Gould was not of the temperament to accept a situation of this sort with good grace. The humiliation he had suffered at being put among the substitutes had been a bitter pill for him to swallow, but to be continued as a second-string man while he watched Thatcher make good in his old job hurt his natural conceit and pride more than he was willing to admit even to himself.
He went about with a perpetual grouch, and he did far less bragging than he had done before. He became very unpopular in his class, too, because of the disposition he developed, and there were few of his former friends who appeared to care very much about him. Yet in spite of it all one boy clung to him as closely as ever and seemed to admire him as much as he had in former days. That was Birdie Pell. It seemed very strange to most of the fellows that this should be so. Jeff, for one, could not understand why the little Sophomore should still insist on chumming with Gould, who to appearances had developed into a thoroughly unpleasant person. Others tried to understand it, too, and failing, classed Birdie Pell in the same category as Gould, and as a result had very little to do with him. Yet this seemed to make but very little difference to Pell, for he went blithely on his way of palling with Gould, until they became a thoroughly lonesome couple, finding their own pleasures and developing their own interests.
Jeff devoted a great deal of thought to this strange companionship and tried to analyze the reason for it. But in the end he had to give it up as a problem too deep for him to solve. For some reason he liked Birdie in spite of his associations and some unpleasant faults of personality. And Pell seemed to think well of him, for even though Gould hated Jeff with a hate that was almost sinister Birdie was always pleasant to Thatcher even in Gould’s company. When they passed Thatcher on the campus, though Gould glowered and looked ugly, Birdie always smiled and had a cheery word, and in the halls of the school buildings Pell frequently stopped to chat just a moment with Thatcher while classes were changing.
As the spring term drew on toward June and the time for final examinations, Jeff found that he had a lot more to think about than baseball. School work was piling up fast and getting stiffer and stiffer for the entire year was being reviewed and new work was being crowded in as well. With the examinations looming ahead, Jeff, and most of the other fellows, were cramming hard, burning the midnight oil, so to speak, whenever they could find opportunity.
Especially were the baseball men studying hard, for there was a scholastic rule at Pennington that no boy could play on any of the athletic teams representing the school unless his school standing was all that it should be.
The final examinations were scheduled for the eighth of June and the last and crucial game of the season, the Lawrencetown game, was scheduled for the following Saturday, which was the fifteenth of June, and all of the players realized that to be eligible for the big game of the season they would all have to pass the examinations with flying colors.
And besides this highly important reason Jeff had still another reason for wanting to make a good showing in his studies. The other reason was Mr. Davidson, the President of the Third National Bank, who was making it possible for Jeff to remain at Pennington. During the school term Jeff had written repeatedly to his benefactor just by way of keeping in touch with him and informing him of his school standing, and the few letters that he had received in answer to his messages were always hearty, encouraging and very cheerful. Indeed Mr. Davidson maintained what almost amounted to a fatherly interest in Jeff, and especially was he interested in his baseball career.
Several times he had motored over to Pennington of a Saturday afternoon and watched the team play, and he was always very careful to seek out Jeff and have a cheerful chat with him before the boy went back to the locker room.
Realizing this interest in him, Jeff studied hard as the final examinations approached. Indeed he soon became a veritable “bone,” to quote Wade Grenville, who frequently had to roar to Jeff to turn out the light and come to bed. In truth Jeff became so serious over his studies that he often carried one text book or another about with him, snatching odd moments to study. Especially did he carry around his Cæsar, for he realized that he was weaker in his Latin than in any other study. And strange to relate it was this conscientious habit that brought Jeff Thatcher no end of trouble and resulted in a situation that threatened again to wreck his whole career at Pennington.