McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. “The world should become a great camp,” he cried. “The brains of the world should be at the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand what is meant let them be knocked down.”
The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at McGregor. “I understand your kind,” he said, and his voice trembled. “The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here.”
The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he muttered to himself: “What's getting in here? What's getting into our schools?”
Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to the study of law. Several young men came in.
Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old. Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk. Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman—a clean-looking youth with black curly hair and round pink—and—white cheeks, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
“You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us,” said the spokesman. “We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me tell you.”
He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors, business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
“It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,” the curly-haired youth said. “It helps you get on, get in with the right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get in with the best fellows.” He hesitated and looked at the floor. “I don't mind telling you,” he said with an outburst of frankness, “that one of our stronger men—Whiteside, the mathematician—wanted us to have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you.”