Larry shook his head. “No; and I’m not likely to. I’m out here to play foot-ball.” And, as Coach Brock put him in just here, he did play foot-ball; played it so well that the scattering of more or less enthusiastic student spectators in the stands gave him ear-splitting credit by name every time he scored.
It was after the practice game that MacClay invited some of his friends and the members of the ’Varsity to come around to the little college inn, “At the Sign of the Samovar,” to meet his uncle and cousin; and Dick, who was watching things like a hawk hovering over a chicken yard, noticed that the team invitation was given to the various members individually, and that MacClay dodged Larry. Dick’s suspicions were aroused at once, but all he did at the time was to ask Larry to come over to the Samovar later in the afternoon; did this without saying anything about the impromptu reception for MacClay’s guests—and without saying anything to MacClay.
At the appointed time there was a gathering of the invited ones in the club room of the little inn, with Dick—who had naturally been included in the bidding, since his father was the general manager of the railroad of which Mr. Holcombe was the vice-president—among them. Apart from this, however, Dick knew the Holcombes well from having spent part of a summer with them at a mountain resort in Colorado.
It was rather early in the reception affair that Bess Holcombe got Dick aside to ask him a question.
“Tell me, Dickie,” she said; “who was the ‘Donovan’ who was playing at right half and scored so many times. Surely he isn’t our Donovan, is he?”
Dick knew quite well what she meant by the personal pronoun possessive. On that never-to-be-forgotten day in the mountain canyon less than a year before, the Pullman car, holding only Miss Holcombe, four women and the porter, had slipped its brakes for a runaway down the grade, and it was Larry’s quick wit and cool courage in chasing it with one of the construction engines that had saved the lives of the imperilled ones.
“He is our Larry, all right,” Dick replied. “Didn’t you know that he came here to Old Sheddon with me?”
“There are lots of things I don’t know about him,” was the quick rejoinder. “For one thing, I never could find out why he ran away that day last summer and wouldn’t let us even so much as thank him for saving our lives.”
“Bashful,” Dick laughed, though he knew very well that it was grouchiness and workingman prejudice rather more than bashfulness that had made Larry take to the woods on that memorable afternoon.