CHAPTER IX A NEW INTEREST

The midweek Seatonian printed a frantic editorial demanding that more fellows come out to try for the relay team. From the tenor of the article one would suppose that some calamity threatened which could only be averted by the timely arrival of a regiment of candidates. The spirit of the exhortation was worthy of Demosthenes. Ignorant that the new member of the staff who was trying his hand at editorials was substituting vehemence for skill after the manner of tyros, Rob was greatly mystified. He understood neither what a relay team was, nor how it could be so shockingly unpatriotic not to come out and try for it. So he asked Strong, the captain of the track team, for information; and Strong, who treated every inquirer as an over-modest candidate, promptly added his name to the list.

[Pg 87]

Rob fell in obediently with the squad, and presently learned what it was all about. There was to be a team race of one mile with Hillbury six weeks later, at the great invitation winter meet of the Boston Athletic Association. Some other events besides this race were open to Seaton, and a considerable interest in the meeting had been worked up by Strong and Collins the trainer. Salter, a fat, good-natured senior, the butt of many a joke, but at the same time a favorite with the jokers, acted as captain's assistant. It was Salter who undertook to time Owen on his trial run on the wooden outside track that lies in a big, uneven oval in the hollow behind the gymnasium.

When Owen, aglow with warmth despite uncovered ankles and the icy air of February, slowed down a dozen yards beyond the finish line and turned about to learn his time, the fat boy in the big ulster and tweed cap was not to be seen. He had hurried off to find Collins, leaving the runner to take care of himself. This circumstance, taken with the physical reaction which promptly set in, and the frigidity of the wind which whistled past his bare legs and bellied out his thin run[Pg 88]ning trousers with a cold storage blast, did not encourage Rob in his experiment. He trotted back into the gymnasium, in ill humor with himself and the authorities, convinced that running was not his proper athletic forte, and stoutly resolved to have no more of it.

He was still engaged in piling up fresh arguments to this effect, while he hurried his dressing so as to get back to the tricky geometry original which had caught him in its time-consuming labyrinth. As he buttoned his collar, the tweed cap and voluminous ulster hove in sight.

"I stopped to see Collins," said Salter, "and tell him what good time you made. It's the best any new fellow's done this year!"

Owen stared. "I thought it wasn't any good. I was making up my mind to cut the whole business; I'm not made for a runner."

Salter looked shocked. "Oh, come now, you don't mean that! Why, I told Collins that you were just the man he was looking for to make out the team with Strong, Benton, and Rohrer. You'd be a fool to give up a chance like that to win against Hillbury."

[Pg 89]

"Or maybe to lose the race for Seaton," Rob replied with some bitterness. "No, I thank you. On a short dash I might do something,—I used to be pretty good at beating out bunts,—but this quarter-mile business is beyond me."

"Didn't I say your time was better than any other new man has made?" demanded Salter.

"But what about the old ones?" Owen retorted.

"Strong and Rohrer can beat it, and Benton probably, but that was your first attempt. You can improve on that."

"So can a lot of other fellows. Here, let me through! I've got to get home and finish an original."

But Salter still blocked the way. "What is it? Tell me and I'll start you on it."

Owen gaped incredulous. "You couldn't do it offhand!"

"I'll have a try at it," said Salter. "Look here, will you drop this quitter's talk about not running if I do the trick?"

Rob hesitated. He knew little of Salter personally, but on general principles he felt himself[Pg 90] safe. No fellow could know the whole four hundred and fifty originals in the plane geometry, and if Salter was like the average sport he couldn't know a dozen. Besides, Salter's geometry dated from the preceding year. To accept would be the easiest way to get rid of him.

"All right," he rejoined, smiling, "but it's like getting money for nothing." He stated the theorem slowly and distinctly, so as to take no unfair advantage. "Want it repeated?" he asked, leering triumphantly into the serious face of his companion, whose knitted brow and abstracted expression showed that he was thinking hard.

"No, I don't," replied the senior, suddenly breaking into a satisfied grin. "It's too dead easy. Look here!"

He drew forth a block of paper from one pocket, a fountain pen from another, with a single flourish of the pen made an almost perfect circle on the paper, and rapidly threw in chords and tangents and added letters.

"That's what you want to prove, isn't it? Well, this is the way it's done."

[Pg 91]

At the end of a minute Rob stood with the slip of paper in his hand blushing to think that he had made so much of a simple matter, while Salter was calmly replacing his block and pen in his pockets.

"You're in for it, all right. Of course, you know, I don't mean that you're sure of the team, but you've got a mighty good show, unless something unusual happens. There's Strong now."

Strong stopped just long enough to congratulate Owen on his trial, and to tell him he had a good show for a position. The captain was followed by the trainer. When Rob emerged from the gymnasium a few minutes later he carried in his hand Salter's notes, and in his mind certain regular practice appointments with Collins. Startlingly sudden as had been his precipitation into the ranks of the relay men, he felt less elation on this account than amazement at the quickness with which the senior had opened a rift in the obscurity of the geometry. How could a fellow like Salter, who didn't look remarkably clever and certainly hadn't studied geometry for at least six months, give an im[Pg 92]promptu demonstration like that! Was that the way in which originals were to be solved? If so, Rob Owen might as well get accustomed to a back seat; such feats were hopelessly beyond his slow powers!

Unreconciled to the notion that an hour of his time was not equivalent to a minute of another's, he stopped at Lindsay's room to ask for information.

"Salter? Of course I know him,—a good fellow he is, a perfect shark at lessons. You couldn't expect a man of his build to be athletic. What do you want to know about him?"

Rob told his tale, adding rather shamefacedly that he suspected there was some trick about it.

Lindsay laughed. "Not a bit of it. That's just the thing he can do. He's got a kind of X-ray mind for mathematics; he can see in a flash through all sorts of obstacles that we have to take a lot of time to work around. You can imagine what an awfully discouraging fellow he is to be in a class with. Why, he'll short-circuit a solution that a teacher's got out of a key, and find an easier way to do it."

[Pg 93]

Owen felt relieved. He evidently wasn't such a fool after all.

"Salter's best in mathematics, but he's good in everything. Last year he made a complete card catalogue of all the places and definitions in ancient history, with abstracts and dates and all that sort of thing written out on about three hundred separate cards in the neatest kind of a hand. He might have made a small fortune renting it out the fortnight before the examination, but he just let it go round, and of course some fellow was mean enough to take it off with him."

Owen had his hand on the door-knob. "They've roped me in for that relay business. Strong says I've a show to make the team. Do you think it's worth while? I can play ball a little, and I'd like to make the nine, but I don't care for running."

"If Collins wants you, I'd run," advised the senior. "He knows what he's about. It won't hurt your chances for baseball, and it's worth a lot to beat Hillbury at anything. They have mighty pretty prizes for that meet, too. Oh,[Pg 94] have you seen what the school gave the football men?"

It was a little engraved football of gold, bearing Lindsay's name. Rob handled it with reverence and yearning. How he would like to earn a thing like that!

"It's pretty," said Lindsay, "but as I don't wear a watch charm, it's hardly useful. If it were a medal, now, I could put it up somewhere."

Rob's eyes were resting on the mantel. Two silver cups were there which he had never seen before. Lindsay's gaze followed Rob's while his words anticipated the visitor's question.

"I brought those two back with me when I went home last week. Got them both last summer. The two-handled one was for a yacht race, the small one I got in a swimming match."

"What a beauty!" exclaimed Owen, taking up the heavy, ornate cup by one of its handles.

"All the same I prefer the other," returned Lindsay, "for I won that all by myself. Anybody with a fast yacht can win a sailing prize. I had to beat seven men to win that little swimming cup. Two cups don't amount to much[Pg 95] anyway. It's the running fellows that make the collections."

"Strong must have a lot," sighed Owen, in the tone a poor man might use in speaking of a neighbor's millions.

"It takes a college crack to pile them up," Lindsay observed. "Poole has been in Dickinson's room at Harvard, and he says Dickinson has a velvet shield two feet square, just thatched with medals, to say nothing of the cups all around. Just imagine what it must be to go to a great meet like the intercollegiate, and know in advance you're going to beat every one of the hundred men in your event! That's what Dickinson's been doing for the last two years."

Rob tried his imagination, but it would not serve. It was like seeking to conceive stellar distances!

"I must be getting back to work," he said. "I suppose I may as well go in for the relay, even if I don't accomplish anything."

He said good-by, and returned to his desk for another attack on the original. Salter's notes proved an Ariadne's thread for the labyrinth;[Pg 96] in ten minutes he was writing Q.E.D. at the foot of his sheet of paper with a satisfaction dimmed only by the fact that the demonstration was not wholly of his own making.

A rattle at the door now announced that he in turn was to be visited. He knew the rattle, for it always heralded the coming of a Peck; but to-day he fancied it lacking in assurance, and he looked up at the door in a momentary thrill of curiosity. There were two Pecks this time, both unusually grave in aspect. One carried in his hand a covered pasteboard box.

"More eels?" asked Owen, giving way frankly to the snicker which would come.

The bearer of the box, whom Rob had provisionally fixed upon as Duncan, grinned sheepishly and answered: "No; guinea pigs this time."

"Guinea pigs! Where?"

"In the desk drawer, two of 'em," went on Duncan, trying hard to be jocose. "They are really quite—quite sweet. Want to see 'em?"

Duncan raised the lid of the box a finger's width and Rob peeped in.

"Pretty, aren't they!" observed the grinning[Pg 97] Owen. "What are you going to do with them? I thought animals weren't allowed in the dormitories."

"That's just where the chump's meanness comes in!" burst out Donald. "We couldn't throw the things out alive, of course, and we couldn't kill 'em. Lady Jane" (the matron) "came in on us while we had 'em on the table,—caught us with the goods on us, she thought,—and jawed us like a stepmother for defying the school rules. When we said some one put 'em in the desk drawer, she thought we were lying and threatened to have us fired for breaking the rules and not showing her proper respect. I call it a low-down trick!"

"Here's what we found with them," interrupted Duncan. "What does it mean?"

Rob took the slip of paper on which was written in print: "The Second Plague."

"I suppose it means what it says," he remarked.

"And there are more plagues to follow?"

"Yes."

"How many?"

[Pg 98]

"How many do you suppose!" exclaimed Rob, derisively. "How many plagues of Egypt were there?"

"That's the question," replied Duncan. "I say there were three, and Don says there were seven. Which is it now?"

Owen sniffed. "You fellows had better join Dr. Norton's Bible class, and learn something."

He took down a Bible from his bookcase and fluttered the leaves to the chapters in Exodus in which the plagues are described. "The first was turning the river into blood, so that the fish died, the second frogs, the third lice, the fourth flies, the fifth—"

"Oh, ring off!" shouted the impatient Donald. "Don't harrow our feelings with all that. How many were there, can't you tell us? or don't you know yourself?"

"Ten," answered Rob, curtly, replacing the book.

The brothers stared at each other blankly, each seeking comfort and finding none.

"You don't really think Payner'd be mean enough to put all those on us, do you?" Duncan asked after an impressive period of silence.

[Pg 99]

"There's a whole menagerie to draw from, if he's cussed enough," growled Donald.

"Who was cussed enough to rip up his room?" Rob's visitors sought information, not judicial criticism; but the opportunity was one that he could not resist.

"How does he know that we stacked his room?" For the moment Donald was like an unfortunate victim of circumstances pleading "not guilty" to a false charge.

"How do you know that he is sending the plagues?" Owen replied quietly.

"He's got you there, Don," said Duncan. "We're up against it all right. There's no use trying to squirm."

"Who's trying to squirm?" retorted Donald. "Let him bring on his plagues—a bunch of mummies if he wants to. He won't feaze me."

With this the pair departed to continue their analysis of the situation in their own quarters, and later to endeavor to sell the guinea pigs to a drug-store man to display in his window.