While Larry was arriving at the fact, Purdick got up to go. But at the door he turned, and his face was white and the hand on the door-knob was shaking. “Donovan, I hope you’ll do that fellow up, cold!” he snapped, with his pale eyes ablaze. “Ump!” said Larry. Then: “Why the sudden burst of fury?” “You know, perfectly well. He and his kind are always putting you and me and our kind to the wall――squeezing the life out of the working classes. They got my father between the millstones and ground him till he died! But our time’s coming; and when it does come――look out!” “Here, you firebrand――come back here!” Larry called; but the door had slammed and the lame dog was gone. For some little time after Purdick had left him, Larry sat at the table with his square chin propped in his cupped hands. Class distinctions, as between rich and poor, had never troubled him very much in his home life. There hadn’t been any hard-and-fast line drawn in the home High School, or, if there had been, it was fellows like himself――sons of workingmen――who drew it. Naturally, while he was working spare time in the railroad shop and roundhouse, he had heard more or less talk about labor and capital, and about the battle that would one day be fought to a finish between the two; but most of this had gone in one ear and out the other. Dick Maxwell’s father, who, besides being general manager of the railroad, was a fairly wealthy mine owner, was the only “capitalist” he had ever known, and there was certainly no fault to be found with him. But the Underhill tribe――new-crop rich, somebody had called them――was another matter. Of course, Bryant Underhill, Sheddon Freshman, wasn’t responsible for what his father did; but he was evidently willing to have sins enough of his own to answer for. Then, on the other side, here was little Purdick, type of the down-trodden; spiteful and vindictive; the stuff out of which anarchists are made. Larry drew a long breath. Even in this early stage of it, college life was opening up some pretty large fields. As to the Underhill threat――that he, Larry Donovan, was to be forced to leave Sheddon――Larry dismissed this promptly. Quite likely Underhill, helped by his own set, might try to start something; but, if so, he wouldn’t get anywhere with it. That was the way Larry left it when he went to bed that night; and by morning he had forgotten the threat. But the morning ushered in a day to be marked in the calendar with a letter in charcoal black; a day in which everything seemed to go wrong end to. It began in “Practical Mechanics.” In Sheddon three of the engineering courses――Electrical, Mechanical and Civil――include so many hours a week of shop work. At that moment Larry’s section was in the blacksmith’s shop; fifty students at fifty forges doing actual blacksmithing, under an instructor who was himself a skilled workman.