“So much for that part of it,” said Larry grittingly. “Now, I’m going to give you your choice. As I said, I’ve got a witness to what you did to me in the shop to-day. I can go before the faculty and get you canned. It’s up to you to say whether you’ll take that, or pull off your coat right here and stand up to me like the man you’ll never be.” By this time Crawford was snarling――not like a man, but more like a trapped fox. “If you make me fight, I――I’ll kill you!” he stormed; but he did take his coat off and fling it aside. Then and there, in the dusk of the evening in Farmer Holdsworth’s stubble field, was staged the historic battle of the year. It is said that a cornered coward can always fight if he is driven to it, and Crawford made the saying good, hurling himself upon Larry in a mad-bull rush that was meant to end in a clinch in which his superior weight would give him the advantage. But when the clinch arrived, Larry was not there; there was nothing there but a stiff forearm with a fist at the end of it against which Crawford pushed his right eye vigorously. In the next rush it was his nose with which he endeavored to push the hard fist aside. Larry hadn’t much “science,” but it doesn’t ask for any great amount of skill to let a frenzied maniac beat himself silly if he is sufficiently bent upon doing it. One thorough and rather prolonged round settled it. At the end of the one-sided boxing match Crawford was down, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t get up; could――or would――do nothing but gasp out that he had enough. Larry did the decent thing――and did it as reluctantly as he ever did anything in his life――hauled the thrashed coward to his feet, took him across the field to his boarding-house, helped him get rid of such of the battle marks as the bath-room appliances could remove. All this in grimmest silence. But as he was leaving he claimed the victor’s privilege of having the last word. “You go to the fellow whose boots you’ve been licking and tell him what you got from the ‘mucker.’ And when you do it, you may tell him from me that he can have the same, or a little better, any time he’s man enough to ask for it. And one other thing, Crawford. You stay out from under my feet from this time on. If you don’t, you’ll get it again.” One of the problems that has never been satisfactorily solved, and perhaps never will be, is how the news of a thing done in privacy gets wings of the wind to scatter it abroad. Larry thought that the brief and brittle mix-up, staged in the growing dusk in Farmer Holdsworth’s wheat field, had been wholly without witnesses. But that same evening, after supper, Dickie Maxwell leered knowingly at him across the study table. “So you chased up my little hint and whaled the daylights out of Snitty Crawford, did you?” he laughed. Larry glanced up frowning. “Who told you anything about that?” he demanded.