“I’ve been virtuous so long I can’t stand it any longer,” said Winans. “Here we are drilling at baseball, trying for the track team, boning on studies like a lot of slaves, and no fun going on at all. If any of you fellows had any nerve we’d set fire to the main building or tie Prexy in a tennis net and toss him into the lake.”
“Why don’t you blow up the old dormitory or put poison in the food at the mess hall?” inquired Larry wearily. “That seems to be your conception of undergraduate humor.”
“Well,” replied Winans slowly, “before I came up from home the governor spent two or three days telling me how he and his crowd put a wagon load of hay on top of the north dorm on Hallowe’en, how they hitched one professor’s cow to a buggy and drove her through the campus, and a few other delicate pranks. He spent hours bragging about all the devilment he pulled off while he was here at Cascade, and warning me against doing the same.”
“Very proper advice,” remarked Kirkland, who had been buried in his mathematics. “The old gentleman seems to have a very high sense of a student’s duty to his alma mater.”
“Yep,” replied Winans carelessly. “I have a sneaking suspicion that if I go home this term without blowing up a laboratory or assaulting a professor the revered Pater will think I am wasting the advantages of higher education and will be vastly disappointed in me.”
“Let’s pull off something that will wake up the whole school,” suggested little Butler. “Something new and unheard of.”
“What are you nefarious schemers plotting?” asked Kirkland, again climbing down from the heights of pure mathematics to the level of his comrades. “I just caught the drift of your remarks. Who do you want to maltreat?”
“Bartelme,” suggested Butler. “Not that I have any dislike for Bart, but we’ve got to have a victim and he’s so confoundedly dignified we ought to reduce him to the ranks. He’s so important since the Seniors appointed him to have charge of the barracks, he makes Prexy look cheap. Let’s do something to good old Bart.”
“What do you suggest?” inquired Winans, still busy trying to kick the headboard of the bed while stretched flat on his back.
“Let’s dope up his bed with cactus splinters,” suggested Butler hopefully.