It was only a matter of minutes. While the Sophomore front line was buckling for the second time a wild yell went up from their rear. The small guard they had left to hold the northern end of the bridge had given way at the charge of the twenty huskies Larry had sent to swim the river, and in another half-minute the yearly class struggle had passed into history. Larry’s ruse had been the simplest of tricks, but even a simple trap works if it has never been tried before. Caught between two fires, the bridge defenders broke in confusion, and after that, it was every man for himself and a get-away. [Illustration: The Sophomore front line was buckling for the second time] Of course, Larry had his reward――and Dick, too, for that matter. For an uproarious half-hour the victorious Freshmen marched back and forth over the bridge, carrying the “twins” shoulder-high and shouting themselves hoarse for Donovan and Maxwell, the class, Old Sheddon, and the epoch-marking scrap which would put Freshmen numerals on the portal arch for the first time in eight years. But after it was all over; after the shouting, singing mob had made its way back to the college suburb and dispersed, and Dick, hero-worshipping in proper fashion by applying the contents of Mother Grant’s arnica bottle to the handsome array of bruises Larry had acquired in the battle, ventured to add a little adulation of his own to the class leader’s triumph, Larry cut him off morosely. “None of that from you, Dick!” he growled. “I know just how much and how little all this shouting and yelling is worth, and so do you. To-morrow morning nine-tenths of those fellows won’t know me when they meet me on the campus. For just about that percentage of them I’ll drop back and be just what I am――a workingman and the son of a workingman. They wanted a hard-hitter to-night, and I happened to be it. But that’s all there is to it. No more rah-rah stuff for me.” “But you can’t――you simply _can’t_ go through college with that sort of a slant on things!” Dick protested, almost tearfully. “It isn’t human! You’re simply batty on that ‘workingman’ stunt. Why, those fellows you captained to-night will black your shoes――do anything on top of earth for you, if you’ll only let ’em!” But “letting them” was the hitch that Larry Donovan, in the very beginning of his college career, was allowing the stubborn part of his own character to knot around him. There is no variety of pride quite so unreasoning as poverty-pride; and when Larry tumbled into bed a little later, it was with the fixed idea that he was going to be _in_ college without being _of_ it; that he would hoe his own row and let others do the same; a determination which, farther along, was to lead to――but of that more in its proper place. II THE OFFISH WORM “Say, Maxie; what the di――hinkle is the matter with that red-headed room-mate of yours, I’d like to know?”