“Did—did she call you that?” he stammered, clawing desperately to gain time.
“Yes. She said Ollie had been calling me that in his letters home.”
“Just some of Knighty’s foolishment, I guess,” said Larry. “He’s taken that way sometimes.”
The reply seemed to satisfy Purdick. Anyway, he didn’t ask any more ticklish questions, then, or later when they were together in their room after supper, hustling into their oldest clothes to take part in the Freshman cap-burning, which was scheduled for eight o’clock on the campus.
Purdick had said at first that he wouldn’t go to the cap-burning; meaning thereby that he was still clinging to some of the old prejudices and was disposed to hold aloof from mingling with the class as a body. Though Larry had had prejudices enough of his own at the beginning of the year, it was he who had finally persuaded Purdick not to spoil the whole year by being “stuffy,” as he phrased it, at the very end of things.
“Reckon the Soffies’ll make any bad breaks?” Purdick asked, struggling into a shop jumper to take the place of his cast-off coat.
“They’d better not,” said Larry grimly. “We walloped them last fall and we can do it again, if we have to. But the fellows tell me that the Soffie interference at the cap-burnings has been dying out. I guess they won’t monkey with us to-night.”
Larry’s prediction proved to be a true one. When they reached the rendezvous on the campus, the big bonfire was already blazing, and the men of their class were gathering in full force for the final ceremony of their year as Freshmen. Though the cap-burning is strictly a Freshman rite, the other classes were out to look on, but there was no attempt made to interfere with the programme.
College songs were sung, the Sheddon series given, and Wally Dixon, who, besides being a promising full-back, was pretty generally known as the class joker, made a speech in which he paid what you might call left-handed compliments to every fellow in the class whose name he could remember. After Dixon had worked off every joke, old or new, that he could think of, the men formed in line, single file, and marched solemnly around the big fire. At the third circling the green caps were flung into the blaze one by one as the procession passed a given point, and the final event of the Freshman year was over.
It was at the moment of dispersal, after the last cap had gone up in smoke, that Dick halted Purdick and Larry.