Larry thought he knew the reason, but he was close-mouthed enough about his own affairs not to wish to talk about this particular one. He knew he had earned the enmity of Bryant Underhill and his following, and that meant the enmity of whatever proportion of the student body Underhill and his cronies could influence.
“I guess maybe there’s reason enough—for the fellows who do it,” was all he said in reply to Havercamp’s implied question; and just then the first copies of the paper came up, and they both fell to work scanning these preliminary “pulls” for last-minute correction of errors.
“Bry Underhill is one of the fellows who has it in for you,” Havercamp resumed, after the “go ahead” order had been ’phoned down to the press room.
“I know it,” said Larry. “At first he was sore at me because my father happens to be a railroad man working for day-pay instead of a salary. And now he’s got a bigger grudge—since Dick and I caught him and Crawford looting a house for ‘souvenirs’ on the night of the flood, and I was brash enough to talk about it.”
Havercamp shook his head.
“Underhill’s a bad actor. But because he flings his dad’s money around with an open hand and drives a sporty auto and poses as a ‘free and easy,’ he has a following—such fellows always do have. What I can’t understand is how he gets by with the Registrar in his classroom record. Nobody ever hears of his doing any real work.”
“There are others, as well,” said Larry; and as he was leaving the little editorial den on the top floor of the Chronicle Building to go home: “There are times when a fellow is tempted to believe that money—enough of it—will buy most anything in this world, Havvy. So long. Got to mog over to the shack and get down to brass tacks; couple of tests coming to-morrow.”
Now, as every one who is familiar with the town of which Old Sheddon is an over-the-river part knows, the Chronicle Building is well up the hill on the left-hand side of the main street, not quite out of the business district, but well over in the edge of it farthest from the river. Turning west at the newspaper corner, Larry glanced up at the clock in the dome of the court-house. Its hands were pointing to eleven.
At the moment the streets were nearly deserted, though in the “booze block,” as a certain square well down toward the river was called, the saloons (now happily a thing of the past) were all open and doing, or so it seemed to Larry, an unusual amount of late-hour business.
Since he passed that way nearly every evening on his way to and from the Micrometer office, he went on toward the bridge without paying any attention either to the lighted dives on one hand, or to the groups of late-hour loafers cluttering the sidewalk on the other. But just as he was passing the last of the saloons a man stepped out of a group of three, followed him and touched him on the shoulder. Larry wheeled quickly, with his muscles hardening themselves; but the man, a rather burglarish-looking fellow with a week-old beard blackening the lower half of his face and a workman’s cap pulled well down over a pair of beady eyes, spoke him fair, as they used to say in our grandfathers’ time.