starting?" asked practical, pop-eyed
Tom Jenkins.

"Oh, anything that will cause excitement!" waved Travers, serenely.

"If you boys really want some excitement ... and want to do some service
for the community at the same time,--I've got a scheme to suggest ...
something I've been thinking over for a long time," suggested Jerome
Miller, president of the club....

"Tell us what it is, Jerome!"

"The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger
whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger's joint ... blind pigs
... blind tigers, for the students....

"We might show up the whole affair....

"--how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from
that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the
whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....

"_That_ would be starting something!"

"I should say it would!" shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.

"Then we might extend operations," continued the masterful, incisive
Jerome, "and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the
gallon, for 'medicinal' purposes, abusing the privilege of the law."

"But how is all this to be done?"

"Through the _Laurelian_?"

"No ... I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade
'Senator' Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the _Laurel Globe_, to
let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day--just as a college stunt!"

"They'd never stand for it!" I averred, innocently.

"Of course they wouldn't--if we let them in on what we were up to!--for
they are staunch supporters of the present administration--but they
won't smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will
be too late to stop it!"

"In other words," laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke
from his nose, "they'll think they're turning over their paper, _The
Globe_, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few
sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....

"And they'll wake up, to find we've slipped a real man-size sheet over
on them, for the first time in local history!"

"It'll raise hell's all I've got to say!" sagely commented the
prematurely bald "Colonel," his eyes glinting merrily.

"It'll be lots of fun," remarked Travers, characteristically, "and I'm
for it, lock, stock, and barrel."

"That's not the reason I'm for it; I'm for it for two reasons,"
reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, "first, because it will pu