For a few moments Dick was stunned. He didn’t know what to do. He felt that he might be able to excuse himself to himself for saying nothing about his discovery. It had been made by accident. Perhaps he had not even the right to take advantage of it. But Dick was not able, as so many are, to compromise between right and wrong. He knew that the honor system was supposed to prevail at Yale—that any student who discovered, no matter how, that another was cheating, was required to report that fact, and he felt himself to be bound by that.
Suddenly his face cleared.
“They must have just made these up as notes in preparing for the examination,” he said, to himself. “This is no proof at all that they did anything wrong. I am probably making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Just then Sherman, the captain of the team, walked in.
“Hello, Tom,” said Dick, with a cheerful smile. He was very fond of the first baseman, who had made such a fine leader for Yale’s great baseball team on the field. “How about exams? All through now?”
“All through,” said Sherman, with a sigh of relief. “That modern history this morning was the last. Gee! that was a stiff paper. I was worried about Taylor and Gray, too. They had to take a chance on it without any special preparation. But they seemed to go through swimmingly. Finished before any one. Funny thing, too. Give a dog a bad name—you know the rest. Well, about an hour after we got started, Canfield got suspicious, I thought. Anyhow, he sneaked down the room, and got behind Sam Taylor. Sam was looking at something, but when he felt Canfield behind him, he held up a bit of paper to him to look at, and Canfield just grinned and walked away.”
Dick was mightily disturbed by what Sherman told him. It seemed to destroy his hopes that the papers he had found were innocent. Dejectedly, letting his engagement go by default, he waited for the two seniors, who were to be Yale’s battery in the second game against Harvard, to return. And when they did, waiting for Taylor to get dressed, he called him aside.
“Did you lose any papers, Taylor?” he asked him gravely.
“Don’t think so,” said Taylor, with a laugh. “I never carry many.”
But his hand went to his breast pocket, and suddenly his face went white. He stammered, and then colored, in much confusion.