n a cayenne coating composed of parental remarks
on extravagance and laziness. He gave away all of his little jobs to the
rest of us first thing, and said he was content with what he had; but,
pshaw!--when a man has the gift he can't dodge prosperity. Keg had to
manage the college paper that year because no one else could do it quite
so well; and it netted him about fifty dollars a month. When the
glee-club manager got cold feet over the poor prospects, Keg backed a
trip himself--and I hate to say how much he cleared from it. That was
the first year we swept the West with our famous football team of
trained mastodons; and at the earnest solicitation of about a dozen
daily papers here and there, Keg dashed off something like one hundred
yards of football dope at five dollars a column--sort of a literary
hundred-yard dash. He used to write it between bites at the dinner
table. And then to top off everything, his precious desk company came
along and stole him from us early in April. It considered him too
valuable a man to tramp the country selling desks, while there were
other young collegians who only needed the touch of a magic tongue to
get them into the great calling. So Keg made a tour of Kiowa and
Muggledorfer and Hambletonian and Ogallala colleges, lining up
canvassers at a net profit of something like fifty dollars per
head--full or empty. When he blew in at the end of the year to spend
Commencement week with us he was nothing short of an amateur Croesus.
He bulged with wealth. I remember yet the awe with which the rest of us,
hoarding our last nickels at the end of the long and billful year, took
a peep at the balance in his checkbook and touched him humbly for
advances, great and small.

Keg had gone out the second evening of Commencement week to bring a
little pleasure into the barren life of a girl who hadn't been shown any
attention by any one for upward of four hours. The rest of the boys were
also away scattering seeds of kindness in a similar manner, and so I was
alone when Pa Rearick stumped up the walk to the chapter-house porch and
glared at me.

"I want to see my boy," he said, out of the corner of his beard. He
seemed to suspect that I had made him into a meat pie or otherwise done
away with him.

"He's out," I said, not very scared; "but if you want to wait for him,
won't you make yourself quite at home?"

He took a seat on the porch without a word. I went on smoking a
cigarette in my most abando