Tom did not hesitate. “I guess,” said he loyally, “I’ll call it Puff the Second.”
“PSYCHOLOGY STUFF”
Joe Talmadge came to Hollins from some fresh-water college out in Wisconsin. Anyway, they called it a college, but Joe had hard work getting into the upper middle class at Hollins, and Hollins is only a prep school, so it seems that his college, which was called Eureka or Excelsior or something like that, couldn’t have ranked with Yale or Princeton. His father had died the spring before. He had been in the lumber business in a place called Green Bay and had made a pile of money, I guess. They had opened an office or agency or something in Philadelphia a year or so before and when Mr. Talmadge died the other men in the company decided that Joe was to finish getting an education right away and take charge of the Philadelphia end of the business. It was Joe’s idea to finish up somewhere in the East, because, as he said, folks back East were different and he’d ought to learn their ways. That’s how he came to duck his Excelsior place and come to Hollins.
The first time I saw him was the evening of the day before the Fall term began. They’d made me proctor on the third floor of Hyde Hall and after supper that night I was unpacking in number forty-three when I heard a beast of a rumpus down the corridor and hiked out to see what was doing. It seemed that they’d put Joe in thirty-seven with a fellow named Prentice, who hails from Detroit. Prentice was all right except that his dad had made money too quickly. He had invented a patent brake lining or something for automobiles and everyone wanted it and he had made a pile of money in about six years and it had sort of gone to Tom Prentice’s head. He wasn’t a bad sort, Tom wasn’t, but he could be beastly offensive if he set out to. When I knocked at thirty-seven no one inside heard me because there was too much noise. So I just walked in. The study table was lying on its side and the gas drop light—we didn’t have electricity in Hyde then—was dangling a couple of inches from the floor at the end of its green tube. Tom Prentice was lying on his neck on one of the beds with his heels near the ceiling and Joe was standing over him waiting for him to come back to earth. Joe didn’t look mad, but he looked mighty earnest.
He was seventeen, but big for his years, wide-shouldered and powerful looking. He had a nice sort of face, with gray eyes and very dark hair and a good deal of sunburn. His hair needed trimming and some of it was dangling down over his forehead, making him look sort of desperate, and I wondered what would happen to me if I had to step in between them. But I didn’t. Joe stopped knocking Tom around for a minute and I explained that I was proctor and accountable for the peace and quiet of that floor. By that time Tom was sitting on the bed looking dazed and holding one hand to his jaw. I never did find out what had actually started the riot, but it was something that Tom had said about the sovereign State of Wisconsin, I think. I persuaded them to shake hands and forget it and Tom said he hadn’t meant whatever it was just the way Joe had taken it, and when I went out Joe was fussing around Tom with arnica and wet towels.
They got on all right together after that first show-down. Maybe Tom realized that he was no match for Joe. Tom wasn’t any frail lad, either. He weighed about a hundred and sixty and was eighteen years old and played left guard on the Eleven. It was Tom who induced Joe to go out for football. Joe had played a little out West, but had never taken it seriously, and didn’t show any enthusiasm for it now, only Tom kept at him, I guess. Anyway, I saw Joe working with the dubs a day or two after the term began. They had him going through the motions at center on the fourth or fifth scrub. I remember saying to Larry Keets, who was assistant manager that Fall, that “that guy Talmadge was built for the part, all right.” Keets looked across and grinned.
“Yeah, he’s built for it, maybe, but he handles the ball like it was a basket of eggs. Morgan”—Morgan was our coach—“was eying him yesterday, but he’s still where he is. Anyway, we’ve got centers and guards and tackles to burn. It’s back field men we need, Zach, and a couple of good ends.”
Which was all true. We’d lost seven out of the fifteen men who had played in the big game last Fall, and all but two were backs. Of the two, one was an end and the other was a guard. Coach Morgan and Truitt, our right tackle and captain, were raking the whole school for halfback material and not having much success in finding any.