universal antagonism. He would not wake Butsey
in the morning, fill his basin or arrange his shoes. He would run no
errands. He refused to say sir or doff his hat to his superiors in the
morning; and, being better supplied with money, he took particular
pleasure in entering the House with boxes of jiggers or tins of potted
meats and a bottle of rootbeer, with which he openly gorged himself at
night, while Butsey squirmed over the unappetizing pages of the Gallic
Wars.

Finally, the blow came. Cheyenne Baxter, as president of the House,
appeared one evening and hurled on him the ban of excommunication--from
that hour he was to be put in Coventry.

From that moment no one spoke to him or by the slightest look noticed
his existence. Dink at first attempted to laugh at this exile.

At every opportunity he joined the group on the steps. No one
addressed him. If he spoke no one answered. At table the
Coffee-colored Angel no longer asked him to pass his plate, but passed
it around the other way. He went out in the evenings and placed his
cap in line with the other boys', but the ball never went into his
hat. If he stood, hoping to be hit, no one seemed to notice that he
was standing there. For several days he sought to brazen it out with a
miserable, sinking feeling, and then he gave it up. He had thought he
cared nothing for the company of his House mates--he soon discovered
his error and recognized his offending. But apology was now out of the
question. He was a pariah, a leper, and so must continue--a thing to
be shunned.

The awful loneliness of his punishment threw him on his own resources.
At night he lay in his bed and heard Butsey steal out to a midnight
spread behind closed doors, or to join a band that, risking the sudden
creak of a treacherous step, went down the stairs and out to wend
their way with other sweltering bands across the moonlit ways, through
negro settlements, where frantic dogs bayed at the sticks they rattled
over the picket fences, to the banks of the canal for a cooling frolic
in the none too fragrant waters.

In the morning he could not join the group that congregated to listen
to Beekstein--Secretary of Education--straighten out the involved
syntax or track an elusive x to its secret lair. In the afternoon he
could not practice on the diamond with them, learning the trick of
holding elusive flies or teaching himself to face thunderous outshoots
at the plate.

This enforced seclusion had o