After briefly visiting their homes and having reunion suppers there with their families, the boys reassembled in their old meeting-place, Will Moreraud’s room over a store. There they made out all their accounts, trying hard to make them look like those prepared by Mr. Kennedy’s bookkeepers in New Orleans. They were then ready to settle, on the next day, with all the owners of the cargo they had carried.
When all was arranged, Phil figured a while, and then said:—
“Fellows, we’ve netted a profit of exactly four hundred and fifty dollars clear, by our trip. That’s ninety dollars apiece to add to our college fund. The money’s in bank to my credit. I’ll draw a check for each fellow’s share.”
When he had delivered to each of his comrades a check for ninety dollars, he rose and stretched himself and said, with accents of relief:—
“Now I’m not ‘It’ any longer.”
“Oh, yes, you are,” said Irv. “We fellows are going to stick together now, you know. There’s the study club, you remember. That will need an ‘It,’ and you’ll be the ‘It,’ won’t he, boys?”
“You bet!” said all in a breath.
When Irv and Ed reported the voyage and the study club plan to Mrs. Dupont, she entered enthusiastically into the scheme.
“Don’t go to school at all this year,” she said. “Come to me instead. When bright boys have made up their minds to study as hard as they can without any forcing, all they need is a tutor to help them when they need help. I’ll be the tutor. The old schoolroom in my house, where I taught you boys and your fathers the multiplication table long before graded schools were thought of in this town, is unoccupied. Everything in it is just as it was when you boys were with me. I’ll have the maids dust it up, and it shall be the home of the ‘Study Club.’”