“I’ll tell you what, Tommy!” exclaimed Duncan, swelling with a great idea, “let’s start a subscription to buy them some new ones. We’ll get two long sheets of foolscap, head them ‘Subscriptions to buy new Rubbers for the Editors of the Lit,’ and send them round. A cent apiece all over school will pay the bill and more.”
“I guess that won’t be necessary,” said Tompkins, who had no desire to become a school joke. “The thing can’t be settled in that way.”
“It’ll pay up for that gym scheme you put up on us,” suggested Donald.
“Overpay,” said Tompkins, significantly, as he turned to go. “I’m owing you now.”
Only a few weeks had passed since these things happened, and yet, as Wolcott sat in church that stormy morning waiting for the service to begin, these scenes and others flitted before his mind like recollections of a remote period. He had learned much in the short interval of ways and places and fellow-students. Poole, Durand, Planter, Tompkins, and the twins he counted friends; and with Marchmont he was intimate. The teachers he knew in name and lineage, history, peculiarities, faults, and virtues. He no longer mentioned them to his associates as Professor A and Dr. B and Mr. C; they were Peter and Swipesy and Moore, and so on down to the unfortunate latest comer, Mr. Owen, who struggled thrice daily against fearful odds in Room 10.
On the next day the sky was again clear, and Wolcott as soon as his first recitation was over put on his snowshoes and started out for an experimental tramp, in preparation for the expedition of the Snowshoe Club in the afternoon. Being out of practice, and quite well aware that he presented a not altogether graceful figure, he took a cross-cut over the garden fences to an outlying field. As he passed the boarding-house where Laughlin waited on table, he glanced up at the kitchen window, and beheld the broad chest and massive face fronting a dish pan, and the big hands working with cloth and plates. The captain nodded cordially, but Wolcott hardly returned the greeting.
Dish washing! That was certainly the limit. A school captain washing dishes! Shovelling snow, tending furnaces, could be forgiven; but dish washing, never!
CHAPTER VII
NO THOROUGHFARE
That same afternoon Marchmont and Whitely were amusing themselves in Stone’s room; that is, Whitely and Stone were pretending to study, while Marchmont, who was above such pretences, was twirling Stone’s geometry on the point of a pencil.
“Did you fellows know that Rogers isn’t coming back?”