It was on the tip of Larry’s tongue to tell the instructor the real reason for the discredits, but again he held himself in. The matter, as it stood, lay between himself and Crawford――and possibly Underhill――and he set his teeth upon a frowning resolve to make the plotters answer to him and not to the faculty. With the mystery of his stumblings thus completely solved, he went to his other assignments for the day with the handicap lifted. Straight “A’s” were his grades for that day, and his various instructors marveled as much over his sudden “come-back” as they had over his equally sudden slump. It was at the close of the gymnasium half-hour, late in the afternoon, that he caught Crawford. The spoiler of records was on his way to his room, which was in a street reached most easily by cutting across a field lying back of the campus. Larry tried to keep cool; meant to keep perfectly cool; but his hand shook a little when he laid it on Crawford’s shoulder. “I’ll walk a piece with you,” was all he permitted himself to say; and as if some inner sense was telling him that something was about to happen, the big-bodied, hulking culprit kept step in silence. After they had crossed the stile into the field, and were thus off the university grounds, Larry wheeled short upon the sham “lame dog.” “You’ve been doing me dirt, Crawford, and this is payday,” he snapped, trying to say it calmly. “Will you peel your coat?” [Illustration: “Will you peel your coat?”] A frenzied outburst of denial was the answer to this. Like any fellow who would stoop to the things he had been doing, Crawford was a shrinking coward at heart; this though he would have tipped the scale at twelve or fifteen pounds more than Larry. “Oh, good gosh!――hold on――somebody’s been lying to you!” he protested. “I――――” “Cut it out,” said Larry. “I caught you at it in the shop this morning, and I’ve got Dowling for a witness. You did everything you could think of to make me get a goose-egg marking, and you’ve been doing it right along for two weeks. What did you put into my fire in the blacksmith shop so that I couldn’t make a weld? Tell the truth!” Crawford hung his head. “It was only a joke,” he mumbled. “I just put a li’l’ pinch of sulphur in the fire, to see what you’d do.” “A joke, was it? And I suppose it was a joke to knock my flasks down in the foundry, and to nick my planes and chisels on the pattern bench. Now, one question more: who put you up to all this?” For some little while Crawford wouldn’t answer this direct question, filling the air with shrill protestations of his innocence of any malicious motive, and the like. But Larry pinned him down savagely. “Out with it! I want to know whom you were working for.” It came out at last――because it had to. “Bry Underhill――and some of the other fellows――said you were a ‘mucker’ and oughtn’t to be allowed to stay,” was the final hang-dog admission.