“Why――if you had an enemy that hated you hard enough: I’ll admit that’s what I had in mind, Larry; but it can’t be. A fellow who would do such a thing as that couldn’t stay twenty-four hours in Old Sheddon.” “Couldn’t he?” Larry said; but that is all he did say. And when Dick would have gone on to talk more about the present-moment sad state of affairs, the “shark” stuck his nose in a book and seemed to have lost all interest in the subject of his critical standing――or his no-standing――in the Registrar’s records. But the next morning, in the shop-work period, he was as sharp-eyed as a cornered rat. His job――“exercise,” they called it――that morning was to turn a piece of round shafting to fit the hole in a pulley. Lathe work was one of the things he had learned fairly well in the old home railroad shop, and he ran the roughing chip in a few minutes. Setting the tool for the finishing chip, he stopped the lathe and turned to the bench behind him to try the gauge in the pulley-hole. As he did so, somebody passed between him and his lathe, and he looked up quickly. It was Crawford. That was enough to make him extra cautious. Before starting the lathe again he examined the reading of the micrometer scale on the tool-rest. The mischief had been done. The tool had been advanced, just the least little fraction in the world, but it was enough. If he had let the tool run without resetting, the piece of work would have been spoiled. With this for a starter, he not only kept his eye on Crawford during the entire period; he also put the fellow next to him on the watch. Three separate times the “lame dog” set traps for him into which he would have blundered helplessly if he hadn’t been forewarned. Once, in a screw-cutting exercise, the gears were changed on his lathe, and it had been done so deftly that he wouldn’t have believed it if the gears themselves hadn’t proved it. Again, it was a sly loosening of the tail-stock clamp, which would have let the work fall out when the lathe was started. Lastly, it was a “cut-in” on the wiring of the lathe motor, which would probably have burned out the motor if the current had been switched on. Larry, seething inwardly like a pot ready to boil over, corrected the sabotage in each case before any harm was done, held on grimly, and said nothing. Before the shop period was over, the psychological reaction had begun to set in. Now that he knew that the fault wasn’t his own; hadn’t been his own at all; he was able to take a fresh grip upon himself. Gorman, the shop instructor, gave him the final little upward boost when he came around to examine and stamp the work of the period. “Now, that is something like it, Donovan,” he said, in warm approval. “Glad to see that you’re getting back to your old form. You get ‘tens’ all around, this time. Keep it up and you’ll work off some of the discredits you’ve been earning.”