When the crowd broke up, Dick led the cripple back to his chair, and for quite some little time Larry sat with his head in his hands, staring down at an open book which might have been printed in Sanskrit for all that the words in it meant to him. Dick waited as long as he thought he ought to. Then he said: “How about that ‘workingman’ class line now, Larry?”
Larry looked up, and the good gray eyes were suspiciously bright.
“They’ve broken it down for me, individually, Dick; but it’s here, just the same――you know it is. I had a bit of good luck this afternoon, and for that they’ve taken me in. But there are lots of others who won’t be taken in; little Purdick, and Jungman, and dozens that I could name.”
“Well?” said Dick, as one who would say, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Dick,” Larry shot back, much as if he had read Dick’s unspoken question; “I’m going to make it my job to break the combination――or as much of it as can be broken from my side of the fence. Old Sheddon ought to be one and indivisible, all through the year, just as it is on the day of a foot-ball victory. I’m going to do what one fellow can to make it so.”
Dickie Maxwell started to gasp, but caught himself in good time. “That’s the right old stuff!” he chanted heartily. “Go to it, old scout, and when the pinches come, I’ll be there to help.”
Yet, later, it was Larry who was to do the helping――but that does not belong to the story of the Offish Worm.
Old Sheddon, calling itself pretty strictly an engineering school, is peculiar in one respect: it has no dormitories on its campus. Its two thousand (more or less) undergraduates live in clubs, fraternity houses, and with the neighbors. Practically everybody in the college town takes roomers and boarders, and among these private houses the “Man-o’-War” was popular for two reasons: Mrs. Grant was a most motherly home body; and her pies were, as Dickie Maxwell put it, “simply out of sight.”
Dick and Larry had the largest of the upstairs rooms, with two windows on the side toward the street and the campus. While the college year was still in its infancy, it began to be remarked that these windows were seldom dark in the evening. Which meant that at least one of the room’s occupants knew what he wanted and was going stubbornly after it.