Scott tried to look the room over carelessly as he thought anyone would who was used to renting a new one every week or so. He found that he was still holding his suitcase in his hand. He looked at his roommate to see if he had noticed it, but that indifferent young man was still absorbed in the poster and oblivious to his surroundings. Scott set the suitcase quietly in the corner and took another careless look around the room.
“Well, I guess this will do,” he remarked flippantly. “I’ll go see about the trunk.”
As he was going out the door Johnson called after him, “Hustle back and I’ll take you to our hash house. They are nearly all foresters there and a couple of them are seniors, too.”
Scott hurried to the registrar’s office, left word about the trunk and started back to his newly acquired room and roommate, both of which he had obtained almost before he knew it and was not yet quite certain whether he wanted them or not. However, it was a great relief to feel that he had some place to go, and he rather thought that he liked it. As he was going down the steps a husky, sunburned fellow with a swinging gait and the free air of the woods joined him.
“Getting straightened out?” he asked pleasantly.
“Yes,” Scott answered, with a readiness that surprised himself. “I got a room, a roommate and a boarding house, all this afternoon.” He was beginning to feel a little proud of it.
“You are lucky,” the other said. “Where are you from?”
“Massachusetts,” said Scott, a little proudly. He felt that it was rather a distinction to live so far away. He expected to see some show of astonishment from this stranger, but instead the answer astonished him.
“I expect we are nearly the Eastern and Western limits of the School,” he said quietly. “I am from Honolulu. Not much timber left in Massachusetts, is there?”
Ordinarily Scott would have been very diffident with a stranger who accosted him in this way, especially after such an experience as he had had that morning, but there was a personal magnetism about this tall, dark, gentlemanly fellow that made him open his rather lonesome heart.