The Varmint Part 58

Stover began to laugh.

"All alone in a cold, cold world--wicked, very wicked?"

"Perhaps."

"And it was rather a nice feeling, too, wasn't it?"

"I didn't know, you----" said d.i.n.k, blus.h.i.+ng to find himself back in the common herd.

"Me, too," said the Tennessee Shad, sucking a straw. "Good old sporting days!" Presently he began mischievously:

"_Then stand by your gla.s.ses steady, This world is a----_"

But here d.i.n.k, rising up, tumbled him over.

XX

With the complete arrival of the spring came also a lessening of d.i.n.k's requested appearances at Faculty meetings, his little evening chats in The Roman's study on matters of disciplinary interpretation and the occasional summons through the gates of Avernus to quail before the all-seeing eye.

It was not that the spirit of Spartacus was faint, or that his enmity had weakened toward The Roman--who, of course, without the slightest doubt, was always the persecutor responsible for his summons before the courts of injustice. The truth was, Stover had suddenly begun to age and to desire to put from himself youthful things. This extraordinary phenomenon that somehow does happen was in some measure a reflex action.

Ever since the stormy afternoon on which he had decided against his own eleven, he had slowly come to realize that he had won a peculiar place in the estimation of the school--somewhat of the dignity of the incorruptible judges that existed in former days. He became in a small way a sort of court of arbitration before which questions of more or less gravity were submitted. This deference at first embarra.s.sed, then amused, then finally pleased him with an acute, mannish pleasure.

The consequence was that Stover, who until this time had only looked forward and up at the majestic shadows of the fourth and fifth formers, now looked backward and down, and became pleasurably aware that leagues below him was the large body of the first and second forms. Having perceived this new adjustment he woke with a start and, rubbing his eyes, took stock of his amazing knowledge of life and again said to himself that now, finally, he certainly must have arrived at man's estate.

On top of which, having been asked to referee several disputes in his character of Honest John Stover, d.i.n.k, while holding himself in reserve to direct operations on a dignified and colossal scale against the Natural Enemy, decided that it was unbecoming of a man of his position, age and reputation, who had the entree of the Upper House, to go skipping about the midnight ways, in undignified costume, with such rank shavers as Pebble Stone and Dennis de B. de B. Finnegan.

So when Dennis arrived after lights, like a will-o'-the-wisp, with a whispered:

"I say, d.i.n.k, all ready."

Stover replied:

"All ready in bed."

"What," said Dennis aghast, "you're not with us?"

"No."

"Aren't you feeling well?"

"First rate."

"But I say, d.i.n.k, there's half a dozen of us. We've got all the laundry bags in the house heaped up just outside of Beekstein's door and, I say, we're going to pile 'em all up on top of him and then jump on and pie him, and scoot for our rooms before old Bundy can jump the stairs and nab us. It'll be regular touch and go--a regular lark! Come on!"

A snore answered him.

"You won't come?"

"No."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No, I'm sleepy!"

"Sleepy!" said Dennis in such amazement that he no longer had any strength to argue, and left the room convinced that Stover was heroically concealing an agony of pain.

Stover immediately settled his tired body, sunk his nose to the level of the covers and floated blissfully off into the land of dreams. The next night and the next it was the same. For a whole month d.i.n.k slept, wasting not a one of the precious moments of the night, sleeping through the slow-moving recitations, sleeping on the green turf of afternoons, pillowed on Tough McCarty or the Tennessee Shad, and watching others scampering around the diamond in incomprehensible activity; but the month was the month of April and his years sixteen.

In the first week of May Stover awakened, the drowsiness dropped from him and the spirit of perpetual motion again returned. Still, the distance between himself and his past remained. He had changed, become graver, more laconic, moving with sedateness, like Garry c.o.c.krell, whose tricks of speech and gestures he imitated, holding himself rather aloof from the populace, curiously conscious that the change had come, and sometimes looking back with profound melancholy on the youth that had now pa.s.sed irrevocably away.

During this period of somewhat fragile self-importance, the acquaintance with Tough McCarty had strengthened into an eternal friends.h.i.+p in a manner that had a certain touch of humor.

McCarty, after the close of the football season, had repeatedly sought out his late antagonist, but, though d.i.n.k at the bottom of his soul was thrilled with the thought that here at last was the friend of friends, the Damon to his Pythias, the chum who was to stand shoulder to his shoulder, and so on, still there was too much self-conscious pride in him to yield immediately to this feeling.

McCarty perceived the reserve without quite a.n.a.lyzing it, and was puzzled at the barriers that still intervened.

During the winter, when d.i.n.k was resolutely set in the pursuit of that beau-ideal, which had a marked resemblance with a certain creation of Bret Harte's, Mr. Jack Hamlin, "gentleman sport," as Dennis would have called him, McCarty found little opportunity for friendly intercourse.

He disapproved of many of d.i.n.k's friends.h.i.+ps, not so much from a moralistic point of view as from Stover's not exercising the principle of selection. As this phase was intensified and Stover became the object of criticism of his cla.s.smates for hanging at the heels of fifth-formers and neglecting his own territory, McCarty resolved that the plain duty of a friend required him to administer a moral lecture.

This heroic resolve threw him into confusion for a week, for, in the first place, he had been accustomed to receive rather than to give words of warning and, in the second place, he was fully aware of the difficulties of opening up the subject at all.

After much anxious and gloomy cogitation he hit upon a novel plan and, approaching Stover at the end of the last recitation, gave him a mysterious wink.

"What's up?" said d.i.n.k instantly.

McCarty pulled him aside:

"I've got a couple of A. No. 1 millionaire cigars," he said in a whisper. "If you've got nothing better, why, come along."

"I'm yours on the jump," said d.i.n.k, trying to give to his words a joy which he was far from feeling in his stomach.

"You smoke cigars?"

"Do I!"

"Come on, then!"

It was the last day of March, which had gone out like a lamb, leaving the ground still chill and moist with the memory of departed snows.

They went down by the pond in the shelter of the grove and McCarty proudly produced two cigars coated with gilt foil.

"They look the real thing to me," said d.i.n.k, eying the long projectiles with a rakish, professional look.

Now, d.i.n.k had never smoked a cigar in his life and was alarmed at the thought of the task before him; but he was resolved to die a lingering death rather than allow that humiliating secret to be discovered.

"You bet they're the real thing," said Tough McCarty, slipping off the foil. "Real, black beauties! Get the flavor?"