And on the same day Larry Donovan――a Larry once more light-hearted and able to look the world and all the people in it squarely in the eye――took his old place at right half on the ’Varsity practice field. XIII THE GREEN CAP BONFIRE “What are you fellows going to do in the summer vacation?” It was Ollie McKnight who wanted to know, and he had just come in from the gymnasium showers where he had been cooling off after a lively practice with the Freshman team; scrimmages which, in the warm afternoon, were a little like sessions in a Turkish bath. There were various answers from the half-dozen Freshmen lounging in the big room at Mother Grant’s which had been occupied for nearly half of the college year by Larry and Purdick. Welborn, the big Aggie, said he was going home to Missouri to work on the farm. Wally Dixon said his father was building an addition to his packing plant in Kansas City, and that he’d probably have a job wheelbarrowing concrete, or something of that sort. Cal Rogers made a similar response. His father was a contractor, and he, Cal, supposed there was a wheelbarrow or a shovel or a pick waiting for him at his home town in Iowa. “How about you two Timanyoni Twins?” McKnight asked, tossing the question to Dick Maxwell and Larry. “Work for me, too, if I can find anything to do,” Larry said; and Dick wrinkled his nose at McKnight. “You’ll have to stay and see Commencement through for the rest of us, Knighty,” he said. “We’re all too industrious to hang around here for doings where Freshmen have to stick on the side lines and don’t get a look-in.” “That’s the way of it,” little Purdick put in. “Commencement’s no Freshman game. Do you stay, Knighty?” “Not on your life. I’ve got a job, too, strange as it may seem. It’s northern Minnesota and the iron country for mine. While you fellows are doing your little summer chores all over the lot you can get a long-distance snap-shot of me down in some open cut in the Mesaba, chucking coal into the tummy of a steam shovel, or something of that sort.” “Yes, I think I see you with overalls on!” said Rogers sarcastically. “You’ll be doing a cross-country run in a million-dollar buzz-wagon, or sailing a brass-mounted yacht up the Maine coast, or something like that. I know you, Knighty.” “Maybe you did know me last summer, or the summer before,” McKnight got back. “But that isn’t saying that you know me now. I’ve already asked Dad if I can’t go to the Mesaba and begin to learn the steel business from the bottom, and he didn’t write to say ‘yes.’ Not on your moving-picture. He wired it.” Wally Dixon shook his head in mock solemnity. “You shouldn’t ought to do things like that, Ollie; not unless you’re sure there’s no heart disease in your family. Think of the terrible shock it must have been when they got your letter.”