“Jiminy, it’s going to be rough on the both of us, Jeff,” he said finally, “but it’s going to be especially tough for you.”
“Well,” said Jeff with a forced smile, “the worst is yet to come. Come on to bed. I don’t much feel like trying to digest Cæsar and his Gaelic Wars to-night, and anyhow I guess it won’t make much difference whether I’m prepared in Latin to-morrow or not. Come on, turn in.”
CHAPTER IV
ON HIS OWN
Both Jeff and Wade spent a restless night. Jeff lay awake until long after the clock in the Congregational church tower across the river in New City boomed the hour of midnight, so overwrought were his nerves over the day’s occurrences and the interview with Dr. Livingston and what it would bring forth on the morrow. And as he lay there tossing between the blankets he realized more and more how hopeless his case was and how cheerless the outlook for his own future was.
What was he to do? Where was he to turn? He could not go back to live with his uncle without finding employment for himself, and where would he turn to find this? Where—
A thought occurred to him that kept him awake for nearly an hour longer. One of the privileges that would be taken away from him as a result of his disobedience to the school rules was the privilege of acting as school correspondent for the New City Daily Freeman. He had secured the position by bearding “Boss” Russell, the city editor of the Freeman, in his office and making application for the job almost before his predecessor, Harold Hall, was graduated from Pennington. And ever since he had been contributing paragraphs of school news to the paper, stories of the football and basketball games, and various other “write ups” for which he had been paid space rates, and had in that way earned a neat sum each week which managed to keep him in clothes and buy some of his books. His work had been acceptable to the paper, he knew, and he wondered, now that he was going to be thrown out on his own, why it wouldn’t be possible for him to join the staff of the Freeman as a cub reporter. It was a great idea. He would try.
And then, thinking of the romance of being a reporter, some time between midnight and daylight he fell asleep and dreamed that he had suddenly become a newspaper man, indeed the only employee his particular dream newspaper had. He was reporter, city editor, typesetter, printer and pressman all in one, and he had a wild nightmare of a career that ended when he got into an altercation with a big printing press and the iron monster stood up on its hind legs and began clawing the air, finally grabbing him in its teeth and, like some prehistoric monster, it shook him back and forth until he woke up with a yell to find Wade Grenville standing over his bed and pulling him out from between the blankets by the slack of his pajamas.
“For the love of Pete, turn out. It’s seven-thirty. You haven’t a dickens of a lot of time to get cleaned and report for chapel. Come on, Jeff, shake a leg. You’ve got a tough day ahead of you, you poor kid.”