The Mark of the Knife. Ernst Clayton Holt
quick work of his hands secured the under holds and though Bassett lifted him off the floor he clung on like a leech, found his feet after a second and saved himself from going down. The Western Whirlwind wrenched and twisted and heaved; he tugged with both hands, striving mightily to "break the back" of his opponent, he grunted as he worked and left no doubt in the minds of the howling audience that he meant to put an effective finish on the combat. The wonder of the crowd was that Teeny-bits did not immediately fall an easy victim. They gave him the ready sympathy that is generally accorded to the under dog.
"Hold him off, Teeny-bits!"
"Don't let him get you!"
"That's the way!"
"Look out!"
"Trip him up!"
Those were the shouts that filled the room with pandemonium. One moment the struggling pair were over against the wall, the next they bumped the bed or knocked over a chair. Surprise showed on the face of Bassett; he could not understand how this little chap was able to keep his feet. He grunted more fiercely and tried to get a new grip, but Teeny-bits squirmed and shifted and somehow saved himself. The Western Whirlwind began to puff and wheeze; sweat came out on his forehead and his face became redder than ever. Then for an instant he let up in his heaves as if to take breath for a new and more furious attack.
It was a fatal pause. Until that moment Teeny-bits had been content to cling on and make a defensive fight of it. Now suddenly he changed his tactics to the offensive. By clever leg-work he got Bassett lurching backward. He pressed home his advantage and while a shout of amazement and delight rang in his ears, brought his big antagonist down to the floor with a jar that made the windows rattle.
Bassett, the Whirlwind, lay on his back, half dazed with amazement and feeling too weak to rise because most of the wind seemed to have been knocked out of him. Once more, as of old, David had slain Goliath, and the victor was receiving congratulations.
At that moment a boy larger than any who had been in the room pushed his way through the crowd. "No fighting in the dormitory!" he cried. "What's all this about?" And then he saw Bassett just rising weakly to a sitting posture and observed the other boys slapping Teeny-bits on the back. He gazed in doubt from one to the other and then said to the diminutive conqueror: "Did you put this big lummux down?"
"You bet he did!" cried a dozen voices.
"Well, you did a mighty good job," he declared. "You're new here, but a lot of these other fellows are not, and they know as well as I do that we're not supposed to fight or have wrestling matches in the dormitories. Get on your feet there, Bassett, and mind your own business hereafter. I know well enough that you started this. You got just what you deserved, didn't you!"
In an authoritative way that was confident without being "bossy" he ordered the boys out of the room, and when the last of them had gone and the sound of their joking remarks to the crestfallen Bassett was receding, he said to Teeny-bits:
"You must be a whale of a scrapper for your size – and I'm mighty glad you gave that fresh-mouthed Bassett a good lesson. But don't get into any more trouble with him. You know we have a sort of self-government here, and we can't be smashing up things in the dormitory. I room downstairs in Number 26. Come in sometime soon."
Later in the day Teeny-bits learned that his visitor was Neil Durant, pitcher on the baseball team, and captain of the football eleven. He was dormitory leader, which meant that he represented Gannett Hall on the self-government committee of the school. Turner, who gave Teeny-bits the information, was only one of many boys who dropped in that day to see the conqueror of Bassett, the Whirlwind. Turner – the same Terrible Turner who had been willing enough for combat earlier in the morning – confessed with a grin that he was pretty glad Teeny-bits hadn't wrestled with him! "If I'd hit the floor as hard as Bassett did, I'd bet my backbone would have been broken into forty pieces," he said. "Oh, what a pippin of a thump!"
Teeny-bits liked Turner's frank, outspoken way. He made up his mind that he liked him still better when Turner said:
"None of the fellows call me Terrible Turner, you know – that was just some bunk that Bassett invented. They all call me Snubby – on account of my nose, I guess."
That noon an incident occurred that some of the roomers in Gannett Hall noticed: just before lunch Teeny-bits' trunk came. Mr. Holbrook brought it up from the village in a buggy drawn by a sorrel horse and with Teeny-bits' help carried it to the room on the third floor. Several of the boys remembered seeing Mr. Holbrook in the Hamilton station and when Teeny-bits introduced him as his father they suddenly realized that the conqueror of Whirlwind Bassett and the bearer of the queer nickname was the son of the station agent and a native of the little hamlet that nestled at the foot of the hill.
Mr. Holbrook was white-haired and he walked with a slight limp that made him seem old. He looked at Teeny-bits' new friends with a kindly twinkle in his eyes and told them that they were all "lucky boys to go to such a fine school" and advised them to "study hard so as to be smart men." If he had not been Teeny-bits' father, they might have thought he was a queer old duffer.
When Mr. Holbrook had said good-by to Teeny-bits he went over to Doctor Wells' office and remained alone with the Head for half an hour. At the end of that time he came out and drove the old sorrel horse through the campus and down the hill toward the village. One or two of the boys who saw him wondered what he had been talking about so long with the Head.
Old Daniel Holbrook with the limp and the white hair meant every word that he had said about the boys being lucky to go to such a fine school, but he meant it particularly in the case of Teeny-bits, whose situation in life was entirely different from the situation of most of the other Ridgleyites. They came to Ridgley from half the states in the Union – from California and Ohio and the Carolinas and New York and New England – they came well-equipped and carried themselves with a manner that suggested the well-to-do homes they had left. Teeny-bits Holbrook was there because he had won the scholarship that under the terms of the endowment of the school was awarded each year to a public-school student who lived within the confines of Sherburne County. Fennimore Ridgley, whose coal mines had yielded the fortune with which he had founded the school on the hill above the village of Hamilton, had been born and bred in Sherburne County. He had long been lying in a peaceful grave with a tall granite shaft above it, but each year one of the boys of Sherburne County received a gift from him – the privilege of coming free of expense to Ridgley. For two years Teeny-bits had been going to the high school at Greensboro, covering the four miles on his bicycle morning and afternoon. Then the unbelievable had happened: he had won the Ridgley scholarship, and father and mother Holbrook, whose hearts were centered on his future, received the news as a direct gift from Heaven. Their pride in him made up for the loneliness of the house after he had gone.
The career of Teeny-bits at Ridgley was not to be without its incidents, it seemed. He had been a roomer in Gannett Hall only ten days and the feeling of newness had not worn off when the school was treated to a sensation that caused no little talk and brought him into more prominence than had the victory in the wrestling match.
On a Wednesday morning before breakfast a sheet of paper was found tacked to the bulletin board that hung inside the door of the dormitory. The message that it bore had been typed crudely as if the person who had done it were a novice in the use of the typewriter. It consisted of two straggling lines and the words were:
"Beware of Teeny-bits! Holbrook is not his name! He's ashamed to tell the truth!"
Two dozen boys saw the paper and read the message before Snubby Turner tore it down and carried it up to Teeny-bits' room. They told other boys about it and no end of talk went round the school.
"This was on the bulletin board," said Snubby to Teeny-bits. "A lot of the fellows wonder what the dickens it means."
"You're a good friend of mine, Snubby," said Teeny-bits, "and I'll tell you what it means. I wonder if Bassett put it up – but I don't see how he knew anything about me – unless Tracey Campbell told him. Tracey lives over in Greensboro and went to public school with me."
"Bassett tags around after him like a tame sheep – I don't like either one of them," said Snubby.
The story that Teeny-bits told his friend was the same