Dick and Larry: Freshmen

by Francis Lynde

Cautiously, and in darkness that was almost thick enough to be felt, and also in momentary fear that this second bridge would go out and leave them struggling again, they clambered over the floating islands of wreckage, pulled themselves up to the almost submerged railroad structure, and groped their way on hands and knees over the cross-ties until they found that they were crawling in the mud of the mainland.

Here Dick dropped like a stone, and Larry had to work over him for quite a little while before he was able to get up and stumble on. Luckily, they found themselves on their own side of the river, and by making a long circuit over the railroad track, they got back to the college suburb.

Soaked, bedraggled and thinly clothed as they were, they were still unwilling to quit before they had learned what the broken levee had done to things. Upon reaching the streets of the devastated area; streets now crowded with anxious and curious spectators; they found that while the levee was gone, the big bridge wrecked, and the property damage was immense, there were no lives lost, so far as anybody could tell, though there was a spreading rumor that two of the college men had been last seen going to a house which had been swept away when the levee broke.

“That will b-be us,” shivered Dick, who was too cold and tired to be careful of his English. “They’ll find out by to-morrow or next week that we didn’t get drowned after all. Let’s go hunt us a place where there is a fire and something hot to drink. I’m frozen just about solid.”

That was the wind-up of the night of catastrophes for the “Timanyoni Twins.” But there were consequences which were to bear fruit a little farther along. A grateful citizenry, appreciative of the good work done in the night of peril by the student body of Old Sheddon, held a town meeting and voted to erect a much-needed addition to the college gymnasium as a sort of memorial. On a bronze plate set in the wall were to be inscribed the names of the students who had rendered the most signal service, and Larry, looking over the blue-prints some week or so later with a bunch of the men of his own section in the Mechanical, flamed out wrathfully when he saw the names of Underhill and Crawford included in the list.

Neither he nor Dick had said anything about the discovery they had made in the last of the deserted houses, but this inclusion of the two who had taken the canoe without a thought for what had become of the man or men who had tied it to the porch was the back-breaking straw.

“Fellows,” he broke out hotly, “it’s up to us to see to it that two names are taken off of this thing. Underhill and Crawford were not helping; they were simply looting!”

If things were always done right end to in this world, a charge thus openly made would have been investigated, and the guilty ones, if proved guilty, would have been punished. But, undergraduate human nature being what it is, the charge never got itself formally before the faculty or the student council. What did happen was only a sort of half-measure. A couple of the fellows who had heard Larry’s angry accusation were curious enough to look for evidences of looting in Crawford’s and Underhill’s rooms.

The evidences were not lacking. Since the dwellings in the flooded area were those of the poor, there was little in them to tempt a thief who would steal for the intrinsic value of the things stolen. But both Underhill and Crawford had that distorted sense of humor which is sometimes found in fellows who decorate their rooms with sign-boards and other property stolen from their rightful owners, and among the ornaments in Underhill’s room were several framed mottoes in cheap frames, “God Bless Our Home,” “What Is Home Without a Mother,” things like that, the very nature of which in such surroundings sufficiently betrayed their origin.

So Larry’s indignant charge got itself corroborated in the gossip of the campus, and Merkle and two or three other sober-minded upperclassmen took it up, with the result that the names of the two looters disappeared from the drawings of the proposed memorial bronze.