What year was it? Why, ninety-ump-teen. What? That's right, you got out the year before. I remember they held your diploma until you paid for the library cornerstone that your class stole and cut up into paper-weights. Well, by not staying the next year you missed the most unsuccessful funeral that was ever held in the history of Siwash or anywhere else. It was one of the very few funerals on record in which the corpse succeeded in licking the mourners. I've got a small scar from it now. You may think you're going home to that valuable baby of yours, but you are not. You'll hear me out. I haven't talked with a Siwash man for a month, and all of these Hale and Jarhard and Stencilmania fellows give me an ashy taste in my mouth when I talk with them. It's about as much fun talking college days with a fellow from another school as it is to talk ranching with a New England old maid; and when I get hold of a Siwash man you can bet I hang on to him as long as my talons will stick. You just sit right there and start another Wheeling conflagration while I tell you how we killed Hogboom to make a Siwash holiday.
I helped kill him myself. It was my first murder. It was an awful thing to do, but we were desperate men. It was spring—in May—and not one of us had a cut left. You know how unimportant your cuts are in the fall when you know that you can skip classes ten times that year without getting called up on the green carpet and gimleted by the Faculty. Ten cuts seem an awful lot when you begin. You throw 'em away for anything. You cut class to go downtown and buy a cigarette. You cut class to see a dog fight. I've even known a fellow to cut a class in the fall because he had to go back to the room and put on a clean collar. But, oh, how different it is in May, when you haven't a cut left to your name and the Faculty has been holding meetings on you, anyway; when classroom is a jail and the campus just outside the window is a paradise, green and sunshiny and fanned by warm breezes—excuse these poetries. And you can sit in your class in Evidences of Christianity—of which you knew as much as a Chinese laundryman does of force-feed lubrication—and look out of the window and see your best girl sitting on the grass with some smug oyster who has saved up his cuts. How I used to hate these chaps who saved up their cuts till spring and then took my girl out walking while I went to classes! Is there anything more maddening, I'd like to know, than to sit before a big, low window trying to follow a psychology recitation closely enough to get up when called on, and at the same time watch five girls, with all of whom you are dead in love, strolling slowly off into the bright distance with five job-lot male beings who are dull and uninteresting and just cold-blooded enough to save their cuts until the springtime? If there is I've never had it.
In this spring of umpty-steen it seemed as if only one ambition in the world was worth achieving—that was to get out of classes. Most of us had used up our cuts long ago. The Faculty is never any too patient in the spring, anyhow, and a lot of us were on the ragged edge. I remember feeling very confidently that if I went up before that brain trust in the Faculty room once more and tried to explain how it was that I was giving absent treatment to my beloved studies, said Faculty would take the college away from me and wouldn't let me play with it never no more. And that's an awful distressing fear to hang over a man who loves and enjoys everything connected with a college except the few trifling recitations which take up his time and interfere with his plans. It hung over five of us who were trying to plan some way of going over to Hambletonian College to see our baseball team wear deep paths around their diamond. We were certain to win, and as the Hambletonians hadn't found this out there was a legitimate profit to be made from our knowledge—profit we yearned for and needed frightfully. I wonder if these Wall Street financiers and Western railroad men really think they know anything about hard times? Why, I've known times to be so hard in May that three men would pool all their available funds and then toss up to see which one of them would eat the piece of pie the total sum bought. I've known Seniors to begin selling their personal effects in April—a pair of shoes for a dime, a dress suit for five dollars—and to go home in June with a trunk full of flags and dance programs and nothing else. I've known students to buy velveteen pants in the spring and go around with big slouch hats and very long hair—not because they were really artistic and Bohemian, but because it was easier to buy the trousers and have them charged than it was to find a quarter for a haircut.
That's how busted live college students with unappreciative dads can get in the spring. That's how busted we were; and there was Hambletonian, twenty miles away, full of money and misguided faith in their team. If we could scrape up a little cash we could ride over on our bicycles and transfer the financial stringency to the other college with no trouble at all. But it was a midweek game and not one of us had a cut left. That was why we murdered Hogboom.
It happened one evening when we were sitting on the front porch of the Eta Bita Pie house. That was the least expensive thing we could do. We had been discussing girls and baseball and spring suits, and the comparative excellence of the wheat cakes at the Union Lunch Counter and Jim's place. But whatever we talked about ran into money in the end and we had to change the subject. There's mighty little a poor man can talk about in spring in college, I can tell you. We discussed around for an hour or two, bumping into the dollar mark in every direction, and finally got so depressed that we shut up and sat around with our heads in our hands. That seemed to be about the only thing to do that didn't require money.
"We'll have to do something desperate to get to that game," said Hogboom at last. Hogboom was a Senior. He ranked "sublime" in football, "excellent" in baseball, "good" in mandolin, "fair" in dancing, and from there down in Greek, Latin and Mathematics.
"Intelligent boy," said Bunk Bailey pleasantly; "tell us what it must be. Desperate things done to order, day or night, with care and thoroughness. Trot out your desperate thing and get me an axe. I'll do it."
"Well," said Hogboom, "I don't know, but it seems to me that if one of us was to die maybe the Faculty would take a day off and we could go over to Hambletonian without getting cuts."
"Fine scheme; get me a gun, Hogboom." "Do you prefer drowning or lynching?" "Kill him quick, somebody." "Look pleasant, please, while the operator is working." "What do you charge for dying?" Oh, we guyed him good and plenty, which is a way they have at old Harvard and middle-aged Siwash and Infant South Dakota University and wherever two students are gathered together anywhere in the U. S. A.
Hogboom only grinned. "Prattle away all you please," he said, "but I mean it. I've got magnificent facilities for dying just now. I'll consider a proposition to die for the benefit of the cause if you fellows will agree to keep me in cigarettes and pie while I'm dead."