There was a half hour of silence in the room. Then Melvin, squinting furtively out of the corner of his eyes, caught Tompkins gazing out of the window.
“You ought to have borrowed of me,” said Dick, quietly. “You could have saved the books, anyway.”
Tompkins shook his head. “I don’t like to borrow, though I may have to do it yet.”
“What’s become of your term allowance?”
“Gone to those confounded little lambs that Bosworth sheared,” said Tompkins, angrily, throwing off his pretense of indifference. “Eddy wasn’t the only fool, by any means. First one would come to me and then another, and every one of them would put up a mournful whine, and promise never, never to do such a thing again, and hold out his hand for his money. They seemed to think that Bosworth was having the games just to give them experience and teach them profitable lessons, and that I was his agent to pay them back when they promised not to do it again. I wasn’t very careful about the money, I suppose, and when I finally shut down on the thing, a good part of my own was gone. Then Dinsmore took the rest for a baseball subscription which I’d promised to pay early. He left me just seventy-five cents. Since then the books have been going, and it’s a month yet to pay-day. I have been a fool.”
With this last statement Melvin mentally concurred. He had maintained from the beginning that the only proper way of dealing with Bosworth was to maul him until he disgorged, and his first impulse was to tell Tompkins that it served him right for having recourse to questionable methods. But wholesome respect for the generosity of the boy and sympathy with him in his present predicament, effectually prevented any such retort, and turned the whole force of his disapproval against the original offender.
“For straight meanness, that Bosworth is the limit!” he exclaimed, with eyes aflame with indignation. “He ought to be fired this very minute!”
“He isn’t much of a fellow, I think myself,” answered Tompkins, more calmly, “but we can’t do anything about it. The firing isn’t in our hands, or he’d go, and a good many fellows would stay who now have to say good-by pretty abruptly. It isn’t Bosworth that I’m thinking of, but how I’m going to get through the next month.”
“Why don’t you write the whole story home to your father?” said Dick, to whom the straightforward way always appealed.
Tompkins smiled wisely. “And have him write back hot foot to Grim, and want to know what kind of a school it is in which such ‘scandalous performances’ go on under the teachers’ eyes. And Grim would hunt it to the ground like a setter after a rabbit! No, I thank you,—not that!”