“Billy’s arrested! he’s in jail! What’ll I do?” John gasped breathlessly. He thrust the note at Haydock. “Read it.”
Haydock struck a match in the shelter of a bay window and read.
“Why, the only thing to do is to bail him out,” he laughed. “It’s horrid, not to say disgusting, to have to stay all night in a jail. How much money have you?”
“I don’t know, five dollars, I think,” answered John. The darkness covered his astonishment at Haydock’s calmness under the circumstances.
“I have thirty or forty myself, and I’ll evolve the rest somewhere.”
“Do you think you can?” To John the idea was incredible.
“Oh, heavens yes! That’s the trouble with Cambridge; you can always borrow any amount at any hour. It makes every place else seem sordid and worldly. Is the ‘guide’ in your room? I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.” He strolled away whistling. John hurried back to Matthews faster than before.
For ever so long that night was a hideous memory to Billy’s room-mate. He and Haydock and the man—a sad, silent person whom Haydock courteously tried to engage in conversation from time to time—spent hours in chilly suburban street-cars and bleak waiting stations. Haydock ignored the topic that to John was of such overwhelming and painful interest; it was as if he had disposed of the entire subject earlier in the evening when he had uttered his prophecy: “Because he’ll get kicked out.” Grey January dawn streaked the sky when the trio, after finding Billy and Dilford Bancroft chatting pleasantly with the watchmen in the police station, managed to rout up the gentleman whose function it seemed to be to determine the amount of a criminal’s bail,—he lived several miles away,—get a cab, and jog back to Cambridge. Billy talked most of the way, in spite of the silence with which John received his reflections, and Haydock’s polite but unenthusiastic attention. Dilford covered his head with the lap-robe at intervals, and had hysterics; but no one noticed him at all, except Billy, who occasionally joined him in these complex emotions.
“It was the surprise—the awful surprise of it that killed me dead,” Billy would giggle. “I was on the box-seat driving, you know,—lickety-split, to beat the band, with Harry Hollis beside me,—he fell off when we went over the car tracks. I’d like to know if he was hurt; anyhow, the car didn’t run over him, because I looked back and it never stopped. Had Jimmy fallen out then?” he appealed to Dilford, whose reply was smothered at its birth. “Then we raced the car until the horses—oh, they were corkers!—began to run away. I couldn’t hold them. I tried, upon my soul, I tried! but I was laughing so that my wrists were all sort of tickly on the inside,—you know how they do,—and I couldn’t close my fingers very tight over the reins; they just flapped around in the breeze any old way. So when the policeman ran out and yelled and waved, what on earth could I do? What could I do? We simply crashed past him like a chariot race. I looked back again and couldn’t even see the creature—only Dilly on the floor, white as a sheet, holding on with everything he had. Oh, it was terrible! perfectly terrible! I was glad we’d ditched the policeman, though; only we didn’t! That was the surprise. My dear, what do you suppose that man—that devil—did? He telephoned—telephoned—to the next police station, and when we got there they received us. Policemen? There were platoons of them,—as far as the eye could reach in every direction. And they had fish-nets and lassoes and the most fearful-looking clubs; and one of the horses fell down, and everybody sat on the poor thing’s head,—people always rush and do that when a horse falls down. I wonder why?”
No one ventured a theory, and William continued:—