CHAPTER XX A SUB-SEATONIAN

Let it not be supposed that the pleasures and pains of the Pecks, or Owen's ambition to become recognized as a catcher, or the affairs of the middle entry of Hale, represent the chief happenings of the season at Seaton. From the opening of the spring term baseball is indeed the most absorbing subject of student conversation, and the nearer the Hillbury game approaches, the more widely discussed are the prospects of the nine and the more general is the interest in it. But on the morning of every week-day throughout the school year the seven-forty-five chapel bell calls together four hundred boys. From eight to six, with intermission for luncheon, changing squads are crowding hourly in and out of the recitation rooms, where strenuous teachers crack their pedagogical whips in mock fury over the heads of their victims. Each of these four hundred[Pg 213] has his own ambitions and interests; each serves and enjoys the school in his own way. They group themselves in scores of combinations. There are state clubs, debating clubs, musical clubs, modern language clubs, college clubs, fraternities. Boys are laboring for scholarships, for prizes of all kinds, for positions on school papers and athletic teams, for honors at graduation, for offices, for entrance to college, for the plain privilege of staying at school. While Payner is catching bugs, Woodford is shooting clay pigeons, Thornton playing a mandolin, Ford running the Assembly Club, Allen preparing to beat the Harvard Freshmen at debate, and Smith plugging away at Cicero and Homer and history with the resignation of a holy man of Tibet walled up in a cave. And many there are who go to and fro in obscurity, mere names on class lists or voices on the cheering benches. Yet who would venture to assert that among these insignificants some distinguished man of the future may not be hidden?

Among the episodes of the year entirely unconnected with baseball was that of the delayed[Pg 214] senior dinner and the presence thereat of the little thirteen-year-old townie who sat in state at the right of the toastmaster and consumed ice cream and cake in quantities quite out of proportion to his size. Robert Owen had nothing to do with the affair, except to hear of it at first hand from Wolcott Lindsay and Durand, when the pair came exulting home late at night, eager to find an upper middler to inform and gloat over. So Rob was routed out and sat in pajamas blinking at the lamp while the seniors narrated. When at last it became clear that they had ceased to narrate, and were merely jeering, Rob rallied his forces, vowed that they were interfering with his baseball training, and drove them out. Their tale, with the necessary introductions, is as follows:—

Class rivalry at Seaton is a matter of years and circumstances. At the time of the class football games in the fall, when the lower middlers combined with the seniors to rush the field after the senior-upper middle game, and stole away the ball which the upper middlers had won, Rob's classmates had indulged in violent talk of retribution. On the week after, however, had occurred[Pg 215] the Hillbury game in which several members of the offending class had won new laurels for the school. The feeling of complacency and brotherhood engendered by the victory was fatal to the spirit of civil strife. The plots for vengeance apparently died a natural death with no likelihood of revival.

So at least it seemed to the school at large. A few rash spirits, whose pretended resentment was but an excuse for a lark, thought otherwise. Acting on the principle that it is easiest to strike when the foe is least expectant, they prepared for war in the midst of peace. Poole, who was president of the class, was expected to preside at the senior dinner. This, of course, the conspirators knew; they likewise knew his habits and companions. He usually went from his room outside the yard to the post-office for the evening mail, and thence either to the school recreation room at Merrill Hall or to some friend's or to his fraternity house, to spend the hour before evening study began. On the night of the dinner he would be likely to make his visit to the post-office somewhat earlier. If he could be[Pg 216] caught alone on the way thither, or while answering some fictitious summons, he might be seized, crammed into a hack, and driven to a place of security. If he should mysteriously disappear before the dinner took place, and stay disappeared a reasonable length of time, the dinner would be spoiled. For even if the seniors ultimately proceeded without their president, the feast must have lost much of its savor through delay, and how could the encomiums on the class be anything but flat with the proof of its inferiority so crushingly evident?

As Payner and Simmons came paddling down the river again that afternoon, they overhauled young Wally Sedgwick in his canoe voyaging homeward. Payner knew Wally, having run across him more than once on these expeditions, and found him possessed of much local information of a varied character.

"Hello!" shouted Payner, "been swimming?"

"Nope," answered Wally, poising his paddle. "My mother made me promise not to till it gets warmer. Have you?"

"Yes," lied Payner; "the water is great."

[Pg 217]

But Wally either didn't believe him or didn't care. "Say, did you see those fellows back there on the bank? What were they doing?"

"Oh, I don't know!" replied Payner, ungraciously. He had seen among them the Pecks and Milliken and Barclay, and that was enough. "Up to mischief, probably. Come on, we'll race you down."

"Thank you," returned the boy; "I guess I'm in no hurry."

Sloper Stevens, who lay outstretched in the bow, dragging his hands in the water, was in no hurry either, so, as the students passed out of sight around the next bend in the river, Wally turned the nose of his canoe up stream again. The suggestion that the knot of students he had lately passed were up to something wrong whetted his curiosity. What crime could they commit here? They weren't stealing wood or cutting trees.

The students appeared on the river bank beneath some tall pines, and looked up and down the wood road and pointed at the river and at some place behind them in the woods. Wally watched them in half concealment in the shelter[Pg 218] of an old stump which projected into the river. They disappeared now and presently came out into view again farther up, where they again pointed and surveyed. Such conduct was incomprehensible, and therefore interesting to Wally, who had seen students up the river before and knew their ways. They usually came by twos and threes in boats or canoes, sometimes seriously with books, more often sprawling on the seats, laughing, singing, innocently engaged in killing time. If they went ashore they stretched themselves on their backs under the trees, or stripped and went swimming. These fellows were different; they seemed to be in search of something.

"Going to stay here all night?" demanded Sloper. "'Cause if you are I'm going to get out and walk."

"I'm going," answered Wally, swinging the bow again down-stream. He also had recognized Milliken and Barclay and the two Pecks, the first because he was the great back in the school eleven, known to every boy in town, the second as the captain of the upper middle eleven, and the Pecks—well, just because they were "the[Pg 219] two Pecks." Wally's sympathies were not with the upper middle class. Next fall he was to be a junior himself, and as a junior would side with upper middlers against lower middlers and seniors. The present upper middlers would be the seniors of next year—hence his natural foes. Wally knew where his allegiance lay.

That night at supper Wally was subdued and meditative. Mr. Sedgwick asked him first if he were tired, and then if he had been swimming, both of which questions Wally answered with an indignant negative. The maternal suggestions were that it was too hard for him in the High School and that he didn't go to bed early enough. These explanations also displeased Master Wally, for he did not wish his work in the High School to be too closely investigated, and no boy likes to be sent early to bed. So he cut his dessert short—he didn't care much for that dessert anyway—and got excused to go to the post-office.

On the way he still wrestled with the problem of the students under the pines. At the supper table he had decided that they must be preparing[Pg 220] for an initiation. On further reflection, however, this theory appeared untenable. The members of the fraternities wear flat gray hats with bands of special stripes. Wally had seen two different fraternity hatbands among the crowd. Besides, the fraternity fellows belong to different classes, and these were all upper middlers.

He took the letters from the box at the office, pushed them into his coat pocket, and sauntered up the lane and through the Academy yard. If he could only run across Eddy, now, or John Somes or French, all students of his acquaintance, he would ask them. It was just growing dusk. As he passed through the gate at the upper end he saw a hack drawn up beside the road. The driver, with his back to the street, seemed to be very busy with the harness. In the vehicle a man with gray hair and spectacles sat crowded into a corner.

Ahead Wally caught sight of the familiar figure of the baseball captain hurrying down the street toward him. He knew Poole, of course, as did every urchin in town; but he had the advantage of the other urchins in the fact that Poole knew him. Poole had made Wally's acquaintance at[Pg 221] the birthday party of Wally's older sister. Since that time the baseball captain had never failed to recognize the boy. To-night, however, either from preoccupation or because he was hastening to meet an appointment, Poole passed him by without a word.

The disappointed boy turned and gazed after the retreating senior. The latter had gone but a few steps when he was apparently summoned by the occupant of the hack. Wally saw him turn to the carriage door and lean in as if to hear the words of the old man inside. Then two figures crept out from the yard of the house near by, stole up behind the unsuspicious Poole, seized him, threw him into the carriage, tumbled in themselves, and pulled the door to and the curtain down. Wally stood with bulging eyes, hearing the throttled yell and the sound of struggle within the hack, and seeing the driver whip his horses into a sudden gallop.

"Barclay and Milliken as sure as guns!" thought Master Wally. "They're running off with Poole!" and forthwith Wally began to run, after the hack and homeward where the letters[Pg 222] must be delivered and where his bicycle still stood leaning against the fence, as he had left it when he came from school at one o'clock. As he plied his legs, his thoughts also were nimble, and he marked well the direction the hack was taking. That morning on the way to school Jack Sanders had told him that the seniors were to have a dinner to-night, and asked him if he remembered the time two years before when the middlers tried to bribe Shorty McDougal to sneak into the hotel kitchen and pinch the ice cream. Milliken and Barclay! It wasn't hard to guess now what those fellows were doing up river!

Wally threw his letters on the hall table—fortunately without meeting any inconvenient member of the family—and dashed out again. The entrance to the river road was through the Gilman farm across the bridge. The hack had gone down Elm Street, evidently taking a circuitous route to avoid passing through the centre of the town. If he sprinted, he could beat it to the Gilmans' yet!

Panting from his efforts, trembling with eagerness, Wally leaned his bicycle against a tree,[Pg 223] scrambled behind a stone wall, and crouched on the ground. He was none too soon. Almost immediately came the sound of wheels on the highway, and a hack turned into the lane and swept by him down the incline to the river. At the gate by the lower barn it stopped, and the sound of voices came back, as of greetings and exclamations. Then the gate was opened and shut again; and the tread of horses' hoofs and the rumble of wheels died away in the river mists.