Football -- Juvenile fiction; Schools -- Juvenile fiction
By Saturday Dick felt almost like an old boy. His courses promised to
be only mildly difficult, and the instructors seemed a very decent lot,
notably “Old Addicks” who knew so much of ancient languages that he
looked like an elderly, benignant Greek philosopher, and Mr. McCreedy,
who taught mathematics. Through Stanley he met a great many of the
fellows, and he picked up a few acquaintances himself. Of these latter,
one was “Rusty” Crozier. He was a Fourth Class fellow who preferred
to live in the town, and occupied two comfortable rooms in a house on
Maple Street, just below the school. He was a jolly, light-hearted chap
with a perpetual smile and hair of that peculiar shade of red that
we associate with rusted iron: hence his nick-name. Dick met him in
classroom. “Rusty” borrowed Dick’s fountain pen for a minute. After
class they came together in the corridor and walked a little way along
The Front. That began it. When Dick asked Stanley if he knew Crozier,
Stanley nodded.
“Everyone knows Rusty,” he said. “But if you want to tread the straight
and narrow, Dick, keep away from him.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t he--all right?”
“Oh, yes, Rusty’s all right. That is, there’s nothing vicious about
him. In fact, he’s a very decent, very clean fellow. But he’s gifted
with a talent for discovering trouble. And a talent for squirming out
of it! If he wasn’t he’d have left Parkinson long ago. I’d say that
Rusty’s trouble was an over-developed sense of humor.”
“I rather liked him,” mused Dick.
“You would. So do I. Everyone likes Rusty. But wise guys say him nay
when he suggests one of his innocent amusements. It was Rusty who
closed traffic on Main Street in the middle of a busy Saturday one day
last year, only faculty doesn’t know it.”
“Did what?” asked Dick.
“He borrowed two carpenter’s horses and a sign and placed ’em across
the middle of Main Street, near School, about one o’clock one day
last spring. He found the sign somewhere, I don’t know where. It said
‘Street Closed by Order of Selectmen.’ Then he went over and stood in
Wiley’s drug store and watched the fun. It was almost an hour before
they discovered that it was a hoax. The paper was full of it, and the
selectmen made an awful rumpus, but everyone else thought it was a
pretty good joke.”
“And he wasn’t found out!”
“No. At least a score of people must have seen him set the barrier
up, but no two of them agreed as to what he looked like. Some said he
was a labourer in blue overalls, and others said he was a tall man
with whiskers, and so on. That’s just one of Rusty’s innocent ways of
amusing himself.”
“But doesn’t he ever get caught?” asked Dick incredulously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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