He drew himself up, fumbling at his cap, terrified at the multiplied faces that danced before his eyes.
"I say, fellows, I don't see why you've got me up here."
"Fellows, I'm no silver-tongued orator----"
"Fellows, I haven't got anything to say----"
"Fellows, they were re-markably good--but _they didn't beat the old school team_! That's all."
He dove headlong into the crowd, unaware that he had repeated for the sixth time the stock oration of the evening.
The cry stuck in his memory all through the jubilant night and long after, when in his delicious bed he tossed and worried over the tackles he had missed.
"It's a bully nickname--bully!" he repeated drowsily, again and again. "It sounds as though they liked you! And Tough McCarty, what a bully chap--bully! We're going to be friends--pals--what a bully fellow! Everything is bully--everything!"
With the close of the football season and the advent of December, with its scurries of snow and sleet, what might be termed the open season for masters began.
A school of four hundred fellows is a good deal like a shaky monarchy: the football and baseball seasons akin to foreign wars; so long as they last the tranquillity of the state is secure, but with the return of peace a state of fermentation and unrest is due.
The three weeks that lead to the Christmas vacation are too filled with anticipation to be dangerous. It is the long reaches after January fifth, the period of arctic night that settles down until the passing of the muddy month of March, that tries the souls of the keepers of these caged menageries.
Since those days a humane direction has built a gymnasium to lighten the condition of servitude, preserve the health and prolong the lives of the Faculty. But at this time, with the shutting of the door on the treadmills of exercise, the young assistant master arranged his warm wrapper and slippers at the side of his bed and went to sleep with one ear raised.
Dink Stover entered this season of mischief with all the ardor and intensity of his nature, the more so because, owing to his weeks of strict training and his virtual isolation of the year before, it was all strange to him. And at that period what is forbidden, dangerous and, above all, untried, must be attempted at least once.