CHAPTER I
THE DEPARTURE OF A HERO

It cannot be truthfully said that Dick Bates was overwhelmingly surprised when he reached the railroad station that September morning and found fully a score of his schoolmates assembled there. Wally Nourse had let the cat out of the bag the day before. Wally was one of those well-meaning but too talkative youths such as we have all met. But Dick played the game perfectly this morning, descending from the carriage – Mr. Bates was one of the very few persons left in Leonardville who could afford an automobile and still drove horses – with an expression of questioning surprise. He realized that too much surprise would suggest that he knew the assemblage was there to do him honour; and if, as some said, Dick was conceited, at least he was always careful not to seem so.

Mr. Bates handed the lines to Hogan, the coachman, who had ridden in the back seat surrounded by Dick’s luggage, and followed his son to the platform with a satisfied smile on his seamed, good-humoured countenance. It pleased him that this younger son of his should be popular and sought after. To a certain extent he accepted it as a compliment to himself. Dick was already surrounded by the little throng of high school boys and girls – for the gentle sex was well represented, too – and his father heard him telling them in that pleasant, rather deep voice of his how unsuspected and undeserved it all was. Mr. Bates wasn’t deceived, however. Dick had confided to him on the way from the house that there might be a few of the fellows there to see him off. Instead, he chuckled to himself. “You can’t beat him at the diplomatic stuff,” he thought proudly. Then his smile faded. “Wonder if he isn’t a little too good at it!” Then Doris Ferguson had spied him and was clinging to his arm and telling him how mean and horrible he was to let Dick go away and leave them, and the other girls, seven in all, were chiming in, and everyone was talking at once. And that pleased Mr. Bates, too, for he liked Doris and, having no daughters of his own, wished he had a girl just like her. He patted her hand and beamed down at her from his six-foot height.

“Now don’t you take on so, young lady. Just you remember you’ve still got me. Course, I can’t play one of those half-portion banjos like Dick can, but I’m just as nice as he is other ways!”

Sumner White had drawn Dick apart. Sumner was this year’s football captain, and the other boys, watching and trying to appear not to be, felt that words of weight and wisdom were being exchanged over there by the baggage-room door, and wouldn’t have interrupted for worlds. What Sumner was saying just then may have contained wisdom, but certainly wasn’t very weighty.

“If you run across any real good plays or wrinkles, Dick, I wish you’d put me on, eh? I guess they play pretty near college football at Parkinson, and you know how it is here. If Murphy ever had a new idea he’d drop dead! Of course I wouldn’t give anything away. You can trust me to keep mum, old chap.”

“Why, yes, I will, Sum, if I can. But I may not get near the team, you know. I guess they have a raft of corking good players at Parkinson, and – ”

“Oh, pickles!” jeered Sumner. “I guess they won’t have so many good quarters that you’ll be passed up! Bet you anything you’ll be playing on the Parkinson team before you’ve been there a week! Gee, I sort of wish you weren’t going, Dick. It’s leaving us in a beast of a hole. Say, honest, do you think Rogers could ever learn?”

“I think Sam’s the best we – the best you’ve got, Sum. All he needs is a whole lot of work. Of course you can try Littleton if you like, but you know my opinion of him.”

“Ye-es, I know. But Sam’s so blamed dumb! Gee, you have to use a sledge to knock anything into – There’s your train, I think. She whistled down by the crossing. Well, say, Dick old scout, I sure wish you the best of luck and everything. You’re going to make us all mighty proud of you, or I miss my guess! We’ll all be rooting for you, you know that. Well, guess the others’ll want to say good-bye. Wish you’d drop me a line some time, eh? I’ll write, too, when I get a chance. But you know how it’s going to be this fall, with a lot of new fellows to break in and Murphy away more’n half the time, and – ”

“Sure, Sum, I know, but you’ll get by all right. I wish I could be here when you play Norristown, but I suppose I’ll be busy myself. So long!”

After that there was much confusion. Wade Jennings shoved a package tied with blue and white ribbon, the high school colours, into Dick’s hands and tried to make the presentation speech he had been practising for two days. But everyone talked at once, the train came thundering in, and his stammers were drowned in the tumult. Dick had to shake hands all around, darting across the platform at the last moment to say good-bye to Hogan, and then listening to his father’s final instructions as to tickets and changing at Philadelphia. A grinning porter took charge of his luggage and Dick followed him up the car steps and from the platform smilingly surveyed the laughing crowd below. Afterwards it came to him that Wally Nourse had been the only one who had looked really sorry, that the others were merely merry and excited! Of course he excepted his father. Poor old dad had really looked quite down at the mouth when, pursued by the high school cheer, the train had pulled out. Tommy Nutting, true to the last to his rôle of school jester, had blown kisses from the summit of a baggage truck, and Doris Ferguson had pretended to wipe tears from her eyes. The rest was a confused memory.

Dick found his seat in the parlour car and watched the frayed and tattered hem of Leonardville disappear: the brick-yards, the carpet factory, the blocks of monotonous, square, lead-hued houses of the operatives, the tumble-down quarter known as Povertyville, and then, at last, the open country still green and smiling. His last glimpse was of the slender steeple of the Baptist church, white above the old elms around it. He changed his straw hat for a light-weight cap and opened a magazine he had tossed into his bag at the last moment. Then, however, his eyes fell on the ribboned package and he picked it up eagerly. The next moment he remembered his neighbours up and down the aisle and so he pretended to suppress a yawn as he struggled with the entwined ribbons. When the covering was off he found a pair of silver-backed military brushes hidden amidst much rustling white tissue and a folded sheet of paper. The brushes weren’t half bad, and although he already had a pair, he made up his mind to use them. The message read: “To Richard Corliss Bates from his friends and fellow-members of the L. H. S. M. C.” Then followed some thirty names, the complete roster of the High School Musical Club, and, in a lower corner, in Wade Jennings’ uncertain writing, the further message: “There wasn’t time to have them marked, but they’ll do it the first time you come home.”

Dick was pleased in a complacent way. The brushes were nicer, in better taste than he had expected they would be. Of course he had known they were coming: trust Wally for that! But even if Wally hadn’t talked, Dick would have expected a gift of some sort. He was the sort who got gifts, not through any effort of his, but because folks liked him and seemed to want to do things for him. He never went out of his way to gain popularity. He didn’t have to. But he enjoyed it thoroughly, and, having known it for some time, had become to regard it as his right. Today, the silver brushes pleased him not because of their value, which, after all, wasn’t great, but because they stood as a further tribute to his popularity.

Dick was seventeen, the right height for his age, slender in a well-muscled, athletic way, and undeniably good-looking. His features were regular, with a rather high forehead and a well-cut straight nose. His eyes were brown, a warm brown that held a suggestion of red, and matched his hair. He had a fair complexion with plenty of healthy colour in the cheeks. It was one of the few sorrows of his life that he didn’t tan readily, that he had to go through a beastly period of sunburn and peeling skin before he could attain a decent shade of brown. He seemed unaware of his personal attractions, whether he was or not, and his smile, which was not the least of them, won where mere good looks failed. He always stood high in his class, for he learned easily. He had a gift for music and could play any instrument at least passably after a surprisingly short acquaintance. He had a pleasant speaking voice and sang an excellent tenor on the school Glee Club. But it was perhaps in the less polite pursuits that he excelled. He had a record of ten and two-fifths for the hundred yards and had done the two-twenty under twenty-four. He was a fair high-jumper, usually certain of third place in the Dual Meet. In the water he was brother to a fish. He had played baseball one season not at all badly and could fill in at basket ball if needed. But, when all is said, Dick’s line was football. He had played two years on the High School Team at quarter-back. Last year he had been offered the captaincy without a dissenting voice and had refused it, announcing, what he had kept a secret until then, that he was leaving at the end of the school year, and nominating Sumner White. That Sumner was promptly elected was a further proof of Dick’s popularity, for ordinarily Sumner would scarcely have been thought of. As a football player Dick was really brilliant. He had a collection of fourteen epistles, which he was not averse to showing to close friends, from as many preparatory schools and smaller colleges urging him to consider their advantages to a person of his scholastic attainments. Parkinson School, however, was not represented in that collection, perhaps because Parkinson was too far away for his fame to have reached it. Dick had chosen Parkinson for the completion of his preparation for college only because his brother Stuart had graduated from there some five years before. Stuart had talked of Parkinson so much that Dick felt that he knew the school and that he was certain to like it. He might have entered two years ago, but had chosen to remain at the high school until he could go to the preparatory school with a fair chance of making the football team. He believed now that the time had arrived. Although he had belittled his chances in conversation with Sumner White, secretly Dick entertained few doubts of his ability to make the Parkinson team.

He was entering the Third Class and had been assigned a room in Sohmer Hall. Brother Stuart had advised Sohmer, since it was the newest of the dormitory buildings, and Dick had made application the year before. To his regret, he had not been able to get a room to himself, but the fact didn’t trouble him greatly. In fact he recognised certain advantages accruing from a room-mate. Who that person was to be he had not yet learned.

His train reached Philadelphia at a few minutes before eleven and he had just time to buy a morning paper before the New York Express left. He didn’t waste much time on the front page of the journal, soon turning to the football and athletic news. A hair-breadth connection in New York put him on the last lap of his journey, and, after a deliberative meal in the diner and the perusal of one story in the magazine, it was time to gather his luggage together. The train slid into Warne at three-fifty, and Dick, not a little excited under his appearance of perfect calm, alighted.