For the few steps remaining before they reached the entrance to the dormitory nothing was said by either boy, and they parted as silently. The last words of the disappointed runner’s surly retort followed Salter home, and still echoed with humiliating clearness in his ears long after he had seated himself in his own study chair. Salter possessed “book brains.” He wasn’t good for much else in the opinion of the school, but he could get marks. He was careful, did not think one thing and write another, always recognized clearly the principle involved, and kept ticketed and shelved in some convenient lobe of his brain a store of exceptional forms and expressions, of formulas and important facts, on which he drew for recitation and examination as one might draw on an ever increasing bank balance for the petty expenses of the day.
And yet in spite of these remarkable gifts which his fellows used without hesitation when it suited their needs, poor Salter, as we have seen, was neither popular nor happy. Why was it, he often asked himself, that while he was doing so unquestionably well that which apparently all boys were sent to school to do, he must forever be rated in the school life as a drone and a non-combatant among workers and warriors? It wasn’t just and it ought not to be, but how could he help it?
An hour later Strong stalked into the corridor before recitation room No. 7, where a couple of fellows were holding up poor Salter on sentences in Latin Composition which each was convinced, by inscrutable analysis of chances, that he was to “get” at the forthcoming recitation. Swift looked over Whitely’s shoulder as the latter scribbled down the last words of the corrected Latin. “_Bellum gerebat_,” said Whitely.
“Oh, yes! And _dies_, what case is that?”
“Accusative, time how long,” returned the patient Sal.
“Why, of course! I knew that all the time,” declared Whitely, folding his paper with the air of one who had had information forced upon him. “I’m ready for him now.”
The recitation took its usual course. Strong flunked his question with a sullen resignation that drew a sharp look from the instructor. Whitely kept in the background until they had got well on toward the sentences which he had especially prepared, when he suddenly developed an intense interest in the recitation, fixed his eyes on Mr. Lovering’s face and brandished his arm aloft. But Mr. Lovering, who was near-sighted,—his colleagues said he always knew what not to see,—looked directly past the waving arm and challenging face to the silent, moody figure behind. Strong received the sentence which Whitely had so carefully prepared; and Whitely, with a face on which chagrin and disgust were so visibly pictured as to stir the merriment of the soberest, dragged himself to the board with a sentence which he had considered beyond the danger line and so not worth while to study.