“So you’ll let this lying story go on spilling itself all over the place, and lose your chance for the ’Varsity, and maybe get a call-down from the faculty, all because you’re afraid you might let go all holds if you went after the fellows who are trying to do you up?” “It’s as true as if you were reading it out of a book,” said Larry, and with that he turned back to his drawing-board, and Purdick went to bed. To a man up a tree, that might have seemed to be the end of it, so far as Larry’s reinstatement on the team or his vindication on the campus was concerned. But little Purdick was of the tribe of those who stick and hang. He was pleased to believe that he owed Larry the biggest debt that one fellow could possibly owe another, and he didn’t propose to see his benefactor’s record smashed by any such vengeful plot as――he made no doubt――the Underhill conspirators had concocted and carried out. If Larry wouldn’t fight for himself, then he, Charles Purdick, would fight for him――and to the last ditch. But just how to go about it, with Larry unwilling to say or do anything in his own defense, was a problem. Purdick waited for a day or two, hoping that Dick Maxwell would turn up; and on the third day after Larry had been dropped from the team, Dick did turn up. “Where’s Larry?” he ripped out, bursting into the big room just as Purdick was settling down for the evening grind on his Math. “He’s gone out somewhere,” said Purdick. Dick flung himself into a chair. “That miserable, low-down lie that’s going ’round about him!” he boiled over. “Did you know he’d been dropped from the team?” Purdick nodded. “That was three days ago. I’ve been hoping you’d come over.” “Conspiracy of silence!” Dick fumed. “No one of the fellows in the house wanted to be the first to tell me, and I haven’t been on the field since last Saturday. What’s Larry doing about it?” “Nothing.” “But, Great Moses, something’s got to be done!” Purdick shook his head. “Larry won’t do anything, and it’s just about breaking his heart. I’ve tried to buck him up and get him to make a fight and show the Underhill bunch up for what it is, but he won’t do it; says he’s got such a bad temper that there won’t be any end to it if he lets himself go.” “Yes; he and his temper!” Dick snorted. Then: “It was a put-up job, of course?” “Not the slightest doubt of it, in my mind. You know what they told him over there at ‘Pat’s Place’――that you’d gone off the hooks and were needing somebody to take you home. Larry fell for it, and then they managed to get him into one of the little card-rooms that had probably been ‘fixed’ for him――alcohol spilled around on the floor. That got him half sick to begin with, and then, when he asked for a drink of water, they doped him.” “Huh!” said Dick. “So that’s the straight of it, is it? Naturally, I hadn’t heard that part of it. It was after that that Markley and Dugger found him, I suppose?”