But the Underhill tribe—new-crop rich, somebody had called them—was another matter. Of course, Bryant Underhill, Sheddon Freshman, wasn’t responsible for what his father did; but he was evidently willing to have sins enough of his own to answer for.
Then, on the other side, here was little Purdick, type of the down-trodden; spiteful and vindictive; the stuff out of which anarchists are made. Larry drew a long breath. Even in this early stage of it, college life was opening up some pretty large fields.
As to the Underhill threat—that he, Larry Donovan, was to be forced to leave Sheddon—Larry dismissed this promptly. Quite likely Underhill, helped by his own set, might try to start something; but, if so, he wouldn’t get anywhere with it.
That was the way Larry left it when he went to bed that night; and by morning he had forgotten the threat. But the morning ushered in a day to be marked in the calendar with a letter in charcoal black; a day in which everything seemed to go wrong end to.
It began in “Practical Mechanics.” In Sheddon three of the engineering courses—Electrical, Mechanical and Civil—include so many hours a week of shop work. At that moment Larry’s section was in the blacksmith’s shop; fifty students at fifty forges doing actual blacksmithing, under an instructor who was himself a skilled workman.
Having grown up with tools and forges and machinery, Larry thought of the shop work as an easy walk-over, and so it had been up to this day of helpless botchings. But now he couldn’t seem to get anything right. The hour was given to welding, and the metal simply wouldn’t weld. Larry cleaned his fire again and again; put it out once and built it over afresh; and still he made nothing but botches.
“You’ll have to do better than this, Donovan,” warned the instructor, at the close of the futile hour. Then he added something that wasn’t quite deserved. “You fellows who have had a bit of outside shop experience mustn’t think you know it all. I can’t give you anything better than a cipher on this morning’s work.”
With this for a send-off it wasn’t very strange that the entire day went wrong. Larry blew up in English, went to pieces in Physics, made a mess of his drawing hour, and even stumbled in Math.—in the very lesson in which he had successfully coached his “lame dogs.”
“This sure has been one beautiful day!” he growled to Dick, when they were settled in their room for the evening. “I’ve gone bunk on everything I’ve touched!”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Dick easily. “Everybody has a day like that once in a while. You just got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning; that’s all.”