sounded now and then. We
waited patiently for him to speak. At last he turned on us and grinned
pensively.

"Do you know, boys," he said, "as a bed-maker I can beat the owner of
that prehistoric old corn-husk mattress out in the suburbs with one hand
tied behind me."

* * * * *

Of course it is a sad thing to be regarded with indignation and disgust
by one's only paternal parent, but Keg bore up under it pretty
manfully. He dug into his work harder than ever--and he was a good
student. Latin words stuck to him like sandburrs. That wasn't his fault,
of course. Some men are born with a natural magnetism for Latin words;
and others, like myself, have to look up _quoque_ as many as nine times
in a page of Mr. Horace's celebrated metrical salve-slinging. Keg went
into a literary society, too, and developed such an unholy genius at
wadding up the other fellow's words and feeding them back to him that he
made the Kiowa debate in his Freshman year. He also chased locals for
the college paper, made his class football team, got on the track squad
and won the Freshman essay prize. In fact, he killed it all year long
and likewise he trained all year long with his idle and vicious
companions--meaning us.

It beats all how much benefit you can get from training with idle and
vicious companions, if you are built that way. Of course we taught him
how to play a mandolin, and how to twostep on his own feet exclusively,
and how to roll a cigarette without carpeting the floor with tobacco,
and how to make a pretty girl wonder if she is as beautiful as all that,
without really saying it himself, and dozens of other pretty and
harmless little tricks. But that wasn't half he picked up while he was
loafing away the golden hours of his college course in our chapter
house. Conny Matthews, whose hobby was Latin verse, plugged him up to
sending in translated sonnets from Horace for Freshman themes. Noddy
Pierce showed him how to grab the weak point in the other fellow's
debate and hang on to it through the rebuttal, while the enemy
floundered and struggled and splattered disjointed premises all over the
hall. Allie Bangs had a bug on fencing, and because he and Keg used to
tip over everything in the basement trying to skewer each other, they
got to reading up on old French customs of producing artistic
conversations and deaths and other things, and eventually they wrote one
of those "Ha" and "Zounds" plays for