I answered his questions as well as I could. I told him how hard it was
to find professors who wouldn't get drunk, and how we had to let the men
and women recite on alternate days after a few of the hen students had
been winged by stray bullets. I had never heard of Greek, I said, but I
assured him that we studied Latin and that we had a professor to whom
Cæsar was as easy as print. I told him how hard we worked to get a
little culture and how many of the boys gave up their ponies altogether,
wore store clothes and took 'em off when they went to bed all the time
they were in college; but, try as I would, I couldn't make the answers
as ridiculous as his questions. He had me on the mat, two points down
and fighting for wind all the time. His thirst for knowledge was
wonderful and his objection to believing what his eyes must have told
him was still more wonderful. There he was, half-way across the country
from New York, and he must have looked out of the car windows on the
way; but he hadn't seen a thing. I suppose it was because he wasn't
looking for anything but Indians.
All this time Petey was circulating about the car, taking aside members
of the Rep Rho Betas and talking to them earnestly. The Rep Rho Betas
were the Sophomore fraternity and were the real demons of the college.
Each year the outgoing Sophomore class initiated the twenty Freshmen who
were most likely to meet the hangman on professional business and passed
on the duties of the fraternity to them. The fraternity spent its time
in pleasure and was suspected of anything violent which happened in the
county. Petey was highbinder of the gang that year and was very far gone
in crime.
We were due home about ten P. M., and just before they untied the
conductor Petey hauled me off to one side.
"It's all fixed," he said; "it's glorious. We'll just make Siwash into a
Wild West show for his benefit. The Rep Rho Betas will entertain him
days and he'll stay at the Eta Pie House nights. I'm putting the Eta
Bites on now. You've got to get him off this train before we get to the
station and keep him busy while I arrange the program. Just give me an
hour before you get him there. That's all I ask."
Now I never was a diplomat, and the job of lugging a fat old foreigner
around a dead college town at night and trying to make him think he was
in peril of his life every minute was about three numbers larger than
my size. I couldn't think of anything else, so I slipped the word to Ole
Skjarsen that Diggs was a Kiowa professor who was coming over to get
notes on our team and tip them off to Muggledorfer College. I judged
this would create some hostility and I wasn't mistaken. Ole began to
climb over his fellow-students and I was just able to beat him to his
prey.
"Come on," I whispered. "Skjarsen's on the warpath. He says he wants to
bite up a stranger and he thinks you'll do."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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