“I don’t need to. You know what I mean too blamed well. You screwed down those rubbers in front of my door. Planter caught one of you at it.”
“Which one?” asked Donald, with a snicker.
“How does he know?” retorted the angry senior. “It makes no difference, anyway. One’s as bad as the other, whichever did it. If I thrash you both, I can’t go far wrong.”
“That wouldn’t be square,” said Duncan. “If one of us did it, that one ought to be punished; but you’ve got to prove him guilty. Isn’t that right, Lindsay?”
Lindsay nodded; he owed Tompkins one himself.
Tompkins snorted. “If you think you’re always going to crawl out of that hole, you’re mistaken. Just keep on with your monkey tricks, and one of these days one of you’ll wake up with a black eye, and then for a couple of weeks you can be told apart.”
On this prospect the Peck brothers had no comment to offer. So Tompkins continued less violently: “I don’t care so much about what you do to me; when you strike at my friends, it’s a different matter. They come to see me, and get their rubbers punched full of holes. I tell you I won’t stand for it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Tommy!” exclaimed Duncan, swelling with a great idea, “let’s start a subscription to buy them some new ones. We’ll get two long sheets of foolscap, head them ‘Subscriptions to buy new Rubbers for the Editors of the _Lit_,’ and send them round. A cent apiece all over school will pay the bill and more.”
“I guess that won’t be necessary,” said Tompkins, who had no desire to become a school joke. “The thing can’t be settled in that way.”
“It’ll pay up for that gym scheme you put up on us,” suggested Donald.
“Overpay,” said Tompkins, significantly, as he turned to go. “I’m owing you now.”
Only a few weeks had passed since these things happened, and yet, as Wolcott sat in church that stormy morning waiting for the service to begin, these scenes and others flitted before his mind like recollections of a remote period. He had learned much in the short interval of ways and places and fellow-students. Poole, Durand, Planter, Tompkins, and the twins he counted friends; and with Marchmont he was intimate. The teachers he knew in name and lineage, history, peculiarities, faults, and virtues. He no longer mentioned them to his associates as Professor A and Dr. B and Mr. C; they were Peter and Swipesy and Moore, and so on down to the unfortunate latest comer, Mr. Owen, who struggled thrice daily against fearful odds in Room 10.