uns, with Martha waving hurrahs at him from a tally-ho.

We wanted to elect Petey president of the college, for we laid the whole
affair to him. But he wouldn't talk at all. If anything, he seemed a
little sore about the whole thing. Martha didn't loosen up, either. She
just smiled and told those of us who knew her well enough to ask
questions that Saunders was a lovely boy and that she had had that date
with him for ages--flies' ages, I guess she meant, for Alice Marsters,
one of the beauties of the school, stayed home from the dance after
announcing that she was going with Saunders, and never seemed able to
remember him by sight after that.

About a week afterward Maxwell, the college orator, a very solemn member
of the Siwash brain trust, was arrested for ever so little a thing. I
believe he so far forgot himself as to help give the college yell on
Main Street the night his literary society won a debate. Anyway, he got
ten days, and he was due in three days to orate for Siwash against the
whole Northwest. It was the biggest event of the school year--the
oratorical contest. We'd won seven of them--more than any other school
in the sixteen states--and we stood a good show with Maxwell. We were
crazy to win. Of course nobody ever goes to the contests; but we all
stay up all night to hear the results, and when we win, which we do once
every other college generation, we try to make the celebration bigger
than the stories of other celebrations that have been handed down. We'd
been planning this celebration all winter and had everything combustible
in Jonesville spotted.

Some of us were for going out and burning up the workhouse, but before
we got around to it Maxwell appeared. It was the day before the contest.
He'd served only two days, but instead of rushing right off to rehearse
his oration, which he couldn't do in the workhouse, owing to an
accountable prejudice the tramps and other prisoners had against
oratory, he took the evening off and went driving with Martha
Scroggs--about as queer a thing for him to do as it would be for the
Pope to take a young lady to the theatre. But we didn't ask any
questions. We cheered him off on the midnight train, and the next night,
when he won and we got the news, we turned out and built a bonfire of
everything that wasn't nailed down. And when the police got done chasing
us they had nineteen of the brightest and best sons of Siwash bottled up
in the booby hatch.

We didn't mind