"Whew!" he thought, "this won't do! I must be slow or stupid; if I don't catch on pretty soon I'll get more black marks against me than I can stand." "Give us something that we can hear!" roared the seniors. The three juniors who had been through it and who were still standing with their backs against the wall, were having a particularly hard time of it just now. Their lips were twitching with an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh. Frank caught Rattleton again by the shoulder and again sawed the umbrella back and forth across his stomach, at the same time grunting in a wheezy way to imitate the sounds of a bass fiddle. "You're out of tune!" cried one of the seniors. "Play louder!" shouted another. "He's playing on the open strings all the time!" exclaimed a third. "Make him move his fingers, won't you?" Frank caught this idea at once, and, throwing his left arm around Rattleton's shoulders, he moved his fingers up and down on Rattleton's chest as if he were touching the strings of an instrument. Meantime he kept up his grunting and humming as loud as he knew how. The seniors roared with merriment. Rattleton was shaking with laughter, and the three solemn juniors against the wall looked as if they would explode. Frank was perspiring in the effort to do the thing as ridiculously as he knew how, and yet keep his face straight. "Oh, but look here!" cried Baker, suddenly, "this won't do!" He took out his memorandum book, and all the students followed suit. Frank stopped fiddling. "Keep on until I tell you to stop!" cried Baker. "That's a black mark, anyway." In despair of ever doing anything right, Frank began to saw away again for dear life. "I call your attention," shouted Baker, above the uproar, "to the fact that this neophyte is making loud sounds with his voice." "That must be a black mark, then!" declared the other seniors, taking out their books. Frank wanted to protest that he had been told to make a noise, and that he could not very well obey one rule without breaking the other, but he thought it best to keep quiet. He learned later that the complaint against his making a loud noise was made for the very purpose of causing him to protest, for that would have brought another black mark against him. As he kept his mouth firmly closed the seniors failed to catch him there, but they put a black mark down nevertheless, so that within the first five minutes of his initiation Frank had had four points scored against him. CHAPTER XVII. THE TEST OF NERVE. Frank felt really worried about it, although it did seem to him that the marking was absurdly unfair. "These fellows haven't any reason to complain of a professor's marking of examination papers," he thought, "if this is the way they treat a fellow student." "It's nearly time for the test of nerve," remarked Baker, "and we'd better have the essay read before this neophyte gets so many black marks that his case will be hopeless. Get up on that table, Merriwell."