When was all this?—how long ago? And was it the rising sun, or the setting, that was shining in on him through the open stable door? He pulled out his watch, the good old reliable timepiece by which his father had once run trains on the home railroad, and which had been given to him as a parting gift when he left for college. Not once since it had been his had he let it run down; but now it had run down, stopping with its hands pointing to half-past nine. His jaw dropped. That must have been half-past nine in the morning!
Larry propped his head in his hands and tried once more to piece the vaguenesses up into some sort of an understandable whole. Was it possible that he had slept through half a night and almost all of a day? Suddenly it came over him with a shock like a bucketing of cold water that this was, or had been, the day for the tests in Math. and Physics—and he had cut not only these, but all his other classes as well!
That shock brought him to his feet with a bound, and he was dismayed to find that he was still wobbly and uncertain when he stood up, and that he had a headache that was worse than any he had ever experienced in his healthy, clear-headed life. This started him off on another line of speculative wondering. What had happened to him in the close little room where he had waited for the return of the hard-faced loafer? Was it possible that the mere reek of the place had made him so drunk that he could sleep eighteen hours on end, and then wake up with his head feeling as big as a bushel basket?
Stumbling out of the cow stable he found himself in a part of the town that he had never visited; the poorer quarter behind the row of saloons in Main Street. The stable, which evidently hadn’t been used for a long time, stood in a neglected back lot fronting upon a dirty alley, and through the alley he made his way to the street and so across the bridge to the college suburb.
Dodging aside as soon as he had crossed the river, he hoped he might be able to reach Mrs. Grant’s and his room without meeting anybody he knew. But at the very last, as he was turning the final corner, he ran into Dick Maxwell and two other members of the Omegs. It was Dick who blocked the way and said: “Just been up to your room to see if you’d been heard from yet. Coach Brock wanted to know where you’d dropped out to. Where’ve you been, and what makes you look as if you’d been pulled backwards through a knot-hole?”
Larry steadied himself with a grip on the corner fence post, and in place of answering the double question, asked one of his own.
“Where were you at eleven o’clock last night, Dick?”
Dick’s reply was prompt.
“Up to about that time I was in the house lounge with Cranny and Stillwell here, chewing Physics with them for the test to-day. After that I was hitting the hay for a home run in my little downy. Why?”
“Nothing,” said Larry, and he went on to the Man-o’-War gate with a great light beginning to filter through the headache clouds. One thing, at least, was clear: the stubble-faced loafer had told a lie cut out of whole cloth. There had been no Dick Maxwell to be knocked down and dragged out and carried home.