"Hicks," pronounced Butch Brewster grimly, holding the genial offender by the scruff of the neck, "you tantalizing, aggravating, irritating, lunatical, conscienceless degenerate! You assassin of Father Time, you disturber of the peace, _heed_! Scoop Sawyer is writing to Jack Merritt, to tell about the football team, and Bannister's chances of the Championship; he wants to tell Jack all about this Thor! Now, you have acted like Herman-Kellar-Thurston long enough, and hear our final word. Read Scoop's letter, and if when you finish its perusal you fail to give us full information, and answer all questions about Thor--" "The football team will toss you in a blanket until you do!" finished Monty Merriweather, "We intended to wait until after the scrimmage, but Butch evidently believes we should end your bothersome mystery as once, and--" "'Curiosity killed the cat!'" grinned T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.; then seeing the avenues and boulevards of escape were closed, but fighting for time, "let me peruse said missive indited by our literarily overbalanced Scoop. I am reluctant to dispel the clouds of mystery, but--" Scoop Sawyer thrust the typewritten pages of the letter--composed on the battered old typewriter in the editorial sanctum of the _Bannister Weekly_--into Hicks' grasp and with a grin, that blithesome youth read: Bannister College, Sept, 27. DEAR OLD JACK: There is so _much_ to tell you, old pal, that I scarcely know where to start, but you want to know about the football eleven, so I'll write about T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., and his 'Billion-Dollar Mystery,' as he calls it; about Thor, the Prodigious Prodigy. You well know what a scatter-brained wretch Hicks is, and how he dearly loves to plot dramatic climaxes--to mystify old Bannister. Just now Hicks has the campus as wrathful as it is possible to be with that lovable youth; he has originated a great mystery, and achieved a seemingly impossible feat, and instead of explaining it, he swaggers around like a Hindoo mystic enshrouded in mystery and the fellows are wild enough to tar and feather the incorrigible villain! To get off to a sprint-start, up in Camp Bannister, before college opened, when the squad was in training camp, Butch Brewster says that Coach Corridan one day, before Hicks, expressed a fervid ambition to find a huge, irresistible fullback-- Here the chronicle must hang fire, while T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., grinning at the wrath his mysterious behavior aroused, peruses those sections of Scoop Sawyer's epistle telling of two scenes already described; first, the one in the Camp Bannister grub-shack, where Head Coach Corridan blue-printed the Gargantuan athlete he desired, and the blithesome Hicks confidently requested that the Herculean task be left to him; second, the scene of intense excitement on the campus the night that the missing Hicks returned personally conducting that mountain of muscle, the blond-haired Thor.