“Confound what people said! They knew no more than we did. They were jumping to conclusions, too. But we were saying things on our own account. Right here, in this room, Poke told us that we were responsible for blocking Orkney’s ambitions from the first, for taking the shine off him; that the Shark eclipsed him in mathematics and Step skimmed the cream from the Greek; that the crowd of us kept him from bossing the class. And all of us chimed in, and said it was so, and patted our own backs, and——”
“Hold on, Sam!” the Shark broke in. “How’d we do that? We’re not contortionists.”
“Hang it all! Don’t interrupt! You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know; I infer,” corrected the Shark. “Be accurate, be accurate!”
Sam’s temper flared. “What’s the matter, anyway? Don’t you want to hear me?”
“I do,” said the Shark calmly. “You’re talking sense. Therefore use sensible language.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” Sam promised, “but listen to me, anyway. What I’m getting at is that, as Poke had it, if Orkney was driven out of town, we had a lot to do with the driving. We called it a good job, but was it? It was not! We didn’t play fair; we didn’t give him a square deal. He was entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and we always counted the doubt against him. I know, I know what you’re thinking—he was a cub, and a chronic grouch, and a trouble maker; but the ugly fact remains that we accused him of a lot of things he didn’t do, and had no intention of doing. And I say, in such a case, it’s up to us to see that, at last, he gets a square deal. I don’t say it so much for his sake as for our own.”
“Umph! Matter of self-respect?” queried the Shark.
“Just that!” said Sam emphatically.
For a moment there was silence.