When Nibs appeared on the campus in the morning, he was besieged by a horde of the faithful, who wanted to know if the weather was "going to make any difference."
"You bet it won't; not to me," he replied, with a sort of vocal swagger, and with a marked enunciatory underlining of the pronoun.
"You don't mean to say you're going to prance up and down State Street in those dinky flapping white pants of yours, bare-legged, in such weather as this, do you?" inquired Jimmy, with a most perceptible sneer in his voice.
"Yes, I am. I shan't think of the cold," was the brave reply.
"Rah! Rah! Rah! Nibsey!" yelled a little pug-nosed freshman on the edge of the crowd, and the cry was taken up lustily.
"Oh, shut up, you fellows," said Nibs, blushing; "leave your yelling till after the race, can't you?" But he sensed an expansion of his chest, just the same, an expansion that, for the moment, made his waistcoat feel uncomfortably tight.
Meanwhile, Billy Shaw was being besieged in precisely the same manner at another point on the campus. With considerable less than Nibs' braggadocio he informed his followers and backers that so far at least as he was concerned, there would be no postponement of the race. And he, too, was cheered forthwith.
Thurston Hubert, a Law, large with importance,—he had been chosen to fire the pistol for the start—was in the little crowd that surged around Billy. He gave it as his opinion that the weather was "great for a running event—simply great." But by six o'clock the mischievous mercury had dropped another five degrees.
They were a muffled, overcoated lot of young men, who, an hour later, began to gather in State Street.
From all directions they came, and they formed in double line from the Psi Upsilon House to the end of the course, precisely one-quarter of a mile. Waiting, they shouted, jeered one another, spoke disrespectfully of a whimsical Nature that had given them without warning so keen a touch of winter, and otherwise disported as college men have a way of doing, when they are waiting for something to occur.