"What?" They shouted together.
"Yeah! One of the fellows saw it. A girl that works at the press copied down the exam and gave it to him."
"What fellow? Where's the exam?"
"I don't know who the guy is, but Hubert Manning saw the exam."
Hugh and Carl were out of their chairs in an instant, and the three boys rushed out of Surrey in search of Manning. They found him in his room telling a mob of excited classmates that he hadn't seen the exam but that Harry Smithson had. Away went the crowd in search of Smithson, Carl and Hugh and Freddy in the midst of the excited, chattering lads. Smithson hadn't seen the exam, but he had heard that Puddy McCumber had a copy.... Freshmen were running up and down stairs in the dormitories, shouting, "Have you seen the exam?" No, nobody had seen the exam, but some of the boys had been told definitely what the questions were going to be. No two seemed to agree on the questions, but everybody copied them down and then rushed on to search for a bona fide copy. They hurried from dormitory to dormitory, constantly shouting the same question, "Have you seen the exam?" There were men in every dormitory with a new list of questions, which were hastily scratched into note-books by the eager seekers. Until midnight the excitement raged; then the campus quieted down as the freshmen began to study the long lists of questions.
"God!" said Carl as he scanned his list hopelessly, "these damn questions cover everything in the course and some things that I know damn well weren't in it. What a lot of nuts we were. Let's go to bed."
"Carl," Hugh wailed despondently, "I'm going to flunk that exam. I can't answer a tenth of these questions. I can't go to bed; I've got to study. Oh, Lord!"
"Don't be a triple-plated jackass. Come on to bed. You'll just get woozy if you stay up any longer."
"All right," Hugh agreed wearily. He went to bed, but many of the boys stayed up and studied, some of them all night.
The examinations were held in the gymnasium. Hundreds of class-room chairs were set in even rows. Nothing else was there, not even the gymnasium apparatus. A few years earlier a wily student had sneaked into the gymnasium the night before an examination and written his notes on a dumbbell hanging on the wall. The next day he calmly chose the seat in front of the dumbbell—and proceeded to write a perfect examination. The annotated dumbbell was found later, and after that the walls were stripped clean of apparatus before the examinations began.