“Oh, we won’t. I’ll promise you we won’t use force under any circumstances, but we are going to see the thing through, let me tell you.” And Wade picked up his hat and went out.
Jeff was half inclined to follow him. Indeed, he took up his hat to do so when he realized that it was eight o’clock and that he was not permitted the privilege of leaving his room at that hour.
Wade crossed over the campus and went straight to Newkirk, in which most of the Sophomores were quartered. On the front step of the house he found Rabbit Warren and Honey Wiggins waiting and several other fellows were coming down the drive. He could make out their forms in the gathering half light of evening.
“Wait here, fellows. I’ll whistle if I want you,” said Wade, and he entered and went upstairs to the second floor.
As he walked in the direction in which Gould’s room lay, he suddenly became conscious of voices raised to more than conversational pitch which sounded rather strange in the silent hall.
As Wade approached Gould’s room he presently recognized the voice speaking as that of Birdie Pell, and he could not resist the impulse to stop and listen. They were in Gould’s room and the transom above the door was open.
“—and I’ve stuck by you through a lot of messes,” Pell was saying, “but, by jingoes, if you are implicated in this I’m through with you, cousin or no cousin. I don’t care a whoop whether your father does get miffed and refuse to pay my expenses here. By jingoes, I’ll work my way through and be quit of a dirty mucker like you.”
“But, Birdie, I didn’t do it, I tell you. You can’t believe I would be as low down as that, can you?”
“No, I can’t, but, by jingoes, you have made yourself such a crab around the school that Wade Grenville and all of Thatcher’s friends suspect you and are perfectly willing to believe that you would do it. And if you didn’t do it you and I have got to find out who did, just to clear you. Get me. Hang it, you make me so mad sometimes I’d give you a good beating if I was big enough. If you hadn’t been such a darned grouch and crab, and so conceited and pig headed you wouldn’t be under suspicion now. You don’t suppose I like to have you act—”
In justice to his own conscience Wade could not listen any longer and he knocked at the door.