“Couldn’t he?” Larry said; but that is all he did say. And when Dick would have gone on to talk more about the present-moment sad state of affairs, the “shark” stuck his nose in a book and seemed to have lost all interest in the subject of his critical standing—or his no-standing—in the Registrar’s records.
But the next morning, in the shop-work period, he was as sharp-eyed as a cornered rat. His job—“exercise,” they called it—that morning was to turn a piece of round shafting to fit the hole in a pulley. Lathe work was one of the things he had learned fairly well in the old home railroad shop, and he ran the roughing chip in a few minutes. Setting the tool for the finishing chip, he stopped the lathe and turned to the bench behind him to try the gauge in the pulley-hole. As he did so, somebody passed between him and his lathe, and he looked up quickly. It was Crawford.
That was enough to make him extra cautious. Before starting the lathe again he examined the reading of the micrometer scale on the tool-rest. The mischief had been done. The tool had been advanced, just the least little fraction in the world, but it was enough. If he had let the tool run without resetting, the piece of work would have been spoiled.
With this for a starter, he not only kept his eye on Crawford during the entire period; he also put the fellow next to him on the watch. Three separate times the “lame dog” set traps for him into which he would have blundered helplessly if he hadn’t been forewarned. Once, in a screw-cutting exercise, the gears were changed on his lathe, and it had been done so deftly that he wouldn’t have believed it if the gears themselves hadn’t proved it. Again, it was a sly loosening of the tail-stock clamp, which would have let the work fall out when the lathe was started. Lastly, it was a “cut-in” on the wiring of the lathe motor, which would probably have burned out the motor if the current had been switched on.
Larry, seething inwardly like a pot ready to boil over, corrected the sabotage in each case before any harm was done, held on grimly, and said nothing. Before the shop period was over, the psychological reaction had begun to set in. Now that he knew that the fault wasn’t his own; hadn’t been his own at all; he was able to take a fresh grip upon himself. Gorman, the shop instructor, gave him the final little upward boost when he came around to examine and stamp the work of the period.
“Now, that is something like it, Donovan,” he said, in warm approval. “Glad to see that you’re getting back to your old form. You get ‘tens’ all around, this time. Keep it up and you’ll work off some of the discredits you’ve been earning.”
It was on the tip of Larry’s tongue to tell the instructor the real reason for the discredits, but again he held himself in. The matter, as it stood, lay between himself and Crawford—and possibly Underhill—and he set his teeth upon a frowning resolve to make the plotters answer to him and not to the faculty.
With the mystery of his stumblings thus completely solved, he went to his other assignments for the day with the handicap lifted. Straight “A’s” were his grades for that day, and his various instructors marveled as much over his sudden “come-back” as they had over his equally sudden slump.
It was at the close of the gymnasium half-hour, late in the afternoon, that he caught Crawford. The spoiler of records was on his way to his room, which was in a street reached most easily by cutting across a field lying back of the campus. Larry tried to keep cool; meant to keep perfectly cool; but his hand shook a little when he laid it on Crawford’s shoulder. “I’ll walk a piece with you,” was all he permitted himself to say; and as if some inner sense was telling him that something was about to happen, the big-bodied, hulking culprit kept step in silence.
After they had crossed the stile into the field, and were thus off the university grounds, Larry wheeled short upon the sham “lame dog.”