Hollister was not at all a good judge of character. His likes and dislikes were very strong, but they were governed by his heart and not by his head. If he once came to care for a fellow he was ready to stick to him through thick and thin, stand up for him at all times and places, and refused to listen to a word against him. Once or twice during his college life he had been disappointed in a man who had been admitted to the inner circle of his friendship. One notable instance was that of a perfectly charming fellow who was possessed of almost every known accomplishment and talent, but in whom the sense of right and wrong was strangely, inexplicably lacking.
Hollister had taken to him tremendously from the very first, and the fellow’s charm of manner and personal magnetism had blinded him to a realizing sense of his sinister failings. For months Bob stuck to him, refusing to listen to the advice of other friends who had discovered the man’s real character, and had only been brought to his senses by coming in suddenly one day and catching the fellow in the act of taking money out of the bill case he had left carelessly on the table.
So he had been all through his college career; honest, loyal, true-hearted, but strangely blinded by prejudice, sometimes almost lacking in common sense when it came to judging the real character of a man.
Presently a car appeared, but Hollister let it go. Hildebrand would probably take it, and at the present moment he did not feel like riding back to the campus face to face with the man he had just insulted.
The more he thought over the matter the sorrier he was that he had allowed his temper to get the best of him. He liked Blair, and, now that he had calmed down, he realized that the big guard must have been perfectly sincere when he made the charge against Blake. He had probably done it with the best intentions in the world.
“Though why everybody is so down on Jarv I can’t imagine,” Bob muttered to himself. “He’s a good fellow, and we’ve had some dandy talks about football lately. It’s all rot about his keeping me from work. I can’t get down to boning, anyway.”
The next car was a long time coming, and, as he stood on the curb waiting for it, he remembered his roommate’s somewhat heated talk of the night before. But that was perfectly absurd. There could not be anything in that. Why, Blake had been actually helping him out with some of the football problems, giving him some really clever ideas, and he was not at all likely to do that if he were scheming for his place on the varsity.
“This is worse than trying to study!” he exclaimed presently, in a tone of exasperation. “I wish people wouldn’t take such an infernal interest in what I am doing! Why can’t they let me alone to do as I like?”
The answer was simple, though he would never have guessed it in a thousand years. He was too decent a fellow to be let alone to ruin himself by his own blind folly so long as any of his friends could prevent it.
Just then a car came along and Hollister took it. He did his best to forget his regrettable quarrel with Hildebrand, but all the way back to the campus it kept recurring to his mind, bringing with it curious, disturbing little doubts as to whether there might not be something after all in the statements the stalwart guard had made, and which fitted in so patly with Jim Townsend’s petulant outburst.