By this time the campus was filling up. Word had gotten around the real
college that the big show of the season was being pulled off up at
Dillpickle, and the students were arriving by the dozen. We were getting
pretty nervous. The new arrivals weren't coached, and sooner or later
they were bound to give the snap away. We decided to introduce our guest
to the president. If we could keep things quiet another half hour all
would be safe, Petey assured us.
We took the Reverend up to the main entrance, Petey's thinker working
like a well-oiled machine all the way. He pointed out the tree where
they hanged a horse thief, and Pubby made us wait till he had gotten a
leaf from it. The Senior classes at Dillpickle had had the custom of
hauling boulders on to the campus as graduation presents. Petey
explained that each boulder marked the resting place of some student
whose career had been foreshortened accidentally, and he described
several of the tragedies--invented them right off the reel. Pubby was so
interested he didn't care who saw his notebook. When Petey told him how
a pack of timber wolves had besieged the school for nine days and
nights, four years before, he almost cried because there was no
photograph of the scene handy. We had to promise him a wolf skin to
comfort him.
Dillpickle Academy was a plain old brick building, with one of those
cupolas which were so popular among schools and colleges forty years
ago. I don't know just what mysterious effect a cupola has on education,
but it was considered necessary at that time. In front of the building
was a wide stone porch. Inside we could see half a dozen dogs and a
horse. Pubby looked a bushel of exclamation points when Petey explained
that they belonged to the president. He looked a lot more when he saw a
counter with a fine assortment of chewing tobacco and pipes on it.
That, Petey whispered to me, was his masterpiece. He had borrowed the
whole thing from a corner grocery store.
Petey had just put his eye to the window of the president's room,
ostensibly to find out whether Prexy was in a good humor and in reality
to find out whether Kennedy, an old grad who had consented to play the
part, was on duty, when one of the boys hurried up and grabbed me.
"Just evaporate as fast as you can," he whispered; "there are six cops
on the way out. They're going to pinch the whole bunch of us."
Now this was a fine predicament for a young and promising college--to be
arrested by six lowly cops on its own campus, in the act of showing a
distinguished visitor how it ran the earth, and was particular Hades
with the trigger-finger! Bangs was showing Pubby the window through
which the Professor of Arithmetic had thrown him the term before, and I
told Petey. He sat down and cried.
"After all this work and just as we had it cinched!" he moaned. "I'll
quit school to-morrow and devote my life to poisoning policemen. This
has made an anarchist of me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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