plained that each boulder marked the resting place of some student
whose career had been foreshortened accidentally, and he described
several of the tragedies--invented them right off the reel. Pubby was so
interested he didn't care who saw his notebook. When Petey told him how
a pack of timber wolves had besieged the school for nine days and
nights, four years before, he almost cried because there was no
photograph of the scene handy. We had to promise him a wolf skin to
comfort him.
Dillpickle Academy was a plain old brick building, with one of those
cupolas which were so popular among schools and colleges forty years
ago. I don't know just what mysterious effect a cupola has on education,
but it was considered necessary at that time. In front of the building
was a wide stone porch. Inside we could see half a dozen dogs and a
horse. Pubby looked a bushel of exclamation points when Petey explained
that they belonged to the president. He looked a lot more when he saw a
counter with a fine assortment of chewing tobacco and pipes on it.
That, Petey whispered to me, was his masterpiece. He had borrowed the
whole thing from a corner grocery store.
Petey had just put his eye to the window of the president's room,
ostensibly to find out whether Prexy was in a good humor and in reality
to find out whether Kennedy, an old grad who had consented to play the
part, was on duty, when one of the boys hurried up and grabbed me.
"Just evaporate as fast as you can," he whispered; "there are six cops
on the way out. They're going to pinch the whole bunch of us."
Now this was a fine predicament for a young and promising college--to be
arrested by six lowly cops on its own campus, in the act of showing a
distinguished visitor how it ran the earth, and was particular Hades
with the trigger-finger! Bangs was showing Pubby the window through
which the Professor of Arithmetic had thrown him the term before, and I
told Petey. He sat down and cried.
"After all this work and just as we had it cinched!" he moaned. "I'll
quit school to-morrow and devote my life to poisoning policemen. This
has made an anarchist of me."
There was nothing to do. We couldn't very well explain that the college
would now have to run away and hide because some enthusiastic Freshman
had fired a horse-pistol on the streets of Jonesville. I looked at the
crowd of fantastic students getting ready to bolt for the fence. I
looked at our victim, fairly punching wor
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