“You’ll have to do the talking, Jack,” he said, as the two delegates, having patiently endured to the end the fusillade of admonitions and counsel with which their ears had been deafened all day long, took seats in the car which was to carry them to the Newbury School. “If I once get going, I’m bound to go off the handle and ruin the whole business.”
“I don’t believe you will,” answered Sumner, reassuringly. “There’s too much at stake. You just want to think of it as seven honest people brought together to consider a question of fact,—that’s what Mr. Westcott said,—not as if you were out for a fight with three sworn enemies and two doubtful characters.”
“If Smithy isn’t an enemy, I don’t know what an enemy is! I wish Harry or Steve were here in my place; either would be a lot better than I. Harry can hold his tongue, and Steve can talk an apple off a tree!”
“You can hold your tongue, too.”
“I will, if I have to bite it off—until they decide against us. When that comes, I’m going to call ’em just what they are, a pack of thieves!”
“But it may not come,” said Sumner, quietly.
“Oh, it will. Everybody thinks so. Mr. Snyder will vote with us because Trowbridge will want to seem to be fair, and Frost will vote with Newbury. That will make a tie, and Smithy will be forced in the interests of pure athletics to give the deciding vote against us.”
“I don’t believe it. Anyway, if that’s your opinion, you don’t want to show it, or they’ll think you know you haven’t any case. We want to act as if we were sure of the rightfulness of our claim, and had only to state it to have it granted.”
“I wish there was something I could do!” groaned Pete. “I hate to sit around and pretend.”
The other members of the committee were already assembled when Sumner and Talbot were shown into the room. The glance with which Pete took in this fact hardened immediately into a look of hostility, for it seemed to him probable that the five had already used their opportunity to come to a decision with reference to the object of the meeting, and that the proceedings would now be merely formal. But Sumner was already going the rounds, shaking hands with everybody in a spirit of great friendliness; so Pete, suspecting that this was the proper time to begin that assumption of confidence to which Sumner had urged him, fell in behind his colleague, with a mighty effort crowding back his feeling of distrust. Mr. Snyder and Frost greeted him cordially, and though Newbold vouchsafed but a languid clasp of the hand and murmured a palpably empty phrase of politeness through a frigid grimace, Thorne gave him a grip of reassuring warmth. He tarried therefore at Thorne’s side and talked with him for a few minutes on indifferent themes,—such as sailing and summer dances,—thereby turning his back on President John and avoiding the necessity of dissembling before that much-hated dignitary.