CHAPTER VI
THE STORY OF JASON
Hardie’s appearance on the football field unquestionably raised him from the condition of nonentity into which he had fallen, but it did not materially help him to get into the charmed circle of the initiate who occupied the social centre of the school on a kind of ancestral tenure. He felt himself an outsider, even more after Talbot had shown him favor than before, for friendliness on the part of one served only to emphasize the lack of interest of others. It was not that he was objectionable or disliked; his schoolmates were merely content without him, seeing nothing in the newcomer that commended him especially to their notice. His mother’s name was not on their mothers’ calling lists; he possessed no cousins or near friends who knew their cousins or friends; he lacked the ready tongue which creates on short acquaintance a reputation for wit. He had no special resources to enhance his attractiveness—no fast auto waiting for him at the corner, no shooting lodge in the marsh to which his friends might be invited. He was just plain, undistinguished, unvalued Hardie, a new boy who lived at Adams’s and played tackle on the second.
Dunn still floated with the tide. Judgment regarding him was still in a measure suspended, but aside from Talbot, who was silent about him, and Wilmot, who jollied him, the trend of opinion was in his favor. As a prospective member of the first eleven, he possessed prestige, and as a good-natured loafer whose excuses and garrulity were entertaining, he appealed to the indiscriminate humor of the mob. But with one of the smaller, though not altogether impotent, members of the school, he early fell into conflict.
“Mike” McKay was a red-headed, freckle-faced, wing-eared urchin, filled to the brim with activity and energy, who dominated the fifth class. He lived at Adams’s, and held the proud position of captain and half-back on the fourth eleven. Mike was no lover of lessons, but they constituted a part of his day, and with his natural habit of putting into everything that he undertook all the vim he possessed, he labored on them devotedly until they were accomplished. Behind Mike in the schoolroom sat Archibald Dunn. Dunn lacked the zeal of his little neighbor; he could endure about ten minutes of mental effort at a stretch, after which his brain demanded rest. In these intervals of rest he often refreshed himself by slouching down in his seat and bracing his toes against the chair in front of him, achieving, in the meantime, some distraction by a languid survey of the room. Mike, intent on the French sentences which he was laboriously manufacturing, word upon word, like a conscientious bricklayer, would feel the tip of Dunn’s toe thrust into his exposed haunch, and violently reacting, would make a scrawl or drop a blot to disfigure the work of his hands.
Expostulations served only to convert what had at first been accidental into a deliberate and repeated annoyance. Dunn had discovered a diversion for the idle moments of brain recuperation.
Stung one day by this persecution, Mike turned fiercely and attacked the exposed ankle of the offender with his pen. A teacher, sharp-eyed but not far-sighted, caught the boy in the act and gave him long minutes after school. This result appeared to Dunn exquisitely amusing; he could hardly wait for the lunch hour to bring him the opportunity of telling the story.
“You’d better let Mike alone,” said Ben Tracy. “He’s a miniature fire-eater when he’s mad.”
Dunn sniffed contemptuously. “What do I care for him? I could lick a couple of such little fresh kids with one hand.”
“He seems to me a rather nice little chap,” Redfield remarked.
“That shows he isn’t,” answered Dunn. “You never get things right.”