Foote had neglected his work sadly in the last term. And now his father, who would otherwise have shown leniency toward such an offense, had told him that unless, by hard work in the summer, with attendance at the Yale summer school to help him, he conformed to all his conditions, he would have to go to work, and shift for himself in the fall.
“I’ve made a mistake with you, my boy,” his father had said to him. “I supposed you were old enough to be allowed a certain liberty, and I find that you’ve been abusing it. I realize that it’s partly my own fault. You’ve had too much liberty and too much money to spend.
“That’s going to stop. I’ll give you a chance to mend your ways and make good from now on; but there must be no skulking and no more crooked work. You’re young yet, and you can live down the mistakes you’ve made. But you’ve got to settle down and help yourself; for, if you don’t, neither I nor any one else can do it for you.”
Foote took his father’s kindly warning in the wrong spirit, as he had the efforts of Jim Phillips and Dick Merriwell to set him on the right path after his outrageous treatment of them. He felt that he was misunderstood and abused, and his mother, a weak and foolish woman, simply helped to keep him in the wrong path. She thought, as mothers will, that her son was about the best son on earth, and she was sure that if he had made mistakes it was because he had been led astray. Finding her arguments of no avail with her husband, she had made the grave mistake of sympathizing with her boy, and of supplying him, in secret, with the money which no longer flowed like water from his father.
Parker, who had frankly and with a certain degree of manliness, admitted his fault and made such amends for it as he could, thus winning full forgiveness from both Dick and Jim, had tried to reason with his former ally.
“There’s no use, Paul, old chap,” he said. “We were wrong, and I can see that now. I didn’t know what you were doing about that freight car, or I wouldn’t have stood for it, but I didn’t make any effort to get out of it on that score. I admitted that I was just as much to blame as you were, and I straightened myself out with Merriwell and Phillips.
“Why don’t you go to them and start a new deal? You’ll find them willing to forget the past, and they’re better people than the ones we’ve been running with. That’s a rotten crowd—that gambling, drinking set. They don’t stand by you when you’re in trouble.”
“You can quit and be good if you want to,” said Foote, sneering. “As for me, when I start something, I see it through, if there’s any way that it can be done. Those fellows have won the first deal. But there’s more coming, and I guess I’ll land on top before I’m through. Then they’ll be sorry they ever got themselves into my bad books.”
Parker gave him up as hopeless after that.
On the very same night as that on which Dick Merriwell and his friends arranged the details of the team that was to play against Boston, Foote left his rooms and went to a gambling house in New Haven, whose owner had grown rich on the money he had made by plucking foolish Yale men, who had more money than was good for them. Foote had played roulette there more than once, and he had been allowed to win just often enough to encourage him to keep on in the hope of making a big killing some day. There he had spent and thrown away money given to him for the payment of his college bills for clothes and books.