er Time was nowhere,
forty miles back with a busted tire.

[Illustration: Martha caused some mild sensation
_Page 63_]

Petey took to college life like a kid to candy and just soaked himself
in college spirit. He proposed his sixty-five-dollar banjo for
membership in the club and went in with it of course. He was elected
yell-master before he had been in school two weeks, and if you ever want
to know how much noise can come out of a comparatively small orifice you
should have seen him emitting riot and pandemonium in the second half of
a lively football game. Naturally, it worried Petey almost to death to
see the dear old Coll. disintegrating under the Scroggs Inquisition, and
he used to sit around the frat house with his head on his hands for
hours, smoking his pipe, which had the largest bowl in school, and
combing his convolutions for a plan. Then, along in March, he
electrified the whole school by taking Martha Scroggs to the college
promenade.

Martha was old Malachi's daughter. We hadn't known it, but she had been
in school all that year. She was a quiet girl who was designed like a
tall problem in plane geometry. While it was possible for a clock to run
in the same room with her, still she was not what you might call a
picnic to look at. She was the kind of girl a man would look at once and
then go off and admire the scenery, even if it only consisted of a
ninety-acre cornfield and a grain elevator. Martha was only about
eighteen, and I never could understand how she got on to the styles of
thirty-six years ago and wore them as fluently as she did.

Naturally, Martha had gotten along in her studies without being pestered
by society to any extent. I sometimes think this helped old Scroggs to
hate us. She was his only child, and he had taken all the affection and
interest that most people distribute over their entire acquaintanceship
and concentrated it on her. They had grown up together since she became
a motherless baby, and they did say that while you could bombard the old
man with gatling guns without jarring his opinions he would lie down,
jump through a hoop or play dead whenever Martha wanted him to.

Naturally Martha caused some mild sensation when she appeared at the
biggest social spasm of the college year, with her sleeves bulging in
the wrong place, and nothing but her own hair on her head. But what
caused the real sensation was the fact that Petey had been released from
the wo