College freshmen -- Juvenile fiction; College stories; Male friendship -- Juvenile fiction
Soaked, bedraggled and thinly clothed as they were, they were still
unwilling to quit before they had learned what the broken levee had
done to things. Upon reaching the streets of the devastated area;
streets now crowded with anxious and curious spectators; they found
that while the levee was gone, the big bridge wrecked, and the property
damage was immense, there were no lives lost, so far as anybody could
tell, though there was a spreading rumor that two of the college men
had been last seen going to a house which had been swept away when the
levee broke.
“That will b-be us,” shivered Dick, who was too cold and tired to be
careful of his English. “They’ll find out by to-morrow or next week
that we didn’t get drowned after all. Let’s go hunt us a place where
there is a fire and something hot to drink. I’m frozen just about
solid.”
That was the wind-up of the night of catastrophes for the “Timanyoni
Twins.” But there were consequences which were to bear fruit a little
farther along. A grateful citizenry, appreciative of the good work
done in the night of peril by the student body of Old Sheddon, held a
town meeting and voted to erect a much-needed addition to the college
gymnasium as a sort of memorial. On a bronze plate set in the wall were
to be inscribed the names of the students who had rendered the most
signal service, and Larry, looking over the blue-prints some week or
so later with a bunch of the men of his own section in the Mechanical,
flamed out wrathfully when he saw the names of Underhill and Crawford
included in the list.
Neither he nor Dick had said anything about the discovery they had made
in the last of the deserted houses, but this inclusion of the two who
had taken the canoe without a thought for what had become of the man or
men who had tied it to the porch was the back-breaking straw.
“Fellows,” he broke out hotly, “it’s up to us to see to it that two
names are taken off of this thing. Underhill and Crawford were not
helping; they were simply looting!”
If things were always done right end to in this world, a charge thus
openly made would have been investigated, and the guilty ones, if
proved guilty, would have been punished. But, undergraduate human
nature being what it is, the charge never got itself formally before
the faculty or the student council. What did happen was only a sort
of half-measure. A couple of the fellows who had heard Larry’s angry
accusation were curious enough to look for evidences of looting in
Crawford’s and Underhill’s rooms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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