“I’m sorry you didn’t get it, really I am,” he said. “I shouldn’t take it if so many hadn’t voted for me.”
“I’m glad you won, if the majority want you,” returned Blankenberg, honestly.
“I think your manager lost you votes,” Mulcahy went on, pretending to joke, but avoiding Sam’s eye. “I wouldn’t trust him again.”
Blankenberg and Sam walked out together. “Isn’t he the limit,” exploded Sam, when they were alone, “for pulling the wool over people’s eyes! He’s got everybody on the string from the faculty to Dunbar Hall, and he hasn’t a principle to his name. The school’s training that fellow for a political boss.”
“He didn’t need to be unprincipled to win to-night,” remarked Blankenberg. “It was too easy. I rather think he’ll find some way of getting ’most anything he wants.”
Sam struggled with an impulse to quote Mulcahy’s statement that his supreme ambition was to win the Yale Cup; but the feeling that Mulcahy had spoken in confidence prevented his mention of it. It seemed quite reasonable now that this ambition should be attained.
“There’s one thing he can’t get,” he said with pardonable bitterness, “class day offices. The class knows him too well.”
But therein Sam was mistaken. The Omega Omicron clashed with the Alpha Beta Gamma over the election of President of the Day, neither being willing to give in to the other. As a result, the unfraternified, moulded into a temporarily coherent force through the influence of the vengeful Swan and the despised Mu Nu, united on Mulcahy and swept him into office.
“There seems to be nothing that that fellow can’t rake in if he tries,” Sam grumbled to himself, as he swung moodily homeward from the class election. “Of course you’d expect the faculty to be fooled, but here’s half the class voting for him when nine out of every ten know he’s a rotten fakir. Think of our bringing all our relatives to class day, and that fellow sitting up on the platform as the representative man of the graduating class of Seaton Academy! The Yale Cup?—Mulcahy, of course! Anything he wants. He’s our color-bearer, sure enough! Rah, rah, rah, Mulcahy!”