“Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” chuckled Cooper. “Nobody else wants to ask her. People around here know enough to keep away from Priscilla Kent.”
“Oh, she’s cracked,” stated Piper. “She’s lived here in Oakdale for the last twenty years, and nobody has ever been able to find out much of anything about her. Take a woman who lives alone with only a pet parrot and a monkey for companions, and never associates with the neighbors, and talks like an asylum for the simple-minded, and you have a proposition too baffling for solution even by my trained and highly developed mind. My deduction is——”
“Here comes Roger!” exclaimed Fred Sage. “Let’s ask him what he thinks about the fellow.”
It was the hour of the noon intermission at Oakdale Academy, and, the season being early November, with the atmosphere biting cold, Roger Eliot stepped forward to warm his hands at the radiator, near which hovered the group who were discussing the new boy. Roger was a tall, well-built, somewhat grave-looking chap, whose sober face, however, was occasionally illumined by a rare smile. The son of Urian Eliot, one of the wealthiest and most influential men of the town, Roger, being a natural athlete, was the recognized leader among the academy boys.
“Hello, fellows,” was his pleasant greeting. “Talking football?”
“No,” answered Hayden; “we were discussing that fellow Rodney Grant. We were trying to size him up, and it seems to be practically the universal opinion that he’s a fraud. We doubt if he has ever been west of the Mississippi. What do you think about it?”
“Well,” confessed Roger slowly, “I’ll own up that I don’t know what to, think. Still, I don’t see any reason why he should lie about himself.”
“Some fellers had rather lie than eat,” observed Sile Crane.
“Why shouldn’t he lie about himself?” questioned Cooper. “He’s told some wallopers about everything else. I never heard a fellow who could bust the truth into smithereens the way he can.”
“Oh,” said Eliot, “I know what you mean. When he first struck Oakdale he didn’t have much of anything to say, and you fellows kept at him, asking questions, until I fancy he grew weary and took a notion to sling off a few big yarns for his own amusement.”