Step moved uneasily. “Say, though! That was a star translation Orkney made! Jiminy! but he must have had an iron nerve to keep his wits about him, with all hands doing their best to show how they despised him.”
“Just what it was—case of nerve!” cried Poke. “Bet you I know just how he felt. He was saying to himself, ‘I’ll show this gang that they can’t rattle me; I’ll show ’em that I don’t give a whoop for their opinion. Let ’em hiss me! I’ll go through this day and prove that they can’t even rattle me.’ And that is just what he did. And when school was dismissed, he walked out as coolly as if he didn’t understand that nobody would travel with him for love or money. You know he’d been building up a sort of crowd of his own? Well, every one of the bunch quit him when the pinch came. But he kept a stiff upper lip right to the end!”
“He surely did,” admitted the Trojan, with a touch of reluctant admiration.
“But all through it he must have been planning what he’d do. My notion is that when he went down the school steps he was saying to himself that it was for the last time. He’d been scheming out what would come next. In the afternoon he got together the few things he meant to take along. He ate supper with his folks as usual. Then he slipped out of the house. And that’s the last anybody in Plainville knows certainly about Tom Orkney.”
From his corner the Shark shot curt comment: “Big mistake he made! Case of quitting!”
“How do you figure that out?” asked Herman Boyd.
“Ran away under fire, didn’t he?”
“But he’d stood the fire all day.”
“Umph! That wasn’t enough.”
Poke waved a hand. “Listen, you fellows! I’ve been meditating on that part of it. And I’ve doped it out this way: Orkney had pride enough to carry him through one day—pride and nerve are the same thing with him, I reckon. But when it came to facing other days, and other days, and then some more—why, that’s where a chap would have to have the backing of a clean conscience. And there were all the tricks he’d played on Sam, and the chance he took of killing one of us with that big boulder, and the dirty deal he gave Little Perrine—why, his conscience must be as spotted—as spotted as an old blotter!”