glorious. We'll just make Siwash into a
Wild West show for his benefit. The Rep Rho Betas will entertain him
days and he'll stay at the Eta Pie House nights. I'm putting the Eta
Bites on now. You've got to get him off this train before we get to the
station and keep him busy while I arrange the program. Just give me an
hour before you get him there. That's all I ask."

Now I never was a diplomat, and the job of lugging a fat old foreigner
around a dead college town at night and trying to make him think he was
in peril of his life every minute was about three numbers larger than
my size. I couldn't think of anything else, so I slipped the word to Ole
Skjarsen that Diggs was a Kiowa professor who was coming over to get
notes on our team and tip them off to Muggledorfer College. I judged
this would create some hostility and I wasn't mistaken. Ole began to
climb over his fellow-students and I was just able to beat him to his
prey.

"Come on," I whispered. "Skjarsen's on the warpath. He says he wants to
bite up a stranger and he thinks you'll do."

"Oh, my dear sir," said the Reverend Ponsonby, jumping up and grabbing a
hatbox, "you don't mean to tell me that he will use violence?"

"Violence nothing!" I yelled, picking up four pieces of baggage. "He
won't use violence. He'll just eat you alive, that's all. He's awful
that way. Come, quick!"

"Oh, my word!" said Diggsey, grabbing his other five bundles and piling
out of the car after me.

The train was slowing down for the crossing west of Jonesville, and I
judged it wouldn't hurt the great collector of Western local color to
roll a little. So I yelled, "Jump for your life!" He jumped. I swung off
and went back till I met him coming along on his shoulder-blades, with a
procession of baggage following him. He wasn't hurt a bit, but he looked
interesting. I brushed him off, cached the baggage--all but a suitcase
and the hatbox which he hadn't dropped for a minute--and we began to
edge unostentatiously into Jonesville.

For an hour or more we dodged around in alleys and behind barns, while
up on the campus the boys burned a woodshed, an old fruit-stand, half a
hundred drygoods boxes and half a mile of wooden sidewalk by way of
celebration. The glare in the sky was wild enough to satisfy any one,
and when some of the boys got the old army muskets that the cadets
drilled with out of the armory and banged away, I was happy. But how I
did long to be close up to that fire!