have some attention paid me. Call me down just to show that you're alive."

She pointed to his History and subsided into her English Poets. When she came to earth again, the sun was low beyond the eucalyptus trees. There was a regular sound near her which she realized having heard for some time in her sub-consciousness. She peeped over the high-growing root between them. The man whom she was helping slept peacefully, his book closed and his mouth open, and only the suspicion of a snore stirring the quiet autumn air.

"I shall never have any trouble with him!" thought Katharine, with just the faintest discontent, as she dropped a twig on his face, by way of waking him without embarrassment.

The autumn rains came and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class work had undergone a transfiguration. People noticed it. At the opening of the term he had put Professor Leyne's course in "Renaissance Poets" on his schedule card, because it was a proclaimed snap and because two of the three Rhos who took it the year before had kept their set-papers. Professor Leyne loved to draw covert allusions from what he called "the ocean of young life that swells around us." One day he threw out a direct allusion. Stopping in his remarks about chivalry, he sunk his voice to an impressive, confidential tone, looking almost directly at the impassive Pellams in the back row.

"And I think sometimes," he said, "when I see the youth feeling the uplifting earnestness of first love—when I see it taking him gently by the hand and saying to him 'my son, there are higher things'; when I see him putting his spirit with new zeal to the tasks that are laid before him, when I see him realizing that life is indeed serious and its end the fulfilment"—and so on until the bell rang, while the subject of the eulogy, outwardly calm, grinned fiendishly in his secret soul, for only himself, the professor and one other knew that he had scored an A on his last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English.

Similar results ensued in French, which they prepared together, and he so endeared himself to the History professor that that worthy expanded to the point of a hint at an entrance to the seminary the next semester. The superior Miss Meiggs, pondering upon the remarkable change in her classmate, saw with concern this renegade disproving an argument with which she had enlivened many a Theta Gamma meeting. She never guessed with what patience Katharine was training his wandering attention. She was not present during the afternoons of real, quiet study which were forced out of him between luncheon and football practice.

By the time their contract, renewed from week to week, had been operating for two months, Pellams began to wonder just where the point of the joke came in. People had become used to the condition. The House could rely on him and his singing, and girls came oftener than ever to Sunday supper. The Knockery took his affairs as an accepted fact. They no longer had any new jokes on it. Jimmy Mason grumbled now and then because his chum was queening "like all the rest of the frat-men," and their jovial expeditions to Mayfield were over, "because she wouldn't understand" (most conclusive proof!), but he ended by taking it as he might have taken an inequality of temper—as a flaw in character to be overlooked in a friend. Then again, Pellams found it positively uncanny to be getting on so well in his work, an uneasy feeling as though he were walking along the edge of a steep place. As for the joke itself, he could laugh over it with Katharine, but there was no way to spring it. A josh that has not a public end lacks art. He realized that the idea had seemed very rich when he conceived it and that he had plunged into it without considering its finish, and of course an impractical girl wouldn't look so far ahead. Now, he saw that it had ceased to be a josh at all, where other people were concerned.

When he came to the thought of dropping it, he suspected that it was no longer a josh where he himself was concerned. The realization of this quite stunned him, the afternoon it came to him. They were sitting below the Sphinx, at the back of the Mausoleum, and the quail were calling among the pines. Katharine was reading to him from one of his text-books. He heard very little of what she read. To him the book kept repeating that she had the most attractive mouth and chin he had ever noticed; that the low-drawn hair on her forehead was made to be smoothed back, very gently, from her clear skin. The consciousness that he could not give up these study-afternoons came over him with a stab, and told him that he had not been listening at all well lately; that this was why he could not remember the stuff in recitation and why he had not dared to tell her his recent marks. She trusted him so thoroughly now that she did not stop him so often when he talked, instead of working. If she had guessed the real reason of his laziness, she would have been honestly disappointed in him. This was the tragedy of it. He could never let her suspect that he was not still fooling the Rho house. She was a girl entirely without sentimentality—this was what he liked in her at first, and now it was his overthrow. If she should so much as dream that his feeling toward her was anything more than the friendship he had outlined in the beginning, she would shut her book with a slap and declare the compact at an end. He must keep on acting, only his audience had changed and the people he had been joking with were now behind the scenes, though they didn't know it. So he would put his chin in his hand and gaze at her as though the peculiarities of the Renaissance Poets were his greatest concern. He laughed, too, about the joke itself, finding a sort of painful relief in double entendre. Sometimes his mind wandered, and when Katharine failed to reprove him, as in the earlier days of the compact, he felt as though he had betrayed a confidence. Once they had forgotten all about football practice, and it frightened him; but she seemed not to have realized the gravity of the thing, and he laughed the alarming incident away. During lectures, he tried to reason himself out of the predicament. It was entirely possible that this feeling toward her was but another instance of habit, a natural affection for a chum, with some subtle influence of sex combining to frighten him into thinking it more serious. But he was not entirely comforted.

Crises occur properly at the end of a semester. On the evening of Friday, the closing day, Roble gave an impromptu dance. Katharine made Pellams come; it would be final evidence in their joke, since he was known to dislike dances. He agreed to attend, adding his own emphasis to the reason as stated. Katharine filled out his card for him, allowing him three dances with herself. The evening began in misery for the woman-hater, and ended in perturbation of spirit. There were girls, oceans of them, and not one of them had any sense. Katharine was different. These girls didn't know when they were joshed, and they couldn't josh back. They were an uninteresting lot. She had filled his card with them and he had to hunt them up and dredge his head for conversation. It was an awful bore. Katharine was the only girl whom he had ever seemed able to talk with easily, and he had only three little dances with her. He was savage.

During the third dance, he was floundering through an absent-minded conversation with a Freshman girl, whose eyelashes were pale pink, when Cap Smith glided past him, waltzing with Katharine. They looked as though they were having a very good time. Pellams felt that Cap, fine fellow as he was, generally grew too familiar with girls. He noticed with disapproval the man Katharine drew for the fourth dance, and she had Cap again for the fifth. He went over after that dance and asked for her program. Cap was down for two more dances. Pellams gave her back her card. He laughed a joking sentence on another subject, then he slipped down stairs and blundered out into the rainy night in a towering rage at Katharine, at Smith, most of all at himself for being a certain Thing.

Jimmy Mason had not attended the Roble dance. Instead, he sat at his table in the Knockery, going over his accounts as laundry agent. He was deep in these end-of-semester figures when Pellams burst in at the window, like a storm-driven creature. People never stand on ceremony at the Knockery. It is the corner room on the ground floor. The place has always been the Knockery ever since Mason roomed there, just as the big room over the old dining-hall will be the "Bull-pen" forever. It is the universal avenue after the lights are out, and the doors locked. You open the window as gently as you can and slide in. If the tenants are in bed, you get through into the hall on tiptoe, if possible; if awake, you stop and chat a bit by the way of courtesy; no one ever has to study in this enchanted bower. Moreover, if you do not live in the Hall, if you are an Alumnus visitor from town, if there are girls at your frat-house, or if you dwell off the campus and are belated, there are extra blankets under the lounge in the corner. Make up your own bed and turn in, without waking the sleepers. You are not crowding anybody. Once a whole baseball team, with the help of two extra mattresses, slept comfortably in the Knockery—but that is history.

When Pellams slammed in and flopped disconsolately into a chair, Mason looked up, knowing that there was trouble somewhere.

"What is it?" he asked. No answer. Jimmy rose, locked the door and closed the ventilator. Then he disposed himself on the lounge.

"Tell your dad. Is it the girl?"

Pellams's affirmative was put in language unrepeatable in a book for young persons.

"Something gone wrong?"

"Yes," etc.

Jimmy wished to offer consolation. "Can I do anything?"

"Yes," growled the man in a dress suit. "You can give me a sweater and take me to Mayfield!"

Now Jimmy was a true friend. He would have gone anywhere for Pellams.

When the dance music at Roble had ceased, and the quiet of the December night was broken by only the patter of raindrops and the sound of singing in the Mayfield distance, punctuated by sharp whoops, Jimmy had got Pellams back to the Knockery pretty well consoled. It might not have made much difference just then, even if the lover could have known that over in darkened Roble, Katharine Graham, who did not approve of love affairs, lay crying herself to sleep.

Pellams rose late next day, and ate his lunch mournfully at the House. He was in an exaggerated state of repentance and resolve. After luncheon he made a sorrowful pilgrimage to the Quad. Here he learned that he had lost five hours and that the Glee Club would tour the South without him.

Chastened in spirit, he asked for Katharine at Roble. She had gone to Mrs. Stillwell's on the Row. He went again at night, calling late that she might have her packing finished for the morning steamer.

By diplomacy, arranged beforehand with the door-girl, he got her downstairs. There was only a trace of reserve in her manner when she told him that she had all her packing yet to do, and that she couldn't walk about the Quad even once; there was more than a trace of embarrassment about him when he pleaded something very important.

"Perhaps I know what it is," said she.

"More than likely you don't," he persisted; "anyhow, I deserve a chance to explain."

Katharine went down the steps with him.

"Well?" she said, on the walk outside.

"What do you think I want to say?" He was not so brave now.

"The same thing that I have in my mind, that our little arrangement would better end. I have got my very first condition through wasting time on a foolish josh, and I don't believe you've been doing good work lately."

"They gave me two of 'em."

"Indeed? Then Florence Meiggs was right, wasn't she?"

"Dead right."

Silence for awhile, then she said: "But you mustn't blame me. I did my best, and if we both failed it's proof positive that it has to end."

Another pause, with the whirr of distant machinery breaking the stillness. No speech on either side until Pellams felt that he must say something or the blood in his throat would choke him.

"Do—don't you really know what I wanted you out here for?"

"Perhaps to insult me further. Pellams!" impetuously, "why did you do it?"

"What? flunk?"

"No. Cut those dances."

"You ought to know!"

"Yes; I do know, and your wanting to go to Mayfield was a good, gentlemanly excuse, and I ought to accept it, I suppose. Of course, it shouldn't make any difference to me; you have humiliated me enough already, but you might have considered the other girls."

"Yes, and you are blaming me for cutting down there when you and Cap Smith were floating around——"

"You will please leave Mr. Smith out of the conversation;" she turned toward the Hall. "I have to go in, the shades are down already."

Pellams' courage came up with a flash. By blind instinct, he reached out and caught her hand. She did not struggle, though the moment he released his pressure she drew her hand away, and quickened her pace. He followed close, and she turned upon him.

"This is what I might have expected when I cheapened myself with you! Will you let me go in?"

"Not until I have said what I came to say; Katharine, can't you—can't you guess it? Oh, I know—Kathie, you must have seen it—you know why I cut the dance—you know"—and again words failed him and he reached for her hand.

But she put him off this time. "I am sorry to spoil such a beautiful piece of acting; but our arrangement is going to end, and this is a worn-out joke."

They had come by now to the corner of Roble, where it is indiscreet to talk over private affairs, and neither said anything until they reached and mounted the steps into the shadow of the porch. Then she said: