“Yes,” Johnson bragged. “Fortune has had many a good one on me, but nobody else has.
“Well, I was too late for college then, so I stayed to work in the warehouse awhile, and took a trip back into the country. The place looked pretty good to me and I came near staying there, but I had been working too long to get to the University to let it go. So I took a job on a sailing vessel and reached New York about February 1. I beat my way West with the idea of entering the University at the beginning of the second semester, but they would not let me.
“You know how I worked around College all last spring, carried a rod in a survey party in Wisconsin all last summer and have been trotting up and down this blooming hill to lectures all fall. Now I reckon I have talked you to sleep, so I’ll go myself.”
Scott did not speak for a minute, but it was not because he was asleep. The very carelessness with which Johnson related his wonderful achievements, and the utter lack of conceit in his almost superhuman efforts to rise in the world, added to the fascination of it. Scott was thinking what a bed of roses his life had been compared with Johnson’s, what a tremendous handicap he had been working under, and yet how little he had the advantage of Johnson. Even that little advantage was temporary, for a man with that experience of life would soon distance him when he finally started his real work.
“By George, Johnson,” he said, starting up suddenly, “you’re a hero.”
But the hero made no answer, for true to his word he was already asleep.
Scott lay awake for a while thinking it over. He wondered what his father would think of Johnson as a chosen companion. Judged on the basis of family as was the custom at home Johnson would be rejected but he felt in his heart that Johnson had certainly earned a place in the world and finally went to sleep convinced that if he could not get his ten thousand acres without discarding Johnson he would go without it.
CHAPTER VI
From the moment that he out-boxed that big sophomore, thus saving the honor of the class and bringing everlasting glory to the foresters, Scott’s reputation was established. From an unknown stranger passing quietly and unnoticed from class to class, he had become the lion of the College and one of the “popular” men of the University. Men he had never known hailed him familiarly on the street and in the corridors; girls he had never met smiled at him frankly. A reporter tried to get an interview with him for a big daily paper. Clubs, societies, associations, fraternities, organizations of which he would never have had any knowledge if it had not been for that fateful boxing match, opened their doors to him and invited him cordially to enter. After the quiet life he had led in the little village, with his limited acquaintance and Dick Bradshaw for his only intimate friend, this new life opening before him thrilled him and tingled through his blood like old wine. He remembered his father’s injunction to mix, to study men and learn human character; his new life would give him the opportunity to do it.
He thought he knew now what his father had meant by “responsible companions,” and felt that the fulfillment of that part of the condition for the ten thousand acres was as good as accomplished.