The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

crazy Professor Frazer. I know it must take lots of courage & I admire you _lots_ for it even if Ray doesn't but oh Carl dear if you can't do any _good_ by it I hope you won't get everybody talking about you without its doing any good, will you, Carl? I do so expect you to succeed wonderfully & I hope you won't blast your career even to stand up for folks when it's too late & won't do any good. We all expect so much of you--we are waiting! You are our knight & you aren't going to forget to keep your armor bright, nor forget, Yours as ever, GERTIE. "Mmm!" remarked Carl. "Dun'no' about this knight-and-armor business. I'd look swell, I would, with a wash-boiler and a few more tons of junk on. Mmm! 'Expect you to succeed wonderfully----' Oh, I don't suppose I had ought to disappoint 'em. Don't see where I can help Frazer, anyway. Not a bit." The Frazer affair seemed very far from him; very hysterical. Two of the Gang ambled in with noisy proposals in regard to a game of poker, penny ante, but the thought of cards bored him. Leaving them in possession, one of them smoking the Turk's best pipe, which the Turk had been so careless as to leave in sight, he strolled out on the street and over to the campus. There was a light in the faculty-room in the Academic Building, yet it was not a "first and third Thursday," dates on which the faculty regularly met. Therefore, it was a special meeting; therefore---- Promptly, without making any plans, Carl ran to the back of the building, shinned up a water-spout (humming "Just Before the Battle, Mother"), pried open a class-room window with his large jack-knife, of the variety technically known as a "toad-stabber" (changing his tune to "Onward, Christian Soldiers"), climbed in, tiptoed through the room, stopping often to listen, felt along the plaster walls to find the door, eased the door open, calmly sat down in the corridor, pulled off his shoes, said, "Ouch, it's cold on the feets!" slipped into another class-room in the front of the building, put on his shoes, crawled out of the window, walked along a limestone ledge one foot wide to a window of the faculty-room, and peeped in. All of the eleven assistant professors and full professors, except Frazer, were assembled, with President S. Alcott Wood in the chair, and the Greek professor addressing them, referring often to a red-leather-covered note-book. "Um! Making a report on Frazer's lecture," said Carl, clinging precariously to the rough faces of the stones. A gust swooped around the corner of the building. He swayed, gripped the stones more tightly, and looked down. He could not see the ground. It was thirty-five or forty feet down. "Almost fell," he observed. "Gosh! my hands are chilly!" As he peered in the window again he saw the Greek professor point directly at the window, while the whole gathering startled, turned, stared. A young assistant professor ran toward the door of the room. "Going to cut me off. Dog-gone it," said Carl. "They'll wait for me at the math.-room window. Hooray! I've started something." He carefully moved along the ledge to a point half-way between windows and waited, flat against the wall. Again he glanced down from the high, windy, narrow ledge. "It 'd be a long drop.... My hands are cold.... I could slip. Funny, I ain't really much scared, though.... Say! Where'd I do just this before? Oh yes!" He saw himself as little Carl, lost with Gertie in the woods, caught by Bone Stillman at the window. He laughed out as he compared the bristly virile face of Bone with the pasty face of the young professor. "Seems almost as though I was back there doing the same thing right over. Funny. But I'm not quite as scared as I was then. Guess I'm growing up. Hel-lo! here's our cunning Spanish Inquisition rubbering out of the next window." The window of the mathematics class-room, next to the faculty-room, had opened. The young professor who was pursuing Carl peppered the night with violent words delivered in a rather pedagogic voice. "Well, sir! We have you! You might as well come and give yourself up." Carl was silent. The voice said, conversationally: "He's staying out there. I'll see who it is." Carl half made out a head thrusting itself from the window, then heard, in _sotto voce_, "I can't see him." Loudly again, the pursuing professor yapped: "Ah, I see you. You're merely wasting time, sir. You might just as well come here now. I shall let you stay there till you do." Softly: "Hurry back into the faculty-room and see if you can get him from that side. Bet it's one of the sneaking Frazer faction." Carl said nothing; did not budge. He peeped at the ledge above him. It was too far for him to reach it. He tried to discern the mass of the ground in the confusing darkness below. It seemed miles down. He did not know what to do. He was lone as a mateless hawk, there on the ledge, against the wall whose stones were pinchingly cold to the small of his back and his spread-eagled arms. He swayed slightly; realized with trembling nausea what would happen if he swayed too much.... He remembered that there was pavement below him. But he did not think about giving himself up. From the mathematics-room window came: "Watch him. I'm going out after him." The young professor's shoulders slid out of the window. Carl carefully turned his head and found that now a form was leaning from the faculty-room window as well. "Got me on both sides. Darn it! Well, when they haul me up on the carpet I'll have the pleasure of telling them what I think of them." The young professor had started to edge along the ledge. He was coming very slowly. He stopped and complained to some one back in the mathematics-room, "This beastly ledge is icy, I'm afraid." Carl piped: "Look out! Y're slipping!" In a panic the professor slid back into the window. As his heels disappeared through it, Carl dashed by the window, running sidewise along the ledge. While the professor was cautiously risking his head in the night air outside the window again, gazing to the left, where, he had reason to suppose, Carl would have the decency to remain, Carl was rapidly worming to the right. He reached the corner of the building, felt for the tin water-pipe, and slid down it, with his coat-tail protecting his hands. Half-way down, the cloth slipped and his hand was burnt against the corrugated tin. "Consid'able slide," he murmured as he struck the ground and blew softly on his raw palm. He walked away--not at all like a melodramatic hero of a slide-by-night, but like a matter-of-fact young man going to see some one about business of no great importance. He abstractedly brushed his left sleeve or his waistcoat, now and then, as though he wanted to appear neat. He tramped into the telephone-booth of the corner drug-store, called up Professor Frazer: "Hello? Professor Frazer?... This is one of your students in modern drama. I've just learned--I happened to be up in the Academic Building and I happened to find out that Professor Drood is making a report to the faculty--special meeting!--about your last lecture. I've got a hunch he's going to slam you. I don't want to butt in, but I'm awfully worried; I thought perhaps you ought to know.... Who? Oh, I'm just one of your students.... You're welcome. Oh, say, Professor, g-good luck. G'-by." Immediately, without even the excuse that some evil mind in the Gang had suggested it, he prowled out to the Greek professor's house and tied both the front and back gates. Now the fence of that yard was high and strong and provided with sharp pickets; and the professor was short and dignified. Carl regretted that he could not wait for the pleasure of seeing the professor fumble with the knots and climb the fence. But he had another errand. He walked to the house of Professor Frazer. He stood on the walk before it. His shoulders straightened, his heels snapped together, and he raised his arm in a formal salute. He had saluted the gentleness of Henry Frazer. He had saluted his own soul. He cried: "I will stick by him, as long as the Turk or any of 'em. I won't let Omega Chi and the coach scare me--not the whole caboodle of them. I----Oh, I don't _think_ they can scare me...." CHAPTER XI The students of Plato were required to attend chapel every morning. President S. Alcott Wood earnestly gave out two hymns, and between them informed the Almighty of the more important news events of the past twenty-four hours, with a worried advisory manner which indicated that he felt something should be done about them at once. President Wood was an honest, anxious body, something like a small, learned, Scotch linen-draper. He was given to being worried and advisory and to sitting up till midnight in his unventilated library, grinding at the task of putting new wrong meanings into perfectly obvious statements in the Bible. He was a series of circles--round head with smooth gray hair that hung in a bang over his round forehead; round face with round red cheeks; absurdly heavy gray mustache that almost made a circle about his puerile mouth; round button of a nose; round heavy shoulders; round little stomach in a gray sack-suit; round dumplings of feet in congress shoes that were never quite fresh-blacked or quite dusty. A harassed, honorable, studious, ignorant, humorless, joke-popping, genuinely conscientious thumb of a man. His prayers were long and intimate. After the second hymn he would announce the coming social events--class prayer-meetings and lantern-slide lectures by missionaries. During the prayer and hymns most of the students hastily prepared for first-hour classes, with lists of dates inside their hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis _Journal_ or _Tribune_. But when the announcements began all Plato College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking. * * * * * As he crawled to the bare, unsympathetic chapel, the morning after spying on the faculty-room, Carl looked restlessly to the open fields, sniffed at the scent of burning leaves, watched a thin stream of blackbirds in the windy sky. He sat on the edge of a pew, nervously jiggling his crossed legs. During the prayer and hymns a spontaneously born rumor that there would be something sensational in President Wood's announcements went through the student body. The president, as he gave out the hymns, did not look at the students, but sadly smoothed the neat green cloth on the reading-stand. His prayer, timid, sincere, was for guidance to comprehend the will of the Lord. Carl felt sorry for him. "Poor man 's fussed. Ought to be! I'd be, too, if I tried to stop a ten-inch gun like Frazer.... He's singing hard.... Announcements, now.... What's he waiting for? Jiminy! I wish he'd spring it and get it over.... Suppose he said something about last night--me----" President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed: "My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope----" Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat