Ann Arbor Tales Part 20

The dean stared inquiringly over his gla.s.ses at the a.s.sistant professor of history.

"He is not----"

"He is not," echoed the dean.

"Oh," cackled the old gentleman and sat down. His prejudice against fraternities was well known. Several of the younger men present, who wore their pins on occasion, glanced at one another and smiled.

"It would--oh--ah--seem to me," began the dean, when he was interrupted by that dry, metallic cackle a second time.

"Does he contemplate joining a fraternity?"

"No," Lowe shouted.

"Oh"--and the old gentleman sat down again.

In the second row there rose a round, boy-faced man with a pompadour, who, after clearing his throat, began:

"It would seem to me, gentlemen, that we are on the wrong track; what?

It would seem to me that there is a way--a sure way--of apprehending the villains who seem to have worsted our young friend, Mr. Catherwood; what?"

Every man in the room leaned forward, and again the hush became awesome.

"And it is?" observed the dean, very soberly.

"_That we compare the handwriting of that note with all the students'

signatures in our possession; what?_"

There ensued a general exchange of puzzled looks and then the dean exclaimed:

"A very good idea, my dear professor--oh--ah--a most ingenious idea; but--oh--ah--would _you_ be willing to undertake to make the suggested comparisons?"

"Well I thought the clerks in the registrar's office might----"

"Very good--_very_ good!" said the dean--"I believe there are about thirty-five hundred such signatures--oh--ah--quite a week's work for the entire office force--quite----"

Several of his colleagues openly congratulated the boy-faced genius who seemed to them to be the only man with a plan worthy of adoption.

Amid the general exchange of felicitations before which the genius blushed and stammered his confusion, a.s.sistant professor Lowe rose and caught the eye of the dean.

"Order--oh--ah--order, gentlemen!" the latter called. "Professor Lowe seems to have a word----"

"It's just a word," was the reply, "but, gentlemen, the plan suggested can be of no avail and for a very simple reason----" He looked down at the boy-faced junior professor in astronomy who had formulated the plan referred to and who looked up at him, weakly, sufferingly.

"And what is the reason?" inquired the dean severely, loth to have a theory declared impracticable which he had seemed to favor.

"It is that this note was written--ingeniously I am willing to admit--by a right handed person, who, to disguise his writing, wrote with his left hand in what we call the 'back-hand' style. All writings, under such circ.u.mstances, are alike. My authority, gentlemen, is Dumas; of whom some of you may have heard." And with this cuttingly sarcastic speech the a.s.sistant professor of history sat down.

There was an instant's silence, broken by the old gentleman at the back of the room who had fallen asleep some minutes before. Awakening, just as a.s.sistant professor Lowe delivered his retort, he had heard but a word, and that word was pleasant to his aged ear.

"What's that?" he called.

No one a.s.sumed the task of explaining to him and he dozed off again.

As it was, for three hours, upward of seventy-five full-blooded, able-bodied men wrangled over an affair that little Green had a.s.sumed the responsibility of making clear to the wider world outside. Theories, opinions, solutions, were flung at the dean until he felt his head swim, and saw double.

In the entire a.s.semblage there was but one who had taken no active part in the discussion, but, rather, had appeared to look on merely, an interested, if at times annoyed, spectator--the professor of French.

He was observed occasionally to yawn.

During a lull he got upon his feet and straightway, without clearing his throat--said:

"Gentlemen, it seems to me we are as far from a solution of this affair as we were when we a.s.sembled. For one I am getting tired and am going home,"--he was quite independent for there was a standing "call" for him from an eastern inst.i.tution.--"Now I have a suggestion to make. It is this: Suppose we all go home, and await the return of the president.

Meanwhile let us keep our eyes and ears open, and our mouths shut; perhaps we may see and hear things that will indicate the proper course for us to take. In any event, it would seem wisest for us to await the return of the president. Good-night, gentlemen."

And b.u.t.toning his overcoat about him, the professor of French left the room.

It was not until then that the futility of their discussion dawned upon his colleagues. Some one moved that the meeting adjourn. The motion was carried. The old gentleman voted the single nay.

The dean walked home with a.s.sistant professor Lowe. Their conversation was wholly upon the case in hand. And when the dean left the younger man at the latter's door, he said: "I--oh--ah--I confess to being more puzzled than ever. A very mysterious affair--oh--ah--a _most_ mysterious affair."

And so it was that the puzzlement of the worthy dean deepened next morning as he read little Green's sprightly, suggestive story.

But the frown vanished from his brow and the wonder from his eyes, when, as he left the house, a messenger handed him the president's telegram.

And he hastened to the campus to make known to his colleagues the glad tidings that had come to him in the depths of his perplexity.

IV

The various and varying newspaper accounts of the affair awoke Ann Arbor from its peaceful slumber and for a s.p.a.ce the town lived. For two days interest developed with the pa.s.sage of the hours. Speculation became general. Opinions were as many as those who offered them; until there was not a man or woman from the Cat Hole to Ashley Street who did not advance a theory, new or old.

A like puzzlement, but one tempered by more original conjecture, characterized the att.i.tude of the undergraduate body as a whole. For two days Catherwood had not appeared upon the campus, but at all hours friends and mere nodding acquaintances called at his rooms only to be refused admittance by Mrs. Turner, whom he had bade inform all callers that he was ill, very ill, quite too ill to be seen.

Little Green was one of these callers. He had expected the refusal of admission which Mrs. Turner, with many apologies, gave him and straightway he telegraphed his papers that Catherwood was dying as the result of the great bodily injuries he had received at the hands of his unknown undergraduate a.s.sailants. For little Green knew by instinct what many a reporter requires long years to learn--that a "story" is "good"

just as long as there is a drop of "life" blood left in it, and not an instant longer.

Little Green fairly reveled in the commotion he had caused. The regular college correspondents, anaemic, frightened little fellows, were at a loss to know who had beaten them in their own papers. It was little Green's game, absolutely his, and he purposed playing it alone, aided and abetted in the achievement of this purpose by the various telegraph editors whom he sought to serve. And so far as the faculty was concerned, the frequenter the dispatches, the more woefully addled did the professorial brain become.

Out in the state, and in adjoining states, wise editors, looking down, as it were, from some high place, wrote venomous and vicious editorials in which the legislature was called upon to pa.s.s laws abolishing hazing in inst.i.tutions of the commonwealth by making the practice of it a felony, punishable by imprisonment. Parents in the further west with sons and daughters at Ann Arbor feared for their children's lives.

School boards pa.s.sed resolutions. Guardians wrote to the heads of various university departments asking if their wards were quite safe, alone and unprotected in Ann Arbor. A New York newspaper, on the second day, dispatched its most ingenious "woman reporter" to the scene of action and in three hours the sprightly creature had woven a fictional fabric beside which the tale of Ali Baba was the glowing, gleaming truth. She revived all the half-forgotten stories of ancient hazing rites, dead these many years, and wrote of them as of contemporary practice. And the imaginative artist in the home office ill.u.s.trated her vivacious article elaborately, seeking to convey to the eye horrors of undergraduate torture that words were useless to describe.

Skeletonized, the story was wired across the sea and the ponderous _Times_ gave forth an editorial in which it averred that such refined cruelty had never been heard of in English academic life; not even in the palmiest days of Rugby and of Eton at the height of the f.a.gging system.

Amidst the wild excitement, little pink-cheeked Green grinned at his reflection in his mirror and exclaimed:

"Gad! You've got 'em goin', Greeny; you've got 'em goin'. Greeny, _you're it_!"

And he was; for three swift, brilliant days.

For then the president came.