“He will, when he knows of it. I’m sorry for Chester. He’s a good fellow,—first-rate stuff,—but he’s chuck-full of mere mischief. You see, after that other row in the winter, his father swore that if he got into any rumpus again, he’d take him out of college, and put him in the office; and Chester hates that like poison. And old Chester isn’t like you, dad. He never was a college man, and he doesn’t understand.”
“I suppose not. H’m! I’m sorry for Chester. I like the lad. It would be rough on him to spoil his career.”
Here Cricket suddenly awoke to the fact that she was hanging on to the banisters, listening with all her might. Much mortified, she flew on to the kitchen and delivered her message, and then darted up-stairs to share her story with Eunice.
“Eunice, something must be done about it. Sidney Chester is awfully in it, and Don says he didn’t do a thing, either. They were both calling on Miss Gwendoline Vassar, the pretty one with red hair,—what Donald calls Tissue hair,—he’s awfully struck on her, you know,—and the boys were both there that very night.”
“Then they have only to tell the President so,” said Eunice, much relieved.
“That’s just it. They won’t say so, and some others who were caught, and didn’t really do anything, won’t say so either, because then the President would know just who did it, and expel those very ones.”
“It’s all dreadfully muddled, seems to me,” sighed Eunice. “College things are always so funny.”
“I think they’re very unsensible, myself,” said Cricket, decidedly. “I think they ought to tell. If the other fellows did it, let them say so, and be expelled. It’s like Zaidie, the other day. I was in the nursery, and mamma told her not to run the sewing-machine, and Zaidie did, and mamma tied a handkerchief around her hands. And yesterday, Zaidie got at the machine again, when ’Liza wasn’t there, and then she went and twisted a handkerchief around her own hands, and sat down in the corner, and wouldn’t play with Helen and Kenneth for a long time. ‘I just wanted to run that machine again,’ she said, ‘and now I’ve got to tie my hands up, ’cause I was naughty; but it was fun, anyway.’”
“That’s the way those boys ought to do,” said Eunice. “If they want to go and do bad things, they ought to speak up like a man and say so. Think of Don and Sidney Chester and the others being expelled, and they just calling on Miss Vassar!”
“And Don’s just crazy to get in the team!” added Eunice, almost in tears again. “Oh, Cricket, I wish the President could know about it. I’m sure he’d do something.”