“Queer how I came to make such a bonehead crack as that,” he muttered, as he walked back across the campus; and when he reached his room and found everybody gone, and Dick—for a wonder—in bed and sound asleep, he looked on the study table for the demonstration sheet, meaning to correct the slip.
Oddly enough, the sheet wasn’t to be found. He had either misplaced it, or it had disappeared during his absence. Since it was wrong, anyhow, he did not search very long or carefully; instead, he sat down and painstakingly made another sheet, correcting the error that had appeared in the original; did that, and then went to bed and forgot the incident.
But the next day in class he was pointedly reminded of it. Blackboard demonstrations were called for and Problem 754 was given out. Having the processes at his finger-ends, Larry got through quickly and returned to his seat. Once there, it was only natural that he should look on to see how the other members of the section were getting along. To his astonishment he saw that three of the blackboard workers were demonstrating the problem exactly as he had done it on the sheet of paper that had disappeared; copying it precisely, with the x plus y error and all!
On a bit of paper torn from his scratch pad Larry jotted down the names of the men who were apparently copying from the lost sheet, and that evening, after supper, he asked Dick if he knew the names of the Freshmen who had already been pledged to the Zeta Omegas.
“Sure I do,” was the ready reply. “There are seven of us. Got a list somewhere. Here she is: I’ll call ’em off.”
Without explaining anything, Larry took out the list he had made in class and checked it silently as Dick read from his list. It came out exactly as he thought it would; the three men whose names he had written down were among the pledges to the Omegs. The double mystery of the disappearance of the faulty demonstration, and its reappearance in three separate places on the blackboards, was solved. Lansing had merely pocketed the solution, which he supposed was the correct one, and had given it to at least three of the Freshman pledges to his own fraternity.
It was altogether in keeping with Larry’s make-up that he did not explain his reason for wishing to know the names of the Omeg pledges; that Dick’s query as to what he was driving at should be given a “turn-off” answer. But the incident revived all those earlier and antagonistic questionings about the fraternities. Twist and turn it as he would, he couldn’t make Lansing’s action square with his own ideas of fairness.
But he was not quite fair himself in charging the act of one fellow up to a whole fraternity, or rather to fraternities as a whole—though this he did not realize. As he summed it up, it amounted to just this: if any member of a frat was able to “get by,” all the other members could get good marks without working for them; which, when you come to look at it, was putting a part for the whole with a vengeance—arguing a suit of clothes from a small bunch of wool on the sheep’s back, as you might say.
He did not go so far as to say that the incident would determine his action when, or if, the bid should be made. Nevertheless, it did set him balancing again on the fence of indecision. But, after all, it was little Purdick who gave him the push in the direction in which he was finally to fall.