chanted Tom Eldridge, as he made a flying leap from one horizontal bar to the next.
“‘Swift’ all right, but it won’t be ‘free,’” grumbled Billy Burton. “I won’t feel ‘free,’ till I get those awful examinations off my mind. They’ll be here now in less than a week, and I can’t think of anything else.”
“They’ll be pretty tough, do you think?” asked Fred.
“Tough!” broke in Slim, “they’ll be as tough as a pine knot. Professor Raymond is a shark on algebra. He’d rather solve a problem than eat. And because it’s so easy for him, he thinks it ought to be easy for us, too. He puts down corkers for us to do, and then looks at us in pained surprise if we think they’re hard. If I get through this time, it’ll be due to a special providence.”
“I wish we knew what he was going to ask, beforehand,” sighed Billy. “Couldn’t we bone up on them then? I’d get a hundred per cent. sure.”
“Wouldn’t it be bully, if we were mind readers, and knew just what questions he was going to put on that printed list?” laughed Fred.
“The first glimpse we’ll get of that printed list will be when they’re plumped down on the desk in front of us the day of the examination,” said Ned Wayland. “They’ll be kept snug under lock and key until then.”
“Yes,” chimed in Tom, “and the prof’s so foxy that he doesn’t even have them printed in town, for fear that some copy might get into some of the fellows’ hands. He sends them away to some city to be printed, and they’re sent back to him by registered mail.”
“I’ll bet that was the package I saw him putting away in his desk yesterday!” exclaimed Fred. “It was a long manila envelope, stuffed with something that crackled, and it had a lot of sealing wax on it. I noticed that he seemed to be very careful of it, and put it away under a lot of other papers before he locked his desk.”
“Likely enough, those were the examination slips,” said Billy.