A chorus of “Noes” gave emphasis to his protest and appeal.
“This time, though,” he went on to explain, “we are to keep together. No matter if you are in love with the sweetest girl on earth and can’t be alone much under the University rules, you are not to wander off when we get out of bounds and not come around to the main party again until lunch time and then go off and not return till it is time to come home. What have you to say about it, Brother Borden?”
“Pa” Borden, thus appealed to, raised his pompous head, cleared his throat after the best mode of the orator, and said,
“I’m married myself and maybe shouldn’t have much to say on the matter. I agree with everything’s been said: agree with it hard!” and to give oratorical force to his last word, he brought his plump fist down on the centre table, thereby spilling half the water out of the glass which held in it a sprig of geranium.
A representative of the Benedicts having been heard, Thropper, as representing the unmarried was asked for his opinion. He replied,
“Of course we ought to keep together. I’m certain of it, Mr. Chairman. That’s all I need to say!”
At nine o’clock the excursionists started for the river forty-five people strong. To prove the sincerity of the social aspect of the excursion, Thropper and the other lovers separated themselves from their beloveds and walked, sacrificially, either with other young women or mingled freely with the male members of the party! Thus two by two and three by three we walked down the rutted, soggy lane past the root-fenced sheep pastures where the woolly young lambs squeaked and bleated like crying children, down past the grove where the wood-choppers were measuring cord wood; past dismal, wind-swept forests of burnt stumps and rusty underbrush, over which desolation huge vultures soared, and pivoted themselves in wait for prey; past clayey roads over which mud boats were dragged by struggling horses and oxen, past pig-pastures torn up by the sniffing snouts of the ruminants. Then we entered a fresh, dampish wood-path which led us along the rocky bed of a river over which a thin stream of water churned with great energy as if to impress us with its importance. At last we entered a cleared grass space over which the sun held itself and lighted gloriously the deep pool of water the river had become. Here we deposited our lunch boxes and began to arrange our games. So far the party had remained one, much to the admiration of Brock. But now, after the lunch boxes had been unloaded, a rearrangement of the party began to take place. Thropper, who had been walking and talking with me, hurried over to the side of his beloved, and said:
“There’s a magic tree farther along the path, growing right through a big boulder, about which there’s a legend of Indians. I’ll tell you about it!”
That was all. They two passed out of sight while the angry Brock gazed speechlessly after them. That was the signal for other couples who wanted to see the “magic tree,” and to such an extent did the defection of the lovers take place, that before long only two couples remained with the bachelors to share the games we tried to play.
By the lunch hour, however, they came from their expeditions from this side and that, unapologetic for leaving us, came to eat their lunches and then go off again, paying no heed to Brock’s impassioned appeal to their esprit de corps. When the hour for the return to the University arrived, the couples returned and then either went ahead, arm in arm, or loafed behind, immersed in their own thoughts; leaving us bachelors to amuse ourselves by bantering flings at them, which, however, were no more than peas aimed at the mailed shell of an armadillo.