To the freshman, Carl Ericson, descending from the dusty smoking-car of the M. & D., in company with tumultuous youths in pin-head caps and enormous sweaters, the town of Plato was metropolitan. As he walked humbly up Main Street and beheld two four-story buildings and a marble bank and an interurban trolley-car, he had, at last, an idea of what Minneapolis and Chicago must be. Two men in sweaters adorned with a large "P," athletes, generals, heroes, walked the streets in the flesh, and he saw—it really was there, for him!—the "College Book Store," whose windows were filled with leather-backed treatises on Greek, logic, and trigonometry; and, finally, he was gaping through a sandstone gateway at four buildings, each of them nearly as big as the Joralemon High School, surrounding a vast stone castle.

He entered the campus. He passed an old man with white side-whiskers and a cord on his gold-rimmed eye-glasses; an aged old man who might easily be a professor. A blithe student with "Y. M. C. A. Receptn. Com." large on his hat-band, rushed up to Carl, shook his hand busily, and inquired:

"Freshman, old man? Got your room yet? There's a list of rooming-houses over at the Y. M. Come on, I'll show you the way."

He was received in Academe, in Arcadia, in Elysium; in fact, in Plato College.

He was directed to a large but decomposing house conducted by the widow of a college janitor, and advised to take a room at $1.75 a week for his share of the rent. That implied taking with the room a large, solemn room-mate, fresh from teaching country school, a heavy, slow-spoken, serious man of thirty-one, named Albert Smith, registered as A. Smith, and usually known as "Plain Smith." Plain Smith sat studying in his cotton socks, and never emptied the wash-basin. He remarked, during the first hour of their discourse in the groves of Academe: "I hope you ain't going to bother me by singing and skylarking around. I'm here to work, bub." Smith then returned to the large books which he was diligently scanning that he might find wisdom, while Carl sniffed at the brown-blotched wall-paper, the faded grass matting, the shallow, standing wardrobe.... He liked the house, however. It had a real bath-room! He could, for the first time in his life, splash in a tub. Perhaps it would not be regarded as modern to-day; perhaps effete souls would disdain its honest tin tub, smeared with a paint that peeled instantly; but it was elegance and the Hesperides compared with the sponge and two lard-pails of hot water from the Ericson kitchen reservoir, which had for years been his conception of luxurious means of bathing.

Also, there were choicer spirits in the house. One man, who pressed clothes for a living and carried a large line of cigarettes in his room, was second vice-president of the sophomore class. As smoking was dourly forbidden to all Platonians, the sophomore's room was a refuge. The sophomore encouraged Carl in his natural talent for cheerful noises, while Plain Smith objected even to singing while one dressed.

Like four of his classmates, Carl became a waiter at Mrs. Henkel's student boarding-house, for his board and two dollars a week. The two dollars constituted his pin-money—a really considerable sum for Plato, where the young men were pure and smoked not, neither did they drink; where evening clothes were snobbish and sweaters thought rather well of; where the only theatrical attractions were week-stand melodramas playing such attractions as "Poor but True," or the Rev. Sam J. Pitkins's celebrated lecture on "The Father of Lies," annually delivered at the I.O.O.F. Hall.

Carl's father assured him in every letter that he was extravagant. He ran through the two dollars in practically no time at all. He was a member in good and regular standing of the informal club that hung about the Corner Drug Store, to drink coffee soda and discuss athletics and stare at the passing girls. He loved to set off his clear skin and shining pale hair with linen collars, though soft roll-collar shirts were in vogue. And he was ready for any wild expedition, though it should cost fifty or sixty cents. With the sophomore second vice-president and John Terry of the freshman class (usually known as "the Turk") he often tramped to the large neighboring town of Jamaica Mills to play pool, smoke Turkish cigarettes, and drink beer. They always chorused Plato songs, in long-drawn close harmony. Once they had imported English ale, out of bottles, and carried the bottles back to decorate and distinguish their rooms.

Carl's work at the boarding-house introduced him to pretty girl students, and cost him no social discredit whatever. The little college had the virtue of genuine democracy so completely that it never prided itself on being democratic. Mrs. Henkel, proprietor of the boarding-house, occasionally grew sarcastic to her student waiters as she stooped, red-faced and loosened of hair, over the range; she did suggest that they "kindly wash up a few of the dishes now and then before they went gallivantin' off." But songs arose from the freshmen washing and wiping dishes; they chucklingly rehashed jokes; they discussed the value of the "classical course" versus the "scientific course." While they waited on table they shared the laughter and arguments that ran from student to student through Mrs. Henkel's dining-room—a sunny room bedecked with a canary, a pussy-cat, a gilded rope portiere, a comfortable rocker with a Plato cushion, a Garland stove with nickel ornaments, two geraniums, and an oak-framed photograph of the champion Plato football team of 1899.

Carl was readily accepted by the men and girls who gathered about the piano in the evening. His graceful-seeming body, his puppyish awkwardness, his quietly belligerent dignity, his eternal quest of new things, won him respect; though he was too boyish to rouse admiration, except in the breast of fat, pretty, cheerful, fuzzy-haired, candy-eating Mae Thurston. Mae so influenced Carl that he learned to jest casually; and he practised a new dance, called the "Boston," which Mae had brought from Minneapolis, though as a rival to the waltz and two-step the new dance was ridiculed by every one. He mastered all the savoir faire of the boarding-house. But he was always hurrying away from it to practise football, to prowl about the Plato power-house, to skim through magazines in the Y. M. C. A. reading-room, even to study.

Beyond the dish-washing and furnace-tending set he had no probable social future, though everybody knew everybody at Plato. Those immaculate upper-classmen, Murray Cowles and Howard Griffin, never invited him to their room (in a house on Elm Street with a screened porch and piano sounds). He missed Ben Rusk, who had gone to Oberlin College, and Joe Jordan, who had gone to work for the Joralemon Specialty Manufacturing Company.

Life at Plato was suspicious, prejudiced, provincial, as it affected the ambitious students; and for the weaker brethren it was philandering and vague. The class work was largely pure rot—arbitrary mathematics, antiquated botany, hesitating German, and a veritable military drill in the conjunction of Greek verbs conducted by a man with a non-com. soul, a pompous, sandy-whiskered manikin with cold eyes and a perpetual cold in the nose, who had inflicted upon a patient world the four-millionth commentary on Xenophon. Few of the students realized the futility of it all; certainly not Carl, who slept well and believed in football.

The life habit justifies itself. One comes to take anything as a matter of course; to take one's neighbors seriously, whether one lives in Plato or Persia, in Mrs. Henkel's kitchen or a fo'c's'le. The Platonians raced toward their various goals of high-school teaching, or law, or marriage, or permanently escaping their parents; they made love, and were lazy, and ate, and swore off bad habits, and had religious emotions, all quite naturally; they were not much bored, rarely exhilarated, always ready to gossip about their acquaintances; precisely like a duke or a delicatessen-keeper. They played out their game. But it was so tiny a game, so played to the exclusion of all other games, that it tended to dwarf its victims—and the restless children, such as Carl, instinctively resent this dwarfing. They seek to associate themselves with other rebels. Carl's unconscious rebel band was the group of rowdyish freshmen who called themselves "the Gang," and loafed about the room of their unofficial captain, John Terry, nicknamed "the Turk," a swarthy, large-featured youth with a loud laugh, a habit of slapping people upon the shoulder, an ingenious mind for deviltry, and considerable promise as a football end.

Most small local colleges, and many good ones, have their "gangs" of boys, who presumably become honorable men and fathers, yet who in college days regard it as heroic to sneak out and break things, and as humorous to lead countryside girls astray in sordid amours. The more cloistered the seat of learning, the more vicious are the active boys, to keep up with the swiftness of life forces. The Turk's gang painted the statues of the Memorial Arch; they stole signs; they were the creators of noises unexpected and intolerable, during small, quiet hours of moonlight.

As the silkworm draws its exquisite stuff from dowdy leaves, so youth finds beauty and mystery in stupid days. Carl went out unreservedly to practise with the football squad; he had a joy of martyrdom in tackling the dummy and peeling his nose on the frozen ground. He knew a sacred aspiration when Mr. Bjorken, the coach, a former University of Minnesota star, told him that he might actually "make" the team in a year or two; that he had twice as much chance as Ray Cowles, who—while Carl was thinking only of helping the scrub team to win—was too engrossed in his own dignity as a high-school notable to get into the scrimmage.

At the games, among the Gang on the bleachers, Carl went mad with fervor. He kept shooting to his feet, and believed that he was saving his country every time he yelled in obedience to the St. Vitus gestures of the cheer-leader, or sang "On the Goal-line of Plato" to the tune of "On the Sidewalks of New York." Tears of a real patriotism came when, at the critical moment of a losing game against the Minnesota Military Institute, with sunset forlorn behind bare trees, the veteran cheer-leader flung the hoarse Plato rooters into another defiant yell. It was the never-say-die of men who rose, with clenched hands and arms outstretched, to the despairing need of their college, and then—Lord! They hurled up to their feet in frenzy as Pete Madlund got away with the ball for a long run and victory.... The next week, when the University of Keokuk whipped them, 40 to 10, Carl stood weeping and cheering the defeated Plato team till his throat burned.

He loved the laughter of the Turk, Mae Thurston's welcome, experiments in the physics laboratory. And he was sure that he was progressing toward the state of grace in which he might aspire to marry Gertie Cowles.

He did not think of her every day, but she was always somewhere in his thoughts, and the heroines of magazine stories recalled some of her virtues to his mind, invariably. The dentist who had loved her had moved away. She was bored. She occasionally wrote to Carl. But she was still superior—tried to "influence him for good" and advised him to "cultivate nice people."

He was convinced that he was going to become a lawyer, for her sake, but he knew that some day he would be tempted by the desire to become a civil or a mechanical engineer.

* * * * *

A January thaw. Carl was tramping miles out into the hilly country north of Plato. He hadn't been able to persuade any of the Gang to leave their smoky loafing-place in the Turk's room, but his own lungs demanded the open. With his heavy boots swashing through icy pools, calling to an imaginary dog and victoriously running Olympic races before millions of spectators, he defied the chill of the day and reached Hiawatha Mound, a hill eight miles north of Plato.

Toward the top a man was to be seen crouched in a pebbly, sunny arroyo, peering across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts—athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. He stuttered slightly and was always peering doubtfully at you with large and childish eyes that were made more eerie by his pale, bulbous forehead and the penthouse of tangled mouse-brown hair over it.... The Gang often stopped him on the campus to ask mock-polite questions about his ambition, which was to be a teacher of English at Harvard or Yale. Not very consistently, but without ever wearying of the jest, they shadowed him to find out if he did not write poetry; and while no one had actually caught him, he was still suspect.

Genie said nothing when Carl called, "H'lo, son!" and sat on a neighboring rock.

"What's trouble, Genie? You look worried."

"Why don't any of you fellows like me?"

Carl felt like a bug inspected by a German professor. "W-why, how d'you mean, Genie?"

"None of you take me seriously. You simply let me hang around. And you think I'm a grind. I'm not. I like to read, that's all. Perhaps you think I shouldn't like to go out for athletics if I could! I wish I could run the way you can, Ericson. Darn it! I was happy out here by myself on the Mound, where every prospect pleases, and—'n' now here I am again, envying you."

"Why, son, I—I guess—I guess we admire you a whole lot more than we let on to. Cheer up, old man! When you're valedictorian and on the debating team and wallop Hamlin you'll laugh at the Gang, and we'll be proud to write home we know you." Carl was hating himself for ever having teased Genie Linderbeck. "You've helped me a thundering lot whenever I've asked you about that blame Greek syntax. I guess we're jealous of you. You—uh—you don't want to let 'em kid you——"

Carl was embarrassed before Genie's steady, youthful, trusting gaze. He stooped for a handful of pebbles, with which he pelted the landscape, maundering, "Say, why don't you come around to the Turk's room and get better acquainted with the Gang?"

"When shall I come?"

"When? Oh, why, thunder!—you know, Genie—just drop in any time."

"I'll be glad to."

Carl was perspiring at the thought of what the Gang would do to him when they discovered that he had invited Genie. But he was game. "Come up to my room whenever you can, and help me with my boning," he added. "You mustn't ever get the idea that we're conferring any blooming favor by having you around. It's you that help us. Our necks are pretty well sandpapered, I'm afraid.... Come up to my room any time.... I'll have to be hiking on if I'm going to get much of a walk. Come over and see me to-night."

"I wish you'd come up to Mr. Frazer's with me some Sunday afternoon for tea, Ericson."

Henry Frazer, M.A. (Yale), associate professor of English literature, was a college mystery. He was a thin-haired young man, with a consuming love of his work, which was the saving of souls by teaching Lycidas and Comus. This was his first year out of graduate school, his first year at Plato—and possibly his last. It was whispered about that he believed in socialism, and the president, the Rev. Dr. S. Alcott Wood, had no patience with such silly fads.

Carl marveled, "Do you go to Frazer's?"

"Why, yes!"

"Thought everybody was down on him. They say he's an anarchist, and I know he gives fierce assignments in English lit.; that's what all the fellows in his classes say."

"All the fools are down on him. That's why I go to his house."

"Don't the fellows—uh—kind of——"

"Yes," piped Genie in his most childish tone of anger, his tendency to stammer betraying him, "they k-kid me for liking Frazer. He's—he's the only t-teacher here that isn't p-p-p——"

"Spit!"

"——provincial!"

"What d'you mean by 'provincial'?"

"Narrow. Villagey. Do you know what Bernard Shaw says——?"

"Never read a word of him, my son. And let me tell you that my idea of no kind of conversation is to have a guy spring 'Have you read?' on me every few seconds, and me coming back with: 'No, I haven't. Ain't it interesting!' If that's the brand of converse at Prof Frazer's you can count me out."

Genie laughed. "Think how much more novelty you get out of roasting me like that than telling Terry he's got 'bats in his belfry' ten or twelve times a day."

"All right, my son; you win. Maybe I'll go to Frazer's with you. Sometime."

The Sunday following Carl went to tea at Professor Henry Frazer's.

The house was Platonian without, plain and dumpy, with gingerbread Gothic on the porch, blistered paint, and the general lines of a prairie barn, but the living-room was more nearly beautiful than any room Carl had seen. In accordance with the ideal of that era it had Mission furniture with large leather cushions, brown wood-work, and tan oatmeal paper scattered with German color prints, instead of the patent rockers and carbon prints of Roman monuments which adorned the houses of the other professors. While waiting with Genie Linderbeck for the Frazers to come down, Carl found in a rack on the oak table such books as he had never seen: exquisite books from England, bound in terra-cotta and olive-green cloth with intricate gold designs, heavy-looking, but astonishingly light to the hand; books about Celtic legends and Provencal jongleurs, and Japanese prints and other matters of which he had never heard; so different from the stained text-books and the shallow novels by brisk ladies which had constituted his experiences of literature that he suddenly believed in culture.

Professor Frazer appeared, walking into the room after his fragile wife and gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars, and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" seniors, listened with nodding interest while Carl bashfully analyzed each of the nine cars owned in Plato and Jamaica Mills. At dusk the Diana in brown played MacDowell, and the light of the silken-shaded lamp was on a print of a fairy Swiss village.

That evening Carl wrestled with the Turk for one hour, catch-as-catch-can, on the Turk's bed and under it and nearly out of the window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair of scissors on his knee, and persisted in his violent pursuit of the beautiful. Meanwhile his room-mate, Plain Smith, flapped the pages of a Latin lexicon or took a little recreation by reading the Rev. Mr. Todd's Students' Manual, that gem of the alarm-clock and water-bucket epoch in American colleges.

Carl never understood Genie Linderbeck's conviction that words are living things that dream and sing and battle. But he did learn that there was speech transcending the barking of the Gang.

In the spring of his freshman year Carl gave up waiting on table and drove a motor-car for a town banker. He learned every screw and spring in the car. He also made Genie go out with him for track athletics. Carl won his place on the college team as a half-miler, and viciously assaulted two freshmen and a junior for laughing at Genie's legs, which stuck out of his large running-pants like straws out of a lemonade-glass.

In the great meet with Hamlin University, though Plato lost most of the events, Carl won the half-mile race. He was elected to the exclusive fraternity of Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, Omega Chi Delta, just before Commencement. That excited him less than the fact that the Turk and he were to spend the summer up north, in the hard-wheat country, stringing wire for the telephone company with a gang of Minneapolis wiremen.

Oh yes. And he would see Gertie in Joralemon.... She had written to him with so much enthusiasm when he had won the half-mile.



CHAPTER VII

He saw Gertie two hours after he had reached Joralemon for a week's stay before going north. They sat in rockers on the grass beside her stoop. They were embarrassed, and rocked profusely and chattily. Mrs. Cowles was surprised and not much pleased to find him, but Gertie murmured that she had been lonely, and Carl felt that he must be nobly patient under Mrs. Cowles's slight. He got so far as to sigh, "O Gertie!" but grew frightened, as though he were binding himself for life. He wished that Gertie were not wearing so many combs stuck all over her pompadoured hair. He noted that his rocker creaked at the joints, and thought out a method of strengthening it by braces. She bubbled that he was going to be the Big Man in his class. He said, "Aw, rats!" and felt that his collar was too tight.... He went home. His father remarked that Carl was late for supper, that he had been extravagant in Plato, and that he was unlikely to make money out of "all this runnin' races." But his mother stroked his hair and called him her big boy.... He tramped out to Bone Stillman's shack, impatient for the hand-clasp of the pioneer, and grew eloquent, for the first time since his home-coming, as he described Professor Frazer and the delights of poesy. A busy week Carl had in Joralemon. Adelaide Benner gave a porch-supper for him. They sat under the trees, laughing, while in the dimly lighted street bicycles whirred, and box-elders he had always known whispered that this guest of honor was Carl Ericson, come home a hero.

The cycling craze still existed in Joralemon. Carl rented a wheel for a week from the Blue Front Hardware Store. Once he rode with a party of boys and girls to Tamarack Lake. Once he rode to Wakamin with Ben Rusk, home from Oberlin College. The ride was not entirely enjoyable, because Oberlin had nearly two thousand students and Ben was amusedly superior about Plato. They did, however, enjoy the stylishness of buying bottles of strawberry pop at Wakamin.

Twice Carl rode to Tamarack Lake with Gertie. They sat on the shore, and while he shied flat skipping-stones across the water and flapped his old cap at the hovering horse-flies he babbled of the Turk's "stunts," and the banker's car, and the misty hinterlands of Professor Frazer's lectures. Gertie appeared interested, and smiled at regular intervals, but so soon as Carl fumbled at one of Frazer's abstract theories she interrupted him with highly concrete Joralemon gossip.... He suspected that she had not kept up with the times. True, she referred to New York, but as the reference was one she had been using these two years he still identified her with Joralemon.... He did not even hold her hand, though he wondered if it might not be possible; her hand lay so listlessly by her skirt, on the sand.... They rode back in twilight of early June. Carl was cheerful as their wheels crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale and wistful.

Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.

On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand; she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).

The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. & D. station. As the train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's loneliness. He wanted to go back—back for one more day, one more ride with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the magazine—and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.

He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him; for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bleriot was to cross the Channel—though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights' first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.

The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years; that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than automobiling. He made designs for three revolutionary new aeroplanes, drawing on the margins of the magazine with a tooth-mark-pitted pencil stub.

Gertie was miles back, concealed behind piles of triplanes and helicopters and following-surface monoplanes which the wizard inventor, C. Ericson, was creating and ruthlessly destroying.... A small boy was squalling in the seat opposite, and Carl took him from his tired mother and lured him into a game of tit-tat-toe.

He joined the Turk and the wire-stringers at a prairie hamlet—straggly rows of unpainted frame shanties, the stores with tin-corniced false fronts that pretended to be two stories high. There were pig-pens in the dooryards, and the single church had a square, low, white steeple like the paper cap which Labor wears in the posters. Farm-wagons were hitched before a gloomy saloon. Carl was exceeding glum. But the Turk introduced him to a University of Minnesota Pharmacy School student who was with the crew during vacation, and the three went tramping across breezy, flowered prairies. So began for Carl a galloping summer.

The crew strung telephone wire from pole to pole all day, playing the jokes of hardy men, and on Sunday loafed in haystacks, recalling experiences from Winnipeg to El Paso. Carl resolved to come back to this life of the open, with Gertie, after graduation. He would buy a ranch "on time." Or the Turk and Carl would go exploring in Alaska or the Orient. "Law?" he would ask himself in monologues, "law? Me in a stuffy office? Not a chance!"

The crew stayed for four weeks in a boom town of nine thousand, installing a complete telephone system. South-east of the town lay rolling hills. As Carl talked with the Turk and the Pharmacy School man on a hilltop, the first evening of their arrival, he told them the scientific magazine's prophecies about aviation, and noted that these hills were of the sort Lilienthal would probably have chosen for his glider-flights.

"Say! by the great Jim Hill, let's make us a glider!" he exulted, sitting up, his eyelids flipping rapidly.

"Sure!" said the Pharmacy man. "How would you make one?"

"Why—uh—I guess you could make a frame out of willow—have to; the willows along the creeks are the only kind of trees near here. You'd cover it with varnished cotton—that's what Lilienthal did, anyway. But darned if I know how you'd make the planes curved—cambered—like he did. You got to have it that way. I suppose you'd use curved stays. Like a quarter barrel-hoop.... I guess it would be better to try to make a Chanute glider—just a plain pair of sup'rimposed planes, instead of one all combobulated like a bat's wings, like Lilienthal's glider was.... Or we could try some experiments with paper models——Oh no! Thunder! Let's make a glider."

They did.

They studied with aching heads the dry-looking tables of lift and resistance for which Carl telegraphed to Chicago. Stripped to their undershirts, they worked all through the hot prairie evenings in the oil-smelling, greasy engine-room of the local power-house, in front of the dynamos, which kept evilly throwing out green sparks and rumbling the mystic syllable "Om-m-m-m," to greet their modern magic.

They hunted for three-quarter-inch willow rods, but discarded them for seasoned ash from the lumber-yard. They coated cotton with thin varnish. They stopped to dispute furiously over angles of incidence, bellowing, "Well, look here then, you mutton-head; I'll draw it for you."

On their last Sunday in the town they assembled the glider, single-surfaced, like a monoplane, twenty-two feet in span, with a tail, and with a double bar beneath the plane, by which the pilot was to hang, his hands holding cords attached to the entering edge of the plane, balancing the glider by movements of his body.

At dawn on Monday they loaded the glider upon a wagon and galloped with it out to a forty-foot hill. They stared down the easy slope, which grew in steepness and length every second, and thought about Lilienthal's death.

"W-w-well," shivered the Turk, "who tries it first?"

All three pretended to be adjusting the lashings, waiting for one another, till Carl snarled, "Oh, all right! I'll do it if I got to."

"Course it breaks my heart to see you swipe the honor," the Turk said, "but I'm unselfish. I'll let you do it. Brrrr! It's as bad as the first jump into the swimming-hole in spring."

Carl was smiling at the comparison as they lifted the glider, with him holding the bars beneath. The plane was instantly buoyed up like a cork on water as the fifteen-mile head-wind poured under it. He stopped smiling. This was a dangerous living thing he was going to guide. It jerked at him as he slipped his arms over the suspended bars. He wanted to stop and think this all over. "Get it done!" he snapped at himself, and began to run down-hill, against the wind.

The wind lifted the plane again. With a shock Carl knew that his feet had left the ground. He was actually flying! He kicked wildly in air. All his body strained to get balance in the air, to control itself, to keep from falling, of which he now felt the world-old instinctive horror.

The plane began to tip to one side, apparently irresistibly, like a sheet of paper turning over in the wind. Carl was sick with fear for a tenth of a second. Every cell in his body shrank before coming disaster. He flung his legs in the direction opposite to the tipping of the plane. With this counter-balancing weight, the glider righted. It was running on an even keel, twenty-five feet above the sloping ground, while Carl hung easily by the double bar beneath, like a circus performer with a trapeze under each arm. He ventured to glance down. The turf was flowing beneath him, a green and sunny blur. He exulted. Flying!

The glider dipped forward. Carl leaned back, his arms wide-spread. A gust struck the plane, head on. Overloaded at the back, it tilted back, then soared up to thirty-five or forty feet. Slow-seeming, inevitable, the whole structure turned vertically upward.

Carl dangled there against a flimsy sheet of wood and cotton, which for part of a second stuck straight up against the wind, like a paper on a screen-door.

The plane turned turtle, slithered sidewise through the air, and dropped, horizontal now, but upside down, Carl on top.

Thirty-five, forty feet down.

"I'm up against it," was his only thought while he was falling.

The left tip of the plane smashed against the ground, crashing, horribly jarring. But it broke the fall. Carl shot forward and landed on his shoulder.

He got up, rubbing his shoulder, wondering at the suspended life in the faces of the other two as they ran down-hill toward him.

"Jiminy," he said. "Glad the glider broke the fall. Wish we had time to make a new glider, with wing-warp. Say, we'll be late on the job. Better beat it P. D. Q."

The others stood gaping.



CHAPTER VIII

A pile of shoes and nose-guards and bicycle-pumps and broken hockey-sticks; a wall covered with such stolen signs as "East College Avenue," and "Pants Presser Ladys Garments Carefully Done," and "Dr. Sloats Liniment for Young and Old"; a broken-backed couch with a red-and-green afghan of mangy tassels; an ink-spattered wooden table, burnt in small black spots along the edges; a plaster bust of Martha Washington with a mustache added in ink; a few books; an inundation of sweaters and old hats; and a large, expensive mouth-organ—such were a few of the interesting characteristics of the room which Carl and the Turk were occupying as room-mates for sophomore year at Plato.

Most objectionable sounds came from the room constantly: the Gang's songs, suggestive laughter, imitations of cats and fowls and fog-horns. These noises were less ingenious, however, than the devices of the Gang for getting rid of tobacco-smoke, such as blowing the smoke up the stove.

Carl was happy. In this room he encouraged stammering Genie Linderbeck to become adaptable. Here he scribbled to Gertie and Ben Rusk little notes decorated with badly drawn caricatures of himself loafing. Here, with the Turk, he talked out half the night, planning future glory in engineering. Carl adored the Turk for his frankness, his lively speech, his interest in mechanics—and in Carl.

Carl was still out for football, but he was rather light for a team largely composed of one-hundred-and-eighty-pound Norwegians. He had a chance, however. He drove the banker's car two or three evenings a week and cared for the banker's lawn and furnace and cow. He still boarded at Mrs. Henkel's, as did jolly Mae Thurston, whom he took for surreptitious rides in the banker's car, after which he wrote extra-long and pleasant letters to Gertie. It was becoming harder and harder to write to Gertie, because he had, in freshman year, exhausted all the things one can say about the weather without being profane. When, in October, a new bank clerk stormed, meteor-like, the Joralemon social horizon, and became devoted to Gertie, as faithfully reported in letters from Joe Jordan, Carl was melancholy over the loss of a comrade. But he strictly confined his mourning to leisure hours—and with books, football, and chores for the banker, he was a busy young man.... After about ten days it was a relief not to have to plan letters to Gertie. The emotions that should have gone to her Carl devoted to Professor Frazer's new course in modern drama.

This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course. They made every member of the Gang enroll in it, and discouraged inattention in the lecture-room by dexterous side-kicks.

Even to his ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, the grim and slovenly school-teacher who had called him "bub" and discouraged his confidences, Carl presented the attractions of Professor Frazer's lectures when he met him on the campus. Smith looked quizzical and "guessed" that plays and play-actin' were useless, if not actually immoral.

"Yes, but this isn't just plays, my young friend," said Carl, with a hauteur new but not exceedingly impressive to Plain Smith. "He takes up all these new stunts, all this new philosophy and stuff they have in London and Paris. There's something besides Shakespeare and the Bible!" he added, intending to be spiteful. It may be stated that he did not like Plain Smith.

"What new philosophy?"

"The spirit of brotherhood. I suppose you're too orthodox for that!"

"Oh no, sonny, not for that, not for that. And it ain't so very new. That's what Christ taught! No, sonny, I ain't so orthodox but what I'm willing to have 'em show me anything that tries to advance brotherhood. Not that I think it's very likely to be found in a lot of Noo York plays. But I'll look in at one lesson, anyway," and Plain Smith clumped away, humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains."

Professor Frazer's modern drama course began with Ibsen. The first five lectures were almost conventional; they were an attempt to place contemporary dramatists, with reflections on the box-office standpoint. But his sixth lecture began rather unusually.

There was an audience of sixty-four in Lecture-room A—earnest girl students bringing out note-books and spectacle-cases, frivolous girls feeling their back hair, and the men settling down with a "Come, let's get it over!" air, or glowing up worshipingly, like Eugene Field Linderbeck, or determined not to miss anything, like Carl—the captious college audience, credulous as to statements of fact and heavily unresponsive to the spirit. Professor Frazer, younger than half a dozen of the plow-trained undergraduates, thin of hair and sensitive of face, sitting before them, with one hand in his pocket and the other nervously tapping the small reading-table, spoke quietly:

"I'm not going to be a lecturer to-day. I'm not going to analyze the plays of Shaw which I assigned to you. You're supposed to have read them yourselves. I am going to imagine that I am at tea in New Haven, or down in New York, at dinner in the basement of the old Brevoort, talking with a bunch of men who are trying to find out where the world is going, and why and when and how, and asking who are the prophets who are going to show it the way. We'd be getting excited over Shaw and Wells. There's something really worth getting excited over.

"These men have perceived that this world is not a crazy-quilt of unrelated races, but a collection of human beings completely related, with all our interests—food and ambitions and the desire to play—absolutely in common; so that if we would take thought all together, and work together, as a football team does, we would start making a perfect world.

"That's what socialism—of which you're beginning to hear so much, and of which you're going to hear so much more—means. If you feel genuinely impelled to vote the Republican ticket, that's not my affair, of course. Indeed, the Socialist party of this country constitutes only one branch of international socialism. But I do demand of you that you try to think for yourselves, if you are going to have the nerve to vote at all—think of it—to vote how this whole nation is to be conducted! Doesn't that tremendous responsibility demand that you do something more than inherit your way of voting? that you really think, think hard, why you vote as you do?... Pardon me for getting away from the subject proper—yet am I, actually? For just what I have been saying is one of the messages of Shaw and Wells.

"The great vision of the glory that shall be, not in one sudden millennium, but slowly advancing toward joys of life which we can no more prevision than the aboriginal medicine-man could imagine the X-ray! I wish that this were the time and the place to rhapsodize about that vision, as William Morris has done, in News from Nowhere. You tell me that the various brands of socialists differ so much in their beliefs about this future that the bewildered layman can make nothing at all of their theories. Very well. They differ so much because there are so many different things we can do with this human race.... The defeat of death; the life period advancing to ten-score years all crowded with happy activity. The solution of labor's problem; increasing safety and decreasing hours of toil, and a way out for the unhappy consumer who is ground between labor and capital. A real democracy and the love of work that shall come when work is not relegated to wage-slaves, but joyously shared in a community inclusive of the living beings of all nations. France and Germany uniting precisely as Saxony and Prussia and Bavaria have united. And, most of all, a general realization that the fact that we cannot accomplish all these things at once does not indicate that they are hopeless; an understanding that one of the wonders of the future is the fact that we shall always, in all ages, have improvements to look forward to.

"Fellow-students, object as strongly as you wish to the petty narrowness and vituperation of certain street-corner ranters, but do not be petty and narrow and vituperative in doing it!

"Now, to relate all this to the plays of Bernard Shaw. When he says——"

* * * * *

Professor Frazer's utterances seem tamely conservative nowadays; but this was in 1905, in a small, intensely religious college among the furrows. Imagine a devout pastor when his son kicks the family Bible and you have the mental state of half the students of Plato upon hearing a defense of socialism. Carl, catching echoes of his own talks with Bone Stillman in the lecture, exultantly glanced about, and found the class staring at one another with frightened anxiety. He saw the grim Plain Smith, not so much angry as ill. He saw two class clowns snickering at the ecstasy in the eyes of Genie Linderbeck.

* * * * *

In the corner drug-store, popularly known as "The Club," where all the college bloods gather to drink lemon phosphate, an excited old man, whose tieless collar was almost concealed by his tobacco-stained beard, pushed back his black slouch-hat with the G. A. R. cord, and banged his fist on the prescription-counter, shouting, half at the clerk and half at the students matching pennies on the soda-counter, "I've lived in Plato, man and boy, for forty-seven years—ever since it wa'n't nothing but a frontier trading-post. I packed logs on my back and I tramped fifty-three miles to get me a yoke of oxen. I remember when the Indians went raiding during the war and the cavalry rode here from St. Paul. And this town has always stood for decency and law and order. But when things come to such a pass that this fellow Frazer or any of the rest of these infidels from one of these here Eastern colleges is allowed to stand up on his hind legs in a college building and bray about anarchism and tell us to trample on the old flag that we fought for, and none of these professors that call themselves 'reverends' step in and stop him, then let me tell you I'm about ready to pull up stakes and go out West, where there's patriotism and decency still, and where they'd hang one of these foreign anarchists to the nearest lamp-post, yes, sir, and this fellow Frazer, too, if he encouraged them in their crank notions. Got no right in the country, anyway. Better deport 'em if they ain't satisfied with the way we run things. I won't stand for preaching anarchism, and never knew any decent place that would, never since I was a baby in Canada. Yes, sir, I mean it; I'm an old man, but I'd pull up stakes and go plugging down the Santa Fe trail first, and I mean it."

"Here's your Bog Bitters, Mr. Goff," said the clerk, hastily, as a passer-by was drawn into the store by the old man's tirade.

Mr. Goff stalked out, muttering, and the college sports at the soda-counter grinned at one another. But Gus Osberg, of the junior class, remarked to Carl Ericson: "At that, though, there's a good deal to what old Goff says. Bet a hat Prexy won't stand for Prof Frazer's talking anarchy. Fellow in the class told me it was fierce stuff he was talking. Reg'lar anarchy."

"Rats! It wasn't anything of the kind," protested Carl. "I was there and I heard the whole thing. He just explained what this Bernard Shaw that writes plays meant by socialism."

"Well, even so, don't you think it's kind of unnecessary to talk publicly, right out in a college lecture-room, about socialism?" inquired a senior who was high up in the debating society.

"Well, thunder——!" was all Carl said, as the whole group stared at him. He felt ridiculous; he was afraid of seeming to be a "crank." He escaped from the drug-store.

When he arrived at Mrs. Henkel's boarding-house for supper the next evening he found the students passing from hand to hand a copy of the town paper, the Plato Weekly Times, which bore on the front page what the town regarded as a red-hot news story:

PLATO PROFESSOR

TALKS SEDITIOUSLY

As we go to press we learn that rumors are flying about the campus that the "powers that be" are highly incensed by the remarks of a well-known member of the local faculty praising Socialism and other form of anarchy. It is said that one of the older members of the faculty will demand from the erring teacher an explanation of his remarks which are alleged to have taken the form of a defense of the English anarchist Bernhard Shaw. Those on the que vive are expecting sensational developments and campus talk is so extensively occupied with discussions of the affair that the important coming game with St. John's college is almost forgotten.

While the TIMES has always supported Plato College as one of the chief glories in the proud crown of Minnesota learning, we can but illy stomach such news. It goes without saying that we cannot too strongly disapprove express our disapproval of such incendiary utterances and we shall fearlessly report the whole of this fair let the chips fall where they may.

"There, Mr. Ericson," said Mrs. Henkel, a plump, decent, disapproving person, who had known too many generations of great Platonians to be impressed by anything, "you see what the public thinks of your Professor Frazer. I told you people wouldn't stomach such news, and I wouldn't wonder if they strongly disapproved."

"This ain't anything but gossip," said Carl, feebly; but as he read the account in the Weekly Times he was sick and frightened, such was his youthful awe of print. He wanted to beat the mossy-whiskered editor of the Times, who always had white food-stains on his lapels. When he raised his eyes the coquette Mae Thurston tried to cheer him: "It 'll all come out in the wash, Eric; don't worry. These editors have to have something to write about or they couldn't fill up the paper."

He pressed her foot under the table. He was chatty, and helped to keep the general conversation away from the Frazer affair; but he was growing more and more angry, with a desire for effective action which expressed itself within him only by, "I'll show 'em! Makes me so sore!"

* * * * *

Everywhere they discussed and rediscussed Professor Frazer: in the dressing-room of the gymnasium, where the football squad dressed in the sweat-reeking air and shouted at one another, balancing each on one leg before small lockers, and rubbing themselves with brown, unclean Turkish towels; in the neat rooms of girl co-eds with their banners and cushions and pink comforters and chafing-dishes of nut fudge and photographic postal-cards showing the folks at home; in the close, horse-smelling, lap-robe and whip scattered office of the town livery-stable, where Mr. Goff droned with the editor of the Times.

Everywhere Carl heard the echoes, and resolved, "I've got to do something!"



CHAPTER IX

The day of Professor Frazer's next lecture, a rain-sodden day at the end of October, with the stubble-fields bleakly shelterless beyond the campus. The rain splashed up from pools on the worn brick walks and dripped from trees and whipped about buildings, soaking the legs and leaving them itchingly wet and the feet sloshily uncomfortable. Carl returned to his room at one; talked to the Turk, his feet thrust against the side of their rusty stove. He wanted to keep three o'clock, the hour of Frazer's lecture, from coming. "I feel as if I was in for a fight and scared to death about it. Listen to that rain outside. Gee! but the old dame keeps these windows dirty. I hope Frazer will give it to them good and hard. I wish we could applaud him. I do feel funny, like something tragic was going to happen."

"Oh, tie that dog outside," yawned the Turk, stanch adherent of Carl, and therefore of Professor Frazer, but not imaginative. "Come on, young Kerl; I'll play you a slick little piece on the mouth-organ. Heh?"

"Oh, thunder! I'm too restless to listen to anything except a cannon." Carl stumped to the window and pondered on the pool of water flooding the graying grass stems in the shabby yard.

When it was time to start for Professor Frazer's lecture the Turk blurted: "Why don't we stay away and forget about it? Get her off your nerves. Let's go down to the bowling-alley and work up a sweat."

"Not a chance, Turk. He'll want all the supporters he's got. And you'd hate to stay away as much as I would. I feel cheered up now; all ready for the scrap. Yip! Come on!"

"All right, governor. I like the scrap, all right, but I don't want to see you get all worked up."

Through the rain, across the campus, an unusual number of students in shining, cheap, black raincoats were hastening to the three o'clock classes, clattering up the stone steps of the Academic Building, talking excitedly, glancing up at the arched door as though they expected to see something startling. Dozens stared at Carl. He felt rather important. It was plain that he was known as a belligerent, a supporter of Professor Frazer. As he came to the door of Lecture-room A he found that many of the crowd were deserting their proper classes to attend the Frazer event. He bumped down into his own seat, gazing back superciliously at the outsiders who were edging into unclaimed seats at the back of the room or standing about the door—students from other classes, town girls, the young instructor in French, German, and music; a couple of town club-women in glasses and galoshes and woolen stockings bunchy at the ankles. Every one was rapidly whispering, watching every one else, peeping often at the platform and the small door beside it through which Professor Frazer would enter. Carl had a smile ready for him. But there was no chance that the smile would be seen. There must have been a hundred and fifty in the room, seated and standing, though there were but seventy in the course, and but two hundred and fifty-six students in the whole college that year.

Carl looked back. He clenched his fist and pounded the soft side of it on his thigh, drawing in his breath, puffing it out with a long exasperated "Hellll!" For the Greek professor, the comma-sized, sandy-whiskered martinet, to whom nothing that was new was moral and nothing that was old was to be questioned by any undergraduate, stalked into the room like indignant Napoleon posing before two guards and a penguin at St. Helena. A student in the back row thriftily gave the Greek god his seat. The god sat down, with a precise nod. Instantly a straggly man with a celluloid collar left the group by the door, whisked over to the Greek professor, and fawned upon him. It was the fearless editor and owner (also part-time type-setter) of the Plato Weekly Times, who dated back to the days of Washington flat-bed hand-presses and pure Jeffersonian politics, and feared neither man nor devil, though he was uneasy in the presence of his landlady. He ostentatiously flapped a wad of copy-paper in his left hand, and shook a spatter of ink-drops from a fountain-pen as he interviewed the Greek professor, who could be seen answering pompously. Carl was hating them both, fearing the Greek as a faculty spy on Frazer, picturing himself kicking the editor, when he was aware of a rustling all over the room, of a general turning of heads toward the platform.

He turned. He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship. Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged them on the small reading-table. One of the papers escaped and sailed off the platform, nearly to the front row. Nearly every one in the room snickered. Frazer flushed. A girl student in the front row nervously bounded out of her seat, picked up the paper, and handed it up to Frazer. They both fumbled it, and their heads nearly touched. Most of the crowd laughed audibly.

Professor Frazer sat down in his low chair, took out his watch with a twitching hand, and compared his time with the clock at the back of the room—and so closely were the amateur executioners observing their victim that every eye went back to the clock as well. Even Carl was guilty of that imitation. Consequently he saw the editor, standing at the back, make notes on his copy-paper and smirk like an ill-bred hound stealing a bone. And the Greek professor stared at Frazer's gauche movements with a grim smugness that indicated, "Quite the sort of thing I expected." The Greek's elbows were on the arm of the seat, and he held up before his breast a small red-leather-covered note-book which he superciliously tapped with a thin pencil. He was waiting. Like a judge of the Inquisition....

"Old Greek 's going to take notes and make a report to the faculty about what Frazer says," reflected Carl. "If I could only get hold of his notes and destroy them!"

Carl turned again. It was just three. Professor Frazer had risen. Usually he sat while lecturing. Fifty whispers commented on that fact; fifty regular members of the course became self-important through knowing it. Frazer was leaning slightly against the table. It moved an inch or two with his weight, but by this time every one was too high-strung to laugh. He was pale. He re-arranged his papers. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak, in the now silent, vulturishly attentive room, smelling of wet second-rate clothes.

The gusty rain could be heard. They all hitched in their seats.

"Oh, Frazer can't be going to retract," groaned Carl; "but he's scared."

Carl suddenly wished himself away from all this useless conflict; out tramping the wet roads with the Turk, or slashing through the puddles at thirty-five miles an hour in the banker's car. He noted stupidly that Genie Linderbeck's hair was scarcely combed. He found he was saying, "Frazer 'll flunk, flunk, flunk; he's going to flunk, flunk, flunk."

Then Frazer spoke. His voice sounded harsh and un-rhythmical, but soon swung into the natural periods of a public speaker as he got into his lecture:

"My friends," said he, "a part of you have come here legitimately, to hear a lecture; a part to satisfy the curiosity aroused by rumors to the effect that I am likely to make indecorous and indecent remarks, which your decorum and decency make you wish to hear, and of which you will carry away evil and twisted reports, to gain the reputation of being fearless defenders of the truth. It is a temptation to gratify your desire and shock you—a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only, it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright and morning faces I see before me. I shall neither be so insincerely tactful as to welcome you, nor so frightened as to ignore you. Nor shall I invite you to come to me with any complaints you have about me. I am far too busy with my real work!

"I am not speaking patiently. I am not patient with you! I am not speaking politely. Truly, I do not think that I shall much longer be polite!

"Wait. That sounds now in my ears as rhetorical! Forgive me, and translate my indiscretions into more colloquial language.

"Though from rumors I have overheard, I fancy some of you will do that, anyway.... And now, I think, you see where I stand.

"Now then. For such of you as have a genuine interest in the brilliant work of Bernard Shaw I shall first continue the animadversions on the importance of his social thought, endeavor to link it with the great and growing vision of H. G. Wells (novelist and not dramatist though he is, because of the significance of his new books, Kips and Mankind in the Making), and point out the serious purpose that seems to me to underlie Shaw's sarcastic pictures of life's shams.

"In my last lecture I endeavored to present the destructive side of present social theories as little as possible; to dwell more on the keen desire of the modern thinkers for constructive imagination. But I judge that I was regarded as too destructive, which amuses me, and to which I shall apply the antidote of showing how destructive modern thought is and must be—whether running with sootily smoking torch of individuality in Bakunin, or hissing in Nietzsche, or laughing at Olympus in Bernard Shaw. My 'radicalism' has been spoken of. Radical! Do you realize that I am not suggesting that there might possibly some day be a revolution in America, but rather that now I am stating that there is, this minute, and for some years has been, an actual state of warfare between capital and labor? Do you know that daily more people are saying openly and violently that we starve our poor, we stuff our own children with useless bookishness, and work the children of others in mills and let them sell papers on the streets in red-light districts at night, and thereby prove our state nothing short of insane? If you tell me that there is no revolution because there are no barricades, I point to actual battles at Homestead, Pullman, and the rest. If you say that there has been no declaration of war, open war, I shall read you editorials from The Appeal to Reason.

"Mind you, I shall not say whether I am enlisted for or against the revolutionary army. But I demand that you look about you and understand the significance of the industrial disturbances and religious unrest of the time. Never till then will you understand anything—certainly not that Shaw is something more than an enfant terrible; Ibsen something more than an ill-natured old man with dyspepsia and a silly lack of interest in skating. Then you will realize that in the most extravagant utterances of a red-shirted strike-leader there may be more fervent faith and honor, oftentimes, than in the virgin prayers of a girl who devoutly attends Christian Endeavor, but presumes to call Emma Goldman 'that dreadful woman.' Follow the labor-leader. Or fight him, good and hard. But do not overlook him.

"But I must be more systematic. When John Tanner's independent chauffeur, of whom you have—I hope you have—read in Man and Superman——"

* * * * *

Carl looked about. Many were frowning; a few leaning sidewise to whisper to neighbors, with a perplexed head-shake that plainly meant, "I don't quite get that." Wet feet were shifted carefully; breaths caught quickly; hands nervously played with lower lips. The Greek professor was writing something. Carl's ex-room-mate, Plain Smith, was rigid, staring unyieldingly at the platform. Carl hated Smith's sinister stillness.

* * * * *

Professor Frazer was finishing his lecture:

"If it please you, flunk this course, don't read a single play I assign to you, be disrespectful, disbelieve all my contentions. And I shall still be content. But do not, as you are living souls, blind yourself to the fact that there is a world-wide movement to build a wider new world—and that the world needs it—and that in Jamaica Mills, on land owned by a director of Plato College, there are two particularly vile saloons which you must wipe out before you disprove me!" Silence for ten seconds. Then, "That is all."

The crowd began to move hesitatingly, while Professor Frazer hastily picked up his papers and raincoat and hurried out through the door beside the platform. Voices immediately rose in a web of talk, many-colored, hot-colored.

Carl babbled to the man next him, "He sure is broad. He doesn't care whether they're conservative or not. And some sensation at the end!"

"Heh? What? Him?" The sophomore was staring.

"Yes. Why, sure! Whadya mean?" demanded Carl.

"Well, and wha' do you mean by 'broad'? Sure! He's broad just like a razor edge."

"Heh?" echoed the next man down the row, a Y. M. C. A. senior. "Do you mean to say you liked it?"

"Why, sure! Why not? Didn't you?"

"Oh yes. Yes indeed! All he said was that scarlet women like Emma Goldman were better than a C. E. girl, and that he hoped his students would bluff the course and flunk it, and that we could find booze at Jamaica Mills, and a few little things like that. That's all. Sure! That's the sort of thing we came here to study." The senior was buttoning his raincoat with angry fingers. "That's——Why, the man was insane! And the way he denounced decency and——Oh, I can't talk about it!"

"W-w-w-well by gosh, of all the—the——" spluttered Carl. "You and your Y. M. C. A.—calling yourself religious, and misrepresenting like that—you and your——Why, you ain't worth arguing with. I don't believe you 'came to study' anything. You know it all already." Passionate but bewildered, trying not to injure the cause of Frazer by being nasty, he begged: "Straight, didn't you like his spiel? Didn't it give you some new ideas?"

The senior vouchsafed: "No, 'me and my Y. M.' didn't like it. Now don't let me keep you, Ericson. I suppose you'll be wanting to join dear Mr. Frazer in a highball; you're such a pet of his. Did he teach you to booze? I understand you're good at it."

"You apologize or I'll punch your face off," said Carl. "I don't understand Professor Frazer's principles like I ought to. I'm not fighting for them. Prob'ly would if I knew enough. But I don't like your face. It's too long. It's like a horse's face. It's an insult to Frazer to have a horse-faced guy listen to him. You apologize for having a horse face, see?"

"You're bluffing. You wouldn't start anything here, anyway."

"Apologize!" Carl's fist was clenched. People were staring.

"Cut it out, will you! I didn't mean anything."

"You wouldn't," snapped Carl, and rammed his way out, making wistful boyish plans to go to Frazer with devotion and offers of service in a fight whose causes grew more confused to him every moment. Beside him, as he hurried off to football practice, strode a big lineman of the junior class, cajoling:

"Calm down, son. You can't lick the whole college."

"But it makes me so sore——"

"Oh, I know, but it strikes me that no matter how much you like Frazer, he was going pretty far when he said that anarchists had more sense than decent folks."

"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant——O Lord, what's the use!"

He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for indoor practice.

He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before his locker.

Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling, "Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.

Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him—slim, wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a clean-carved boy.

The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it, playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.

An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly: "'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"

Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea," and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us, but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"

His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had been much impressed.

* * * * *

To tell the next day or two in detail would be to make many books about the mixed childishness and heroic fineness of Carl's partisanship; to repeat a thousand rumors running about the campus to the effect that the faculty would demand Frazer's resignation; to explain the reason why Frazer's charge that a Plato director owned land used by saloons was eagerly whispered for a little while, then quite forgotten, while Frazer's reputation as a "crank" was never forgotten, so much does muck resent the muck-raker; to describe Carl's brief call on Frazer and his confusing discovery that he had nothing to say; to repeat the local paper's courageous reports of the Frazer affair, Turk's great oath to support Frazer "through hell and high water," Turk's repeated defiance: "Well, by golly! we'll show the mutts, but I wish we could do something"; to chronicle dreary classes whose dullness was evident to Carl, now, after his interest in Frazer's lectures.

* * * * *

Returning from Genie Linderbeck's room, Carl found a letter from Gertie Cowles on the black-walnut hat-rack. Without reading it, but successfully befooling himself into the belief that he was glad to have it, he went whistling up to his room.

Ray Cowles and Howard Griffin, those great seniors, sat tilted back in wooden chairs, and between them was the lord of the world, Mr. Bjorken, the football coach, a large, amiable, rather religious young man, who believed in football, foreign missions, and the Democratic party.

"Hello! Waiting for me or the Turk?" faltered Carl, gravely shaking hands all round.

"Just dropped up to see you for a second," said Mr. Bjorken.

"Sorry the Turk wasn't here." Carl had an ill-defined feeling that he wanted to keep them from becoming serious as long as he could.

Ray Cowles cleared his throat. Never again would the black-haired Adonis, blossom of the flower of Joralemon, be so old and sadly sage as then. "We want to talk to you seriously about something—for your own sake. You know I've always been interested in you, and Howard, and course we're interested in you as frat brothers, too. For old Joralemon and Plato, eh? Mr. Bjorken believes—might as well tell him now, don't you think, Mr. Bjorken?"

The coach gave a regally gracious nod. Hitching about on the wood-box, Carl felt the bottom drop out of his anxious stomach.

"Well, Mr. Bjorken thinks you're practically certain to make the team next year, and maybe you may even get put in the Hamlin game for a few minutes this year, and get your P."

"Honest?"

"Yes, if you do something for old Plato, same 's you expect her to do something for you." Ray was quite sincere. "But not if you put the team discipline on the bum and disgrace Omega Chi. Of course I can't speak as an actual member of the team, but still, as a senior, I hear things——"

"How d'you mean 'disgrace'?"

"Don't you know that because you've been getting so savage about Frazer the whole team 's getting mad?" said the coach. "Cowles and Griffin and I have been talking over the whole proposition. Your boosting Frazer——"

"Look here," from Carl, "I won't crawl down on my opinion about Frazer. Folks haven't understood him."

"Lord love you, son," soothed Howard Griffin, "we aren't trying to change your opinion of Frazer. We're, your friends, you know. We're proud of you for standing up for him. Only thing is, now that he's practically fired, just tell me how it's going to help him or you or anybody else, now, to make everybody sore by roasting them because they can't agree with you. Boost; don't knock! Don't make everybody think you're a crank."

"To be frank," added Mr. Bjorken, "you're just as likely to hurt Frazer as to help him by stirring up all this bad blood. Look here. I suppose that if the faculty had already fired Frazer you'd still go ahead trying to buck them."

"Hadn't thought about it, but suppose I would."

"Afraid it might be that way. But haven't you seen by this time about how much good it does for one lone sophomore to try and run the faculty?" It was the coach talking again, but the gravely nodding mandarin-like heads of Howard and Ray accompanied him. "Mind you, I don't mean to disparage you personally, but you must admit that you can't hardly expect to boss everything. Just what good 'll it do to go on shouting for Frazer? Quite aside from the question of whether he is likely to get fired or not."

"Well," grunted Carl, nervously massaging his chin, "I don't know as it will do any direct good—except maybe waking this darn conservative college up a little; but it does make me so dog-gone sore——"

"Yes, yes, we understand, old man," the coach said, "but on the other hand here's the direct good of sitting tight and playing the game. I've heard you speak about Kipling. Well, you're like a young officer—a subaltern they call it, don't they?—in a Kipling story, a fellow that's under orders, and it's part of his game to play hard and keep his mouth shut and to not criticize his superior officers, ain't it?"

"Oh, I suppose so, but——"

"Well, it's just the same with you. Can't you see that? Think it over. What would you think of a lieutenant that tried to boss all the generals? Just same thing.... Besides, if you sit tight, you can make the team this year, I can practically promise you that. Do understand this now; it isn't a bribe; we want you to be able to play and do something for old Plato in a real way—in athletics. But you most certainly can't make the team if you're going to be a disorganizer."

"All we want you to do," put in Ray Cowles, "is not to make a public spectacle of yourself—as I'm afraid you've been doing. Admire Frazer all you want to, and talk about him to your own bunch, and don't back down on your own opinions, only don't think you've got to go round yelling about him. People get a false idea of you. I hate to have to tell you this, but several of the fellows, even in Omega Chi, have spoken about you, and wondered if you really were a regular crank. 'Of course he isn't, you poor cheese,' I tell 'em, but I can't be around to answer every one all the time, and you can't lick the whole college; that ain't the way the world does things. You don't know what a bad impression you make when you're too brash. See how I mean?"

As the council of seers rose, Carl timidly said to Ray, "Straight, now, have quite a lot of the fellows been saying I was a goat?"

"Good many, I'm afraid. All talking about you.... It's up to you. All you got to do is not think you know it all, and keep still. Keep still till you understand the faculty's difficulties just a little better. Savvy? Don't that sound fairly reasonable?"



CHAPTER X

They were gone. Carl was full of the nauseating shame which a matter-of-fact man, who supposes that he is never pilloried, knows when a conscientious friend informs him that he has been observed, criticized; that his enthusiasms have been regarded as eccentricities; his affectionate approaches toward friendship as impertinence.

There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, nudging one another, waiting agape for him to do something idiotic; a well-advertised fool on parade. He stalked about, now shamefaced, now bursting out with a belligerent, "Aw, rats! I'll show 'em!" now plaintively beseeching, "I don't suppose I am helping Frazer, but it makes me so darn sore when nobody stands up for him—and he teaches stuff they need so much here. Gee! I'm coming to think this is a pretty rough-neck college. He's the first teacher I ever got anything out of—and——Oh, hang it! what 'd I have to get mixed up in all this for, when I was getting along so good? And if it isn't going to help him——"

His right hand became conscious of Gertie's letter crumpled in his pocket. As turning the letter over and over gave him surprisingly small knowledge of its contents, he opened it:

DEAR CARL,—You are just silly to tease me about any bank clerk. I don't like him any more at all and he can go with Linda all he likes, much I care!

We are enjoying good health, though it is getting quite cold now and we have the furnace running now and it feels pretty good to have it. We had such a good time at Adelaide's party she wore such a pretty dress. She flirted terribly with Joe Jordan though of course you'll call me a cat for telling you because you like her so much better than me & all.

Oh I haven't told you the news yet Joe has accepted a position at St. Hilary in the mill there.

I have some pretty new things for my room, a beautiful hand-painted picture. Before Joe goes there is going to be a party for him at Semina's. I wish you could come I suppose you have learned to dance well, of course you go to lots of parties at Plato with all the pretty girls & forget all about me.

I wish I was in Minneapolis it is pretty dull here, & such good talks you and me had didn't we!

Oh Carl dear Ray writes us you are sticking up for that crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage & I admire you lots for it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl dear if you can't do any good by it I hope you won't get everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will you, Carl?

I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too late & won't do any good.

We all expect so much of you—we are waiting! You are our knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor bright, nor forget,

Yours as ever,

GERTIE.

"Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business. I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully——' Oh, I don't suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help Frazer, anyway. Not a bit."

The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical.

Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the street and over to the campus.

There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore——

Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle, Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes, crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in.

All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair, and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a red-leather-covered note-book.

"Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the door of the room.

"Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something."

He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows and waited, flat against the wall.

Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods, caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then. Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition rubbering out of the next window."

The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room, had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well, sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up."

Carl was silent.

The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the window, then heard, in sotto voce, "I can't see him." Loudly again, the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer faction."

Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He remembered that there was pavement below him. But he did not think about giving himself up.

From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after him."

The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the faculty-room window as well.

"Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them."

The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid."

Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!"

In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where, he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm.

He walked away—not at all like a melodramatic hero of a slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to appear neat.

He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called up Professor Frazer:

"Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of your students in modern drama. I've just learned—I happened to be up in the Academic Building and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to the faculty—special meeting!—about your last lecture. I've got a hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck. G'-by."