“Fake?” questioned Grafter, moving his chair to face Fisher more squarely. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said—no more, no less. I am satisfied that Merriwell is a faker.”
Inside an open window of the reading room, which was close at hand, Hobart Manton had been glancing over the pages of a magazine. The words of those outside reached his ears. He dropped the magazine and leaned on the window ledge.
“I agree with you, Fisher,” he said. “Merriwell is the biggest faker in this country, and in many ways the cleverest. You know I’m a Yale man. At college I heard so much of Merriwell and what he had done while there that I grew sick and disgusted. He was successful in fooling almost everybody, it seems.”
Grafter rose to his feet. He was a well-built fellow, nearly six feet tall, with splendid shoulders and carriage. He was the son of Mike Grafter, the well known Tammany politician, familiarly called “Reliable Mike” by his associates in New York. Although young Grafter had never been guilty of doing a day’s work in his life, he had inherited a splendid physique from his parents and had made athletics his hobby, beginning with the days of his baseball playing on the open lots in Harlem. Like his father, he was generally well liked, although it was claimed that, with his sturdy frame he had also inherited some of old Grafter’s ideas of winning in any contest by whatever method possible, either fair or otherwise. Like his father, he was also able to cover his tracks so completely that nothing crooked had ever been proved against him, and he was prompt to vigorously resent any insinuation or hint of unfairness.
“I presume,” he said, “that you gentlemen have heard the saying of the late Abraham Lincoln that ‘you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time?’”
“What has that to do with Merriwell?” asked Fisher.
“If he is a faker,” retorted Grafter, “I swear it seems to me that he has succeeded in fooling all of the people all of the time since he started in to fool them at all.”
“I’d like to know what any one means by calling him a faker,” said Phipps.
Manton rose quickly from his chair and came sauntering out onto the veranda, followed by his particular friend, Denton Fisher, of the Harlem Heights A.A.