“I don’t care who knows it,” Stacey cried, beside himself with despair; “I am suspected of being a thief, and it will kill my mother, and my father will just about kill me.”
Buttertub gave a low whistle. “It can’t be so bad as that,” he said; “what do you mean?”
“Some fellows sneaked into the girls’ party, and they think I was one of them and Terwilliger the other.”
“Well, what if they do?” Buttertub asked. “There is nothing so killing about a little thing like that.”
“Perhaps not; but there was a robbery committed in the school that very night, and that’s the milk of the cocoanut.”
“They can’t suspect a cadet of being a burglar.”
“Well, it looks like it,” Stacey replied. “They’ve arrested Terwilliger, and I’ve just had warning that my turn may come next, unless I can prove that I was boating that night, and I can’t.”
“Ginger!” exclaimed Buttertub. “You are in a mess.” He was on the point of confessing his own share in the escapade, when he reflected that it was not entirely his own secret, he must see Ricos first. Buttertub was naturally good-natured, and he had no idea that the frolic would take so serious a turn, but his brain worked slowly, and he did not quite see what he ought to do.
Stacey was nearly wild. He strode up and down the room. “I haven’t seen father for two years, and mother has written him such glowing accounts of me that he expects great things. It would be bad enough, without this last trouble, to have him find out what a slump I am. I can never look him in the face—never.”
“Fathers are pretty rough on us fellows, sometimes,” said Buttertub. He was thinking of his own father, bombastic old Bishop Buttertub, and wondering, after all, whether he could quite bear to shoulder all the consequences of his frolic. When the Bishop was angry he had been compared to a wild bull of Bashan, and Buttertub, Jr., would rather have faced a locomotive on a single track bridge than his paternal parent on a rampage. He wished now that he had not yielded to the wiles of the entrancing Cynthia, and attended the party. “Hang that girl!” he growled aloud.