The fact was established beyond doubt or denial. The boy was gone, nobody knew whither. There was, to be sure, a somewhat popular theory that he had fled to a neighboring large city; but the theory was based on conjecture, and wholly lacked convincing proof. For forty-eight hours Plainville had been talking about his disappearance, but the topic had lost nothing of its interest. At the club Poke held the floor, and submitted his philosophic view of the case to his friends. “Orkney’s a stubborn brute, as you fellows very well know. When he makes up his mind, it’s made up, and it stays made up. He’s bolted, and he’ll take precious good care not to come back right away. Where do I think he’s gone? I don’t know, but I’m sure he’s gone far enough. And if you insist on having my personal opinion, I think it’s good riddance of bad rubbish.” “Humph! Haven’t seen me shedding the sorrowful tear, have you?” demanded Step. “I haven’t seen any tears,” said Poke. “Why, Orkney hasn’t a friend left, after the way he treated Little Perrine! Don’t you remember how everybody cut him that last day in school?” “Must have been pretty hard for him,” Sam observed thoughtfully. “I don’t believe a soul spoke to him,” Poke went on. “That is, none of the fellows or the girls did. The teachers, of course, had to; but they said just as little as they could. Why, he was called up but once, and that was in the Greek class.” Step moved uneasily. “Say, though! That was a star translation Orkney made! Jiminy! but he must have had an iron nerve to keep his wits about him, with all hands doing their best to show how they despised him.” “Just what it was--case of nerve!” cried Poke. “Bet you I know just how he felt. He was saying to himself, ‘I’ll show this gang that they can’t rattle me; I’ll show ’em that I don’t give a whoop for their opinion. Let ’em hiss me! I’ll go through this day and prove that they can’t even rattle me.’ And that is just what he did. And when school was dismissed, he walked out as coolly as if he didn’t understand that nobody would travel with him for love or money. You know he’d been building up a sort of crowd of his own? Well, every one of the bunch quit him when the pinch came. But he kept a stiff upper lip right to the end!” “He surely did,” admitted the Trojan, with a touch of reluctant admiration. “But all through it he must have been planning what he’d do. My notion is that when he went down the school steps he was saying to himself that it was for the last time. He’d been scheming out what would come next. In the afternoon he got together the few things he meant to take along. He ate supper with his folks as usual. Then he slipped out of the house. And that’s the last anybody in Plainville knows certainly about Tom Orkney.” From his corner the Shark shot curt comment: “Big mistake he made! Case of quitting!” “How do you figure that out?” asked Herman Boyd. “Ran away under fire, didn’t he?” “But he’d stood the fire all day.”