HICKS MAKES A RASH PROPHECY
"Come on, Butch! Atta boy—some fin, old top! Say, you Beef—you're asleep
at the switch. What time do you want to be called? More pep there,
Monty—bust that little old bulb, Roddy! Aw, rotten! Say, Ballard, your
playing will bring the Board of Health down on you—why don't you bring
your first team out? Umpire? What—do you call that an umpire? Why, he's
a highway robber, a bandit. Put a 'Please Help the Blind' sign on that
hold-up artist!"
Big Butch Brewster, captain of the Bannister College baseball squad,
navigating down the third-floor corridor of Bannister Hall, the Senior
dormitory, laden with suitcases, bat-bags, and other impedimenta, as Mr.
Julius Caesar says, and vastly resembling a bell-hop in action, paused in
sheer bewilderment on the threshold of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.'s, cozy room.
"Hicks!" stormed the bewildered Butch, wrathfully, "what in the name of Sam
Hill are you doing? Are you crazy, you absolutely insane lunatic? This
is a study-hour, and even if you don't possess an intellect, some of the
fellows want to exercise their brains an hour or so! Stop that ridiculous
action."
The spectacle Butch Brewster beheld was indeed one to paralyze that
pachydermic collegian, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., the sunny-souled,
irrepressible Senior, danced madly about on the tiger-skin rug in midfloor,
evidently laboring under the delusion that he was a lunatical Hottentot at
a tribal dance; he waved his arms wildly, like a signaling brakeman, or
howled through a big megaphone, and about his toothpick structure was
strung his beloved banjo, on which the blithesome youth twanged at times an
accompaniment to his jargon:
"Come on, Skeet, take a lead (plunkety-plunk!) Say, d'ye wanta marry
first base—divorce yourself from that sack! (plunk-plunk!) Oh, you
bonehead—steal—you won't get arrested for it! Hi! Yi! Ouch, Butch! Oh,
I'll be good—"
At this moment, the indignant Butch abruptly terminated T. Haviland Hicks,
Jr.'s, noisy monologue by seizing that splinter-youth firmly by the scruff
of the neck and forcibly hurling him on the davenport. Seeing his loyal
class-mate's resemblance to a Grand Central Station baggage-smasher, the
irrepressible Senior forthwith imitated a hotel-clerk:
"Front!" howled the grinning Hicks, to an imaginary bellboy, "Show this
gentleman to Number 2323! Are you alone, sir, or just by yourself? I think
you will like the room-it faces on the coal-chute, and has hot and cold
folding-doors, and running water when the roof leaks! The bed is made once
a week, regularly, and—"
"Hicks, you Infinitesimal Atom of Nothing!" growled big Butch, ominously.
"What were you doing, creating all that riot, as I came down the corridor?
What's the main idea, anyway, of—"
"Heed, friend of my campus days," chortled the graceless Hicks, keeping
a safe distance from his behemoth comrade, "tomorrow-your baseball
aggregation plays Ballard College, at that knowledge-factory, for the
Championship of the State. Because nature hath endowed me with the
Herculean structure of a Jersey mosquito, I am developing a 56-lung-power
voice, and I need practice, as I am to be the only student-rooter at the
game tomorrow! Q.E.D.! And as for any Bannister student, except perhaps
Theophilus Opperdyke and Thor, desiring to investigate the interiors of
their lexicons tonight, I prithee, just periscope the campus."