A Master's Degree Part 17

"If I show you sometimes how to look up and find the light, as you showed me the Sunrise beacon on the night of the storm out on West Bluff, you may be glad you heard me. See that glow on the dome! You would have missed that down in Lagonda Ledge."

A level ray from a momentary cloudrift in the western sky smote the stained gla.s.s of the dome, lighting its gleaming inscription with a fleeting radiance.

"But the light comes rarely and is so far away, and between times, only the cave, and the dark ways behind it leading to the river," he said gravely. The sorrow of hopelessness was his tone.

"Not unless one chooses to burrow downward," she replied softly. "Let's hurry home. Tomorrow you will be 'Victor the Famous' again. I hope this shower won't spoil the ball game."

As night deepened, the rain fell steadily. Up in Victor Burleigh's room Bug Buler grew drowsy early.

"I want to say my pwayers now, Vic," he said.

The big fellow put down his book and took the child in his arms. Bug had a genius for praying briefly and for others rather than for himself.

Tonight he merely clasped his chubby hands and said, reverently:

"Dear Dod, please ist make Vic dood as folks finks he is, for Thwist's sake. Amen-n-n."

When he fell asleep, Victor sat a long while staring at the window where the May rain was beating heavily. At length, he bent over little Bug and pushed back the curls from his brow. Bug smiled up drowsily and went on sleeping.

"As good as folks think I am, Bug!" he mused. "You have gotten between me and the rattlesnakes that were after my soul a good many times, little brother-of-mine. As good as folks think I am! Do you know what it costs to be that good?"

Ten minutes later he sat in Lloyd Fenneben's library.

"I have come for help," he said in reply to the Dean's questioning face.

"I hope I can give it," Fenneben responded.

"It's about tomorrow's game. There are sure to be some professional players on the other team. I want Sunrise to win. I want to win myself."

Vic's voice was harsh tonight. And the Dean caught the hard tone.

"I want Sunrise to win. I want you to win. There will probably be some professionals to play against, but we have no way of proving this,"

Fenneben said.

"What do you think of such playing, Doctor?" Vic asked.

"I think the rule about professionalism is often a strained piece of foolishness. It is violated persistently and persistently winked at, but so long as it is the rule there is only one square thing to do, and that is to live up to the law. You should not dread any professionalism in the game tomorrow, however. You'll bring us through anyhow, and keep the Sunrise name and fame untarnished." The Dean smiled genially.

Burleigh's face was very pale and a strange fire burned in his eyes.

"Dr. Fenneben"--his musical voice rang clear--"I'm only a poor devil from the short-gra.s.s country where life each year depends on that year's crop. Three years out of four, the wind and drouth bring only failure at harvest time. Then we starve our bodies and grip onto hope and determination with our souls till seedtime comes again. I want a college education. Last summer burned us out as usual within a month of harvest.

Then the mortgage got in its work on my claim and I had to give it up.

I had barely enough to get through here at pauper rates this year--but I could n't do it and keep Bug, too. I went into Colorado and played baseball for pay, so I could come here and bring him with me. That's why I can out-bat our team, and could win dead easy for Sunrise tomorrow.

n.o.body in Kansas knows it. Now, what shall I do?"

The words were shot out like bullets.

"What shall you do?" Lloyd Fenneben's black eyes held Burleigh. "There is only one thing to do. When you ranked high in grades with only the trivial matter of excusable absence against you--no broken law--you took Professor Burgess gently by the throat and told him you meant to play anyhow. You stood your ground like a man, for your own sake and for the honor of Sunrise. Stand like a man for your own sake and the honor of Sunrise, now. Go to Professor Burgess and take him gently--by the hand, this time--and tell him you do not mean to play, and why you cannot."

Burleigh sat still as stone, his face white as marble, his wide-open eyes under his black brows seeing nothing.

"But our proud record--the glorious honor of this college," he said at length, and back of his words was the thought of Victor Burleigh, the idol of Sunrise, dethroned, where he had been adored.

"There is no honor for a college like the honesty of its students. There is no prouder record than the record of daring to do the right. You could get into the game once by a brute's strength. Get out of it now by a gentleman's honor."

Behind the speech was Lloyd Fenneben himself, sympathetic, firm, upright, before whom the harshness of Victor Burleigh's face slowly gave place to an expression of sorrow.

"My boy," Fenneben said gently, "Nature gave us the Walnut Valley with its limestone ledges and fine forest trees. But before our Sunrise could be builded the ledge had to be shapen into the hewn stone, the green tree to the seasoned lumber, quarter-sawed oak--quarter-sawed, mind you.

Mill, forge and try-pit, ax and saw and chisel, with cleft and blow and furnace heat, shaped them all for Service. Over our doorway is the Sunrise initial. It stands also for Strife, part of which you know already; but it stands for Sacrifice as well. You are in the shaping.

G.o.d grant you may be turned out a man fitted by Sacrifice for Service when the shaping is done."

Burleigh rose, silent still, and the two went out together. At the doorway, he turned to Fenneben, who grasped his hand without a word. And once again, the firm hand clasp of the Dean of Sunrise seemed to bind the country boy to the finer things of life. It had done the same on that day after the Thanksgiving game when he sat in Fenneben's study, and understood for the first time what gives the right to pride in brawny arm and steel-spring nerve.

After Burleigh left him, Lloyd Fenneben stood for a long time on his veranda in the light of the doorway watching the steady downpour of the warm May rain. As he turned at length to enter the house a rough-looking man with rain-soaked clothing and slouched hat, sprang out of the shadows.

"Stranger," he called hastily. "There's a little child fell in the river round the bend, and his mother got hold of him, but she can't pull him out, and can't hold on much longer. Will you come help me, quick? I've only got one arm or I would n't have had to ask for help."

An empty sleeve was flapping in the rain, and Fenneben did not notice then that the man kept that side of himself all the time in the shadows.

Fenneben had only one thought as he hurried away in the darkness, to save the woman and child. His companion said little, directing the course toward the bend in the river before the gateway of Pigeon Place.

As they pushed on with all speed through rain and mud, Fenneben was hardly conscious that Dennie Saxon's words about the lonely gray-haired hermit woman were recurring curiously to his mind.

"If talking about Sunrise made her cry like that, maybe you might do something for her," Dennie had said. He had never tried to do anything for her. Somehow she seemed to be the woman who was in peril now, and he was half-consciously blaming himself that he had never tried to help her, had not even thought of her for months. Women were not in his line, except the kindly impersonal interest he felt for all the Sunrise girls, and his sense of responsibility for Norrie, and the memory of a girl--oh, the hungry haunting memory!

All this in a semi-conscious fleetness swept across his mind, that was bent on reaching the river, and on that woman holding a drowning child.

At the bend in the river, the man halted suddenly.

"Look out! There's a stone; don't stumble!" he said hoa.r.s.ely, dodging back as he spoke.

Then Fenneben was conscious of his own feet striking the slab of stone by the roadside, of a sudden shove from somebody behind him, a two-armed man it must have been, of stumbling blindly, trying to catch at the elm tree that stood there, of falling through the underbrush, headforemost, into the river, even of striking the water. As he fell, he was very faintly conscious of a sense of pity for Victor Burleigh fighting out a battle with his own honor tonight, and then he must have heard a dog's fierce yelp, and a woman's scream. Somehow, it seemed to come through distance of time, as out of past years, and not through length of s.p.a.ce--and then of a brutal laugh and an oath with the words:

"Now for Josh Wream, and--"

But Fenneben's head had struck the stone ledge against which the Walnut ripples at low tide, and for a long time he knew no more.

It was raining still when Victor Burleigh reached the Saxon House.

At the door he met Professor Burgess, who was just leaving. Strangely enough, the memory of their first meeting at the campus gate on a September day flashed into the mind of each as they came face to face now. They never spoke to each other except when it was necessary. And yet tonight, something made them greet each other courteously.

"Professor, will you be kind enough to come up to my room a few minutes?" Burleigh asked, lifting his cap to his instructor with the words.

"Certainly," Vincent Burgess said with equal grace.

Bug Buler had kicked off the bed covering and lay fast asleep on his little cot with his stubby arms bare, and his little fat hands, dimpled in each knuckle, thrown wide apart.

"I saw a picture like this once for the sign of the cross," Vic said as he drew the covering over the little form. "Bug has been a cross to me sometimes, but he's oftener my salvation."

Professor Burgess wondered again, why a boy like Burleigh should have been given a voice of such rare charm.

"I will not keep you long," Vic said, turning from Bug. "I cannot play in tomorrow's game, and be a man."

Then, briefly, he explained the reason.