“She’s Ollie McKnight’s sister. She didn’t say how she came to be with Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck, but I suppose the Starbucks and McKnights are friends. Is Mr. Starbuck a rich man? But of course he is, or he wouldn’t ride off and leave a six-thousand-dollar car lying in the ditch without giving it a second look.” Larry laughed. “He can afford to, I guess. He and Dick’s father own a gold mine together, and he is a director in one of the Brewster banks.” “Huh!” said Purdick, and the tone in which he said it meant that Uncle Billy Starbuck wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, at all the kind of rich man that he had been taught from his infancy to hate and despise. “Mr. Starbuck is everybody’s ‘Uncle Billy’ in Brewster,” Larry went on. “He used to be a cowboy, they say, and after that he was a prospector and had all sorts of hard times.” “Huh!” said little Purdick again, and this time he added: “He doesn’t look or act like a man that any amount of money would spoil.” Beyond this he was silent until after they had topped the hill and the university buildings were in sight. Then he said: “What d’you suppose Ollie’s sister meant by calling me ‘the Red-Wagon boy’?” Larry choked for a minute. Here was all sorts of a chance that, right at the very last moment, the fat of the Red-Wagon scholarship was going to be spilled in the fire. “Did――did she call you that?” he stammered, clawing desperately to gain time. “Yes. She said Ollie had been calling me that in his letters home.” “Just some of Knighty’s foolishment, I guess,” said Larry. “He’s taken that way sometimes.” The reply seemed to satisfy Purdick. Anyway, he didn’t ask any more ticklish questions, then, or later when they were together in their room after supper, hustling into their oldest clothes to take part in the Freshman cap-burning, which was scheduled for eight o’clock on the campus. Purdick had said at first that he wouldn’t go to the cap-burning; meaning thereby that he was still clinging to some of the old prejudices and was disposed to hold aloof from mingling with the class as a body. Though Larry had had prejudices enough of his own at the beginning of the year, it was he who had finally persuaded Purdick not to spoil the whole year by being “stuffy,” as he phrased it, at the very end of things. “Reckon the Soffies’ll make any bad breaks?” Purdick asked, struggling into a shop jumper to take the place of his cast-off coat. “They’d better not,” said Larry grimly. “We walloped them last fall and we can do it again, if we have to. But the fellows tell me that the Soffie interference at the cap-burnings has been dying out. I guess they won’t monkey with us to-night.”