n three nights' play increased this to twenty-nine hundred. The
noise of the unprecedented achievement echoed through the college. In
its constellation of bad examples a new star had blazed out, a star of
the first magnitude.
Bladen Scarborough had used his surplus to improve and extend his
original farm. But farms were now practically unsalable, and Hampden
and Arabella were glad to let their cousin Ed--Ed Warfield--stay on,
rent free, because with him there they were certain that the place
would be well kept up. Hampden, poor in cash, had intended to spend
the summer as a book agent. Instead, he put by a thousand dollars of
his winnings to insure next year's expenses and visited Pierson at his
family's cottage in the summer colony at Mackinac. He won at poker
there and went on East, taking Pierson. He lost all he had with him,
all Pierson could lend him, telegraphed to Battle Field for half his
thousand dollars, won back all he had lost and two thousand besides.
When he reappeared at Battle Field in September he was dazzling to
behold. His clothes were many and had been imported for him by the
Chicago agent of a London tailor. His shirts and ties were in patterns
and styles that startled Battle Field. He had taken on manners and
personal habits befitting a "man of the world"--but he had not lost
that simplicity and directness which were as unchangeably a part of him
as the outlines of his face or the force which forbade him to be idle
for a moment. He and Pierson--Pierson was pupil, now--took a suite of
rooms over a shop in the town and furnished them luxuriously. They had
brought from New York to look after them and their belongings the first
English manservant Battle Field had seen.
Scarborough kept up his college work; he continued regularly to attend
the Literary Society and to be its most promising orator and debater;
he committed no overt act--others might break the college rules, might
be publicly intoxicated and noisy, but he was always master of himself
and of the situation. Some of the fanatical among the religious
students believed and said that he had sold himself to the devil. He
would have been expelled summarily but for Pierson--Pierson's father
was one of the two large contributors to the support of the college,
and it was expected that he would will it a generous endowment. To
entrap Scarborough was to entrap Pierson. To entrap Pierson-- The
faculty strove to hear and see as litt
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