“Hello, old scout!” said Larry in a cheerful growl. “Thought maybe you’d be showing up. Drag out that easy-chair and flop. Had a tough day?”
The undersized one tried to laugh his weariness off.
“If you ever have to work any part of your way through, don’t you take a restaurant for it,” he advised; adding, “I don’t mind waiting on table and having to refuse the tips—I’m sort o’ case-hardened to that now. But the dish-washing sure does get next to me.”
“I’ll bet,” said Larry. “At home I was lucky; have a sister two years younger than I am. But that’s all that saved me. Stuck on the trig, again?”
“I’m always stuck on the trig. If I didn’t love machinery so well, I’d think I’d made the mistake of my life in coming to Sheddon. Yet the High School Math. didn’t bother me so much.”
“Pull up your chair and let’s have a crack at it,” said Larry. “I looked it over just after supper, and it isn’t so awfully rocky, this time.”
With the trigonometry lesson but fairly begun, another of the lame ones dropped in; then a third and fourth. Larry didn’t “baby” the mental mendicants—not any; on the contrary, with the exception of little Purdick, he was gruffly sarcastic with them, calling them cripples, and demanding to know how long it was going to be before they’d throw the crutches away. It was the wise thing to do, but Larry didn’t do it because he was wise; it was chiefly impatience with a bunch of fellows the majority of whom hadn’t made the most of their preparatory advantages while they had them.
Purdick, the first to come, was the last to go. After the others had dropped out one by one, he told Larry why he was lingering.
“You’ve been rattling good to me, Donovan, and there’s something I ought to tell you,” was the way he began the thing that had to be said.
“All right; spill it,” said Larry.