College freshmen -- Juvenile fiction; College stories; Male friendship -- Juvenile fiction
“Sure,” Larry nodded. “Vice-president Holcombe of our line and his
daughter――the girl who wanted to know if my last name wasn’t German.”
Dick grinned.
“You’ve got a long memory――for little pin-pricks,” he laughed. “Mr.
Holcombe is MacClay’s uncle. He and Bess were passing through in the
V-P’s private car, and Mac got ’em to stop over. You haven’t met ’em
yet, I take it?”
Larry shook his head. “No; and I’m not likely to. I’m out here to
play foot-ball.” And, as Coach Brock put him in just here, he did
play foot-ball; played it so well that the scattering of more or less
enthusiastic student spectators in the stands gave him ear-splitting
credit by name every time he scored.
It was after the practice game that MacClay invited some of his friends
and the members of the ’Varsity to come around to the little college
inn, “At the Sign of the Samovar,” to meet his uncle and cousin; and
Dick, who was watching things like a hawk hovering over a chicken yard,
noticed that the team invitation was given to the various members
individually, and that MacClay dodged Larry. Dick’s suspicions were
aroused at once, but all he did at the time was to ask Larry to come
over to the Samovar later in the afternoon; did this without saying
anything about the impromptu reception for MacClay’s guests――and
without saying anything to MacClay.
At the appointed time there was a gathering of the invited ones in
the club room of the little inn, with Dick――who had naturally been
included in the bidding, since his father was the general manager of
the railroad of which Mr. Holcombe was the vice-president――among them.
Apart from this, however, Dick knew the Holcombes well from having
spent part of a summer with them at a mountain resort in Colorado.
It was rather early in the reception affair that Bess Holcombe got Dick
aside to ask him a question.
“Tell me, Dickie,” she said; “who was the ‘Donovan’ who was playing at
right half and scored so many times. Surely he isn’t our Donovan, is
he?”
Dick knew quite well what she meant by the personal pronoun possessive.
On that never-to-be-forgotten day in the mountain canyon less than a
year before, the Pullman car, holding only Miss Holcombe, four women
and the porter, had slipped its brakes for a runaway down the grade,
and it was Larry’s quick wit and cool courage in chasing it with one
of the construction engines that had saved the lives of the imperilled
ones.
“He is our Larry, all right,” Dick replied. “Didn’t you know that he
came here to Old Sheddon with me?”
“There are lots of things I don’t know about him,” was the quick
rejoinder. “For one thing, I never could find out why he ran away that
day last summer and wouldn’t let us even so much as thank him for
saving our lives.”
“Bashful,” Dick laughed, though he knew very well that it was
grouchiness and workingman prejudice rather more than bashfulness that
had made Larry take to the woods on that memorable afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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