“What’s a ducking or two in the snow? Haven’t I seen you dive unflinchingly into iced swimming pools? Give me a few dabs of snow every time.
“I’m afraid the fellows are apt to put you down as a poor sport. I must tell you, that is the main reason I insisted on your going north to school ... you were becoming too self-centered. Your boy friends here knew you too well. They were humoring your weaknesses. Don’t write me, son, unless it’s about your triumphs. After all, you know, you’re a Markham ... and, while a Markham may have his faults, he doesn’t quit....”
Reed read and re-read what he considered to be an amazing letter. His apparently easygoing, soft-spoken father had suddenly spit fire. No mincing of words here—straight from the shoulder stuff. Even the South, it seemed, could be cold and unfeeling on occasion. Reed bit his lips and slipped the letter in a drawer of his desk.
“I won’t write Pop at all,” he said, with a flare of hurt Southern pride. “But I’ll stick this out, somehow ... or die trying!”
Sam Hartley, of all the fellows Reed had so much as a speaking acquaintance with, became the most detested. As the winter tightened its grip and ice and snow sports were more and more indulged in, the taunting Sam seemed to personify the aggravation of the entire school in its relation to the student from the South.
“If he doesn’t leave me alone pretty soon, something’s going to happen!” Reed decided one day after submitting to considerable torment. Among other things he had been caught and forced to dive head first into a five foot drift, being first compelled to climb to the top of a fence post as the diving point. Such stunts as this but increased Reed’s hatred for snow and further outraged his estimate of northern fellows.
“They’re nothing but a bunch of roughnecks!” Reed denounced in private, “who take most of their delight in making me miserable! How I’d like to get even with the crowd of them!”
If wishes had been the father of thoughts, Reed would have been given the power to douse each of the two hundred fellows in the ice-caked water fountain which graced the campus. He would have shouted in fiendish delight at their discomfiture, quite willingly forgetting the supposed propensities of the gentleman. Even a gentleman, Reed had about made up his mind, could give vent, under due provocation, to an expression of righteous indignation. To make the instance more concrete, his patience was being tried to the point of exasperation.
“I wonder what I might be able to do to turn the tables?” Reed commenced to ask himself.