XIII
THE GREEN CAP BONFIRE
“What are you fellows going to do in the summer vacation?”
It was Ollie McKnight who wanted to know, and he had just come in from the gymnasium showers where he had been cooling off after a lively practice with the Freshman team; scrimmages which, in the warm afternoon, were a little like sessions in a Turkish bath.
There were various answers from the half-dozen Freshmen lounging in the big room at Mother Grant’s which had been occupied for nearly half of the college year by Larry and Purdick. Welborn, the big Aggie, said he was going home to Missouri to work on the farm. Wally Dixon said his father was building an addition to his packing plant in Kansas City, and that he’d probably have a job wheelbarrowing concrete, or something of that sort. Cal Rogers made a similar response. His father was a contractor, and he, Cal, supposed there was a wheelbarrow or a shovel or a pick waiting for him at his home town in Iowa.
“How about you two Timanyoni Twins?” McKnight asked, tossing the question to Dick Maxwell and Larry.
“Work for me, too, if I can find anything to do,” Larry said; and Dick wrinkled his nose at McKnight.
“You’ll have to stay and see Commencement through for the rest of us, Knighty,” he said. “We’re all too industrious to hang around here for doings where Freshmen have to stick on the side lines and don’t get a look-in.”
“That’s the way of it,” little Purdick put in. “Commencement’s no Freshman game. Do you stay, Knighty?”
“Not on your life. I’ve got a job, too, strange as it may seem. It’s northern Minnesota and the iron country for mine. While you fellows are doing your little summer chores all over the lot you can get a long-distance snap-shot of me down in some open cut in the Mesaba, chucking coal into the tummy of a steam shovel, or something of that sort.”
“Yes, I think I see you with overalls on!” said Rogers sarcastically. “You’ll be doing a cross-country run in a million-dollar buzz-wagon, or sailing a brass-mounted yacht up the Maine coast, or something like that. I know you, Knighty.”