"I am tired to death of talking and hearing nothing but the game," declared Hudson. "I move to lay it on the table. There is nothing new to guess about it. I don't see how we can lose, and you don't see how we can lose, and no one sees how we can lose." "That is apt to be the case at just this time," remarked Holworthy. "Two days from now our vision may be woefully cleared up." "Shut up, you old croaker," cried Burleigh, throwing a sofa cushion at his host. The cushion knocked the book from Holworthy's hand and out of the window. "You go down and get that now, you pretty, playful child," said Holworthy, indignantly. "Oh, thank you, yes, throw it up, please," he continued to someone outside. "Much obliged. No, Rattleton isn't here. I believe he went out for a ride." "Who's that?" asked Randolph, as Holworthy drew in his head, having caught the book. "Varnum, the coxswain." "What the deuce does he want with Jack Rattleton?" queried Burleigh. "I am sure I don't know," answered Holworthy, "but he and Jack are great pals, you know." "What!" exclaimed Bender, who was not one of Rattleton's intimate friends, "Varnum and Rattleton? That is the funniest combination I ever heard of. The quietest, hardest worker in college, and the worst loafer." "You are wrong there," said Holworthy. "If you knew Jack as well as the rest of us do, you'd know he was the best loafer in college." "I believe that good-for-nothing chap would get up in the middle of the night to be hanged for any one of us," added Rivers. "I am not sure about the middle of the night," said Hudson, doubtfully. "At any rate if he was to be hanged for it himself, he wouldn't get up before nine in the morning." "How did he happen to get thick with Varnum?" inquired Bender. "First they sat next to each other in some course," explained Holworthy. "One day Jack was out in his dog-cart, I believe, and met Varnum walking and picked him up. Jack was a Sophomore then, but a pretty good sort of a Soph., and I think he was rather surprised and interested at discovering that there were men in this University outside of his own little set, and of a new kind." "That fellow Varnum is a rattler," said Rivers. "Hardly anyone knows him except the crew men, and, I suppose, some of his Y. M. C. A. pals. He has been making an awfully sandy fight of it, I can tell you, working his way all through college. Why, do you know, that chap came up with just two dollars and forty cents in his pocket!" "There are lots of men doing just that sort of thing," declared Ernest Gray, a sympathetic, enthusiastic little man. "Some day we'll be proud of having been in the same class with some of those fellows. It's a shame that we don't know all about all of 'em." "Oh, well," said Burleigh, consolingly, "we can always let people think we were hand in glove with the great men. 'Know him? Why he was a classmate of mine'--all that sort of thing, you know."