“I can’t stand for that—from you, Dick,” was all the explanation that was offered; and, of course, Dick was instantly penitent.
“I’m a liar!” he blurted out contritely. “Nobody knows better than I do that there isn’t a single yellow drop of blood in you, Larry. There goes a bunch of our fellows now—let’s run.”
The hazing episode proved to be merely an incident. Enough Freshmen were rallied to rush the field barn in Adams’s back forty; the artistic Sophomores were scattered; and the victim, who proved to be the big, husky “Aggie,” Welborn, who roomed at Mrs. Grant’s, was rescued. Of course, Welborn was a sad sight. The artists had stripped him and he was well daubed with green paint. Nevertheless, he was cheerfully triumphant. “I got five of ’em, b’jing! before they got me,” he gloated, with a grin that the green paint made peculiarly hideous. “Whadda you reckon’ll take it off?”
“Turpentine,” suggested somebody in the mob of rescuers; and two of the light-footed ones ran for a drug store.
With the worst of the paint removed, Larry and Dick took Welborn home, where they commandeered the bath-room and worked over him until he was well-nigh blistered but clean.
“Gosh! talk about Turkish baths!” gurgled the big victim, as they were sousing him for the final time in the tub of hot soap-suds. “I’ll say this beats ’em a mile high! Wait till we got those Soffies at the bridge! I’m goin’ to take a stick along and notch it every time I put one of ’em to sleep.”
“Well?” said Dick to Larry, after they had tucked the cheerful victim into his bed, and were once more in their own room, “changed your mind any?”
“Not a minute’s worth!” was the gruff reply. “It’s all tom-foolishness, and I don’t want any of it in mine.”
“But you’ll turn out for the bridge scrap, won’t you?—for the honor of the class?”
“Not so you could notice it,” Larry refused; and with that he stuck his face into a book.