has to have one or two limbs
working in order to accomplish anything. When all was fast Bangs gave
Ole a preliminary kick. "Now, brethren," he roared, "bring on the
Macedonian guards and give them the neophyte!"

Now I'm not revealing any real initiation secrets, mind you, and maybe
what I'm telling you didn't exactly happen. But you can be perfectly
sure that something just as bad did happen every time. For an hour we
abused that two hundred and twenty pounds of gristle and hide. It was as
much fun as roughhousing a two-ton safe. We rolled him downstairs. He
broke out sixty dollars' worth of balustrade on the way and he didn't
seem to mind it at all. We tried to toss him in a blanket. Ever have a
two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man land on you coming down from the
ceiling? We got tired of that. We made him play automobile. Ever play
automobile? They tie roller skates and an automobile horn on you and
push you around into the furniture, just the way a real automobile runs
into things. We broke a table, five chairs, a French window, a
one-hundred-dollar vase and seven shins. We didn't even interest Ole.
When a man has plowed through leather-covered football players for three
years his head gets used to hitting things. Also his heels will fly out
no matter how careful you are. We took him into the basement and
performed our famous trick of boiling the candidate in oil. Of course we
wanted to scare him. He accommodated us. He broke away and hopped
stiff-legged all over the room. That wasn't so bad, but, confound it, he
hopped on us most of the time! How would you like to initiate a bronze
statue that got scared and hopped on you?

We got desperate. We threw aside the formality of explaining the deep
significance of each action and just assaulted Ole with everything in
the house. We prodded him with furnace tools and thumped him with
cordwood and rolling-pins and barrel-staves and shovels. We walked over
him, a dozen at a time. And all the time we were getting it worse than
he was. He didn't exactly fight, but whenever his elbows twitched some
fellow's face would happen to be in the way, and he couldn't move his
knee without getting it tangled in some one's ribs. You could hear the
thunders of the assault and the shrieks of the wounded for a block.

At the end of an hour we were positively all in. There weren't three of
us unwounded. The house was a wreck. Wilbur had a broken nose. "Chick"
Struthers' kneecap hurt. "Lima" Bea