"What shall I do?" asked Roy, looking about for an avenue of escape.
"Why," said Harry, laughing enjoyably at his discomfiture, "just stay where you are. I'm the one who gives permission!"
CHAPTER III
A MIDNIGHT HAZING
After the lights were out that night Roy lay for quite a while in his bed in the Senior Dormitory reviewing the day. He was tired as a result of the football practice and he had a lame tendon in his left leg which he believed he had sustained in his flying leap onto the hedge when going to the relief of Angel, and which bothered him a little now that he had stopped using it. But his weariness and soreness hadn't kept him from eating an enormous dinner in the Dining Hall down stairs, any more than it was going to keep him from going to sleep in a few minutes.
During dinner he had begun to feel at home. He had found himself at Mr. Cobb's table, which later on would be weeded out to make room for the football players, and had sat next to Captain Rogers, who had spoken to him several times quite affably, but not about football. The other fellows, too, had shown a disposition to accept him as one of them, if we omit Horace Burlen and Otto Ferris, and by the time Roy had scraped the last morsel of pudding from his dish he had commenced to think that life at Ferry Hill might turn out to be "both pleasant and profitable," as Harry had phrased it. After dinner he had spent the better part of an hour in the study room on the first floor composing a letter home. That finished, he had wandered down to the river and had been mildly rebuked by Mr. Buckman, an instructor, for going out of bounds after eight o'clock. There had been prayers at nine in the two dormitories and after that, in the midst of shouts and laughter and general "rough house," he had undressed, washed, donned his pajamas and jumped into the narrow white enamelled bed to which he had been assigned.
Tomorrow lessons would begin and he wondered how he was going to fare. He had entered on a certificate from his grammar school and had been put into the Second Senior Class. If he could keep up with that he would be ready for college in two years. Roy's father pretended to think him backward because he would not enter until he was eighteen, and delighted in telling him of boys who had gone to college at sixteen. But Roy's mother always came to his defence. There was no sense, she declared warmly, in boys going to college before they were old enough to understand what it meant and to derive benefit from the life. And Roy's father would shake his head dubiously and mutter that he had never expected a son of his to be a dullard.
Greek and English were what Roy was afraid of. Latin and mathematics held no terrors for him. As for the other studies, he believed he could worry along with them all right. His mother had hinted hopefully of a scholarship, but Roy knew his capabilities better than she did and looked for no such honors.
Meanwhile the dormitory, full of whispers and repressed laughter for the first few minutes of darkness, had become silent save for a snore here and there. Roy's thoughts wandered back to the football field and to Horace Burlen, who was lying somewhere near in the dark, and presently his eyelids fell together and he was asleep.