“Name’s Donovan, ain’t it?” said the man, shifting the stub of his cigar from one corner of his hard mouth to the other, and talking out of the corner thus vacated.
“It is,” said Larry briefly. Then, quite as briefly, “What do you want?”
The man ignored the question.
“Young fellow named Maxwell’s a pal o’ yours, ain’t he?”
“He’s my friend, yes. What about him?”
“Li’l’ too much bug-juice, I reckon,” was the half-leering reply. “Somebody ought to knock ’im down an’ run ’im off home. Thought mebbe youse’d like to know.”
Most naturally, Larry was just plain horrified. That Dick, after his one bad slip and narrow escape, should make another that was infinitely worse, seemed utterly unbelievable. Then he remembered that for the past few days Dick had been blue and discouraged for fear that, after all, he mightn’t be able to make passing grades in the year-end examinations. Could it be possible that he had let his discouragement, which, as everybody had told him, was nothing worse than the nervous scare of a fellow who has been working his brain a bit too hard, drive him into another kind of dissipation?
All this, as we may figure, flashed through one half of Larry’s mind in the few seconds during which he stood staring at the slouching bearer of bad news and trying, with the other half of the thinking machinery, to determine what possible object the man could have in lying to him—if he were lying.
“You must be mistaken,” he said at last. “The Maxwell you’re talking about isn’t the Maxwell I know.”
“I guess yes. Anyways, the last I seen o’ him he was singin’ an’ hollerin’ f’r youse to come an’ steer ’im home.”