Crossing the bridge, a few minutes later, he stopped stock still. “That was it!” he cried. “He kept saying he wouldn’t breathe a word, but he didn’t promise not to write! The mean little fox! My, I’m glad I didn’t do it! I—I’d like to go back and punch his head for him! I wonder if that stamp was a forgery, after all!”
[CHAPTER XIX]
A FALLING OUT
Harry made no mention of his meeting with Cotton. There were moments when he regretted that stamp. Frequently he turned to the space in his big album where it should be mounted and as often sighed his regret. Some time he meant to have one of those stamps, only he would get it without having to play traitor. Meanwhile he delved more furiously than ever into his albums and his envelopes, wrote letters and received them, perused catalogues and lists, and became an earnest student of three different philatelic journals. It seemed to his roommate that the finer the weather became the closer Harry stuck to his room. Arthur growled and threatened and begged, but all to slight purpose. Day by day Arthur, returning from the field, discovered Harry leaning over his albums in a litter of catalogues and stamps, the air redolent of library paste.
About the beginning of the second week in May, when the blue sky was swept clean of clouds and the sunlight just drew you out of doors as a magnet draws steel filings, Arthur’s patience gave way. Threats, he told himself grimly, had lost their virtue. Things had gone wrong all day, and Arthur was in a decidedly bad temper when he got back to the room. Stevie, or Mr. Austin, to give his real name, had hauled him over the coals in chemistry class in the morning—to the signal amusement of his fellows; he had failed miserably at Greek after dinner, and then, to clap the climax, he had broken his favorite vaulting pole at practice. All that was enough to spoil the best temper any one ever had! And now here was that little idiot of a roommate of his disregarding everything he had been told, wallowing around in a room that was a veritable pigsty and that smelled to heaven of that sickening library paste!
Arthur’s patience gave way, and his temper with it. Crossing the room in three bounds, he lifted Harry from his chair, seized the two big albums and the smaller one, and, striding to his closet, opened the door and tossed the books on to the shelf. Then he turned the key in the lock viciously and placed it in his pocket.
From table to closet stretched a gay, vari-colored path of loose stamps. Harry, bewildered, open-mouthed, looked from the litter on the carpet to Arthur. But before he could summon words to express some of the thoughts within him, Arthur took the floor. He had plenty to say himself, and proceeded to say it.
“I told you what I’d do if you didn’t quit,” he began, angrily. “I said I’d pitch those fool books out the window, but if I did you’d sneak them back again. Well, they’re where you won’t get them for awhile, my son, and you can just make up your mind to that! No more stamps for a week, and not then unless you spend a good part of every day outdoors. You’ve got to play tennis and take walks and get some fresh air into your little starving lungs and some color into your little white face, Harry. Now you clear up that mess there and get these stamps off the floor.”
“I want my albums!” said Harry, hotly.