“The puppy’s. I’m going to call him Muggins!”
Dick snorted wrathfully and went back to sleep.
Trevor fondled the slumberous puppy. “Isn’t he an unfeeling brute, Muggins?” he whispered. And Muggins thumped his tail affirmatively, sleepily.
The following night, when all was silent in the dormitory, a form bundled against the weather in a greatcoat, and followed by a second form, vastly smaller in outline and wearing only the coat that nature had provided him with, might have been seen—but were not—tiptoeing from study No. 16 and descending the creaking stairs. The door was locked, but the key was there, and in a moment the two forms had vanished into outer darkness and the portal had closed again.
As the discerning reader has no doubt already surmised, the mysterious forms were those of Trevor and Muggins.
Trevor had concluded that Muggins’s health demanded more exercise than his puppyship was getting, and so on the preceding night and again to-night Muggins, at the end of the steel chain, had been surreptitiously conveyed from the building for a stroll about the yard. It was bitterly cold and Trevor shivered as he ambled slowly toward the gymnasium followed by the dog; but since Muggins’s health demanded exercise Muggins should have it, though the thermometer stood at miles below zero, which luckily it didn’t to-night. Around the gymnasium plodded Trevor, slipping, sliding on the icy walks; around trotted Muggins, sniffing, shivering in the nipping wind. Then down the path by Bradley to Turner, around the corner of Turner, and——
Alas, tragedy was in the air that night!
Trevor paused, listening. Footsteps sounded loudly, frostily at a little distance, and in the darkness a dim form loomed up from the direction of the gate. It was but the work of an instant to slink into the recess of the building made by the protruding entrance, and to pull Muggins after him. The footsteps drew nearer. One of the professors returning late from the village, Trevor told himself. The form came abreast of him, a scant two yards distant, and was almost past his hiding-place when Muggins awoke to the demands of the occasion.
Muggins, despite his tender age, was valor to the tip of his wagging tail. He heard strange footsteps; he saw a strange form; he feared an attack on his master. But, what ho! was not he, Muggins, there? Certainly! And—
Away went the chain from Trevor’s numbed fingers; away went Muggins, dashing to the fray like a knight of old!