And when it came clicking into those offices to which little Green had wired shortly after noon, the desk men in charge recognized the incompleteness of the "A. P. story," and forthwith telegraphed their unknown correspondent for more. Regular correspondents were totally disregarded. Little Green was supreme; and no one realized that supremacy more keenly than little Green himself. He was the king of the night with his story; and sheet after sheet he filled with his jagged, irregular chirography, and the dreamy operator kept up with him.
But there came an end to his work at last, as there comes an end to all things; and when the end came in this particular case, little Green whistled, slipped his pencil into his pocket and sauntered out of the telegraph box jauntily. He did not recall until he reached the office of the 'Varsity News that he had not eaten since morning. He glanced at his watch. He would write the "story" for his own paper now—and then—Supper.
All of which may explain to the reader of this veracious tale why it was that the president of the University, as he glanced over his Providence Journal in Providence the next morning, suddenly started in his chair, and calling for a telegraph blank sent this message to the dean of the Department of Literature, Science, and the Arts:
"Take no action in Catherwood case. Sift it. Leave for Ann Arbor at once."
And likewise it may account for the sudden exclamation of the dean himself, as at breakfast, earlier that same morning in Ann Arbor, his eye chanced to fall upon a column-and-one-half story with a two column display head, that blazed forth to all the world many details unknown to him in the case of Frederick Edward Catherwood.
He had attended the faculty meeting the night before, when the case was threshed out to the finest grain, and he had heard no such explanation of the affair as stared at him now in cold black type from the front page of his morning paper.
A secret secret society in the University, the function of which was to haze every one big or little who for one reason or another, might fall under its bann! He had never heard of any such organization. And yet—and yet——
Oh, little Green! Oh, little Green! Little did you dream to what ill end your rare invention, your insane imaginings, would result!
For, after partaking that night of a luncheon and dinner rolled into one big steak in "Tuts," little Green sought his room where he slept the sleep of vigorous youth till a beam of the winter sun, shining through his alcove window, fell athwart his eyes and wakened him.
As for Catherwood, he had not been commanded to appear before the faculty. Indeed, of what transpired at that momentous meeting he never knew; that is to say, definitely, but every one learned, in a general way, something of the wordy resolutions that were passed and the learned opinions that were there put forth, all of which tended to no purpose save to obscure more thickly, rather than illumine more brilliantly, the strange affair.