otball 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 i