Daniel Webster Jones, Jr., had solemnly pronounced anathema, malediction and imprecation upon Talbot Cummings. He had put his whole heart and soul into it and concentrated until his head felt funny. That had been yesterday afternoon, just after dinner, and now, more than twenty-four hours later, there was Cummings stalking untroubledly along the sloppy walk in the direction of the library, for all the world as if Jonesie’s passionate utterances had been benedictions and blessings. Gee, it was enough to make a fellow doubt the efficacy of condemnation! Jonesie flattened his somewhat button-like nose against the pane in order to watch his enemy’s ascent of the library steps. It was February, and such things as steps and walks were treacherous surfaces of glaring ice under pools of water. But Cummings never even faltered, and Jonesie’s radiant vision of his enemy prostrate with a number of broken limbs and all sorts of mysterious internal injuries, to say nothing of outward contusions, lacerations and abrasions, faded into thin air. A prey to keen disappointment, his painfully oblique gaze unwavering, Jonesie watched Cummings disappear and the big oak door closed behind him.
Disconsolately he sank back on the window-seat, rearranged his feet on “Sparrow” Bowles’ treasured crimson silk cushion and again took up his book. But although it was one of Kingston’s corkingest sea-yarns, to-day it failed to hold Jonesie’s attention, and presently it was face-down on that young gentleman’s stomach while his thoughts pursued the hated Cummings.
Cummings, you must know, had dealt a frightful blow at Jonesie’s dignity. Cummings might call it a joke, but its victim viewed it rather as a dastardly attempt to disgrace him. It had started with a perfectly excusable confusion of words on Jonesie’s part; and if blame lay anywhere save on Cummings it lay on the English language, which contained words that looked alike and meant differently.
Cummings, who roomed next door, had dropped in to borrow an eraser, and while Jonesie, who didn’t possess such a thing, was obligingly rummaging through the cherished treasures of the absent room-mate, Cummings’s reptilian eye had fallen on a composition on which his host had been engaged and which he had left on the table. Jonesie had next heard a choking sound from the visitor and had then witnessed his hurried departure, composition in hand. Surprised, Jonesie had made outcry. Then, suspicious, nay, chilled with dire apprehension, he had given chase. But a moment of delay had been his undoing. Below on the steps, where, since it was a mild, thawing day, most of the inhabitants of the dormitory were awaiting two o’clock recitations, Cummings was already reading aloud Jonesie’s epochal essay. “‘The ancient Greeks,’” gurgled the traitorous Cummings, “‘had a law forbidding a man to have more than one wife.’” The reader’s voice broke, and Jonesie felt that the tears were near his eyes. “‘This they called monotony!’”
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Jonesie had demanded indignantly, striving to recover the paper. And that, somehow, had increased the hilarity. After that it was no use pretending that he had discovered the mistake and was in the act of remedying it when Cummings had entered, no use declaring, as a final desperate resort, that he had purposely written it that way for fun. No one believed him, no one even listened to him. Everyone just laughed and laughed! For a minute Jonesie had laughed, too, but he couldn’t keep it up. And Cummings had waved the beastly paper out of his reach and gurgled “‘This they called monotony’” over and over, until Jonesie’s temper had fled and he had kicked at Cummings’s shins and promised to get even if it took him a million years! He had said other things, too, which we won’t set down here. And his tormentor had simply laughed and choked and gurgled, and fought him off weakly until, after awhile, a lucky grab had secured the torn and wrinkled paper and Jonesie had fled back to his room with it. Since then life had been a horrible nightmare. His appearance in class rooms had been the signal for idiotic grins and whisperings. The demure smiles of the instructors showed to what far distances the story had spread. Dining hall was a torture chamber. “What was that law the ancient Greeks had, Jonesie?” came to him across the table, or “Guess I’ll try the apple sauce, Billy, just to vary the monotony.”
As I have said, the month was February, and February at prep school corresponds to August in the larger world. It’s the “silly season.” The weather is too utterly “punk” for outdoor life. Detestable thaws ruin sledding, skating and skiing. It is still too early for Spring sports. Even mid-year examinations are things of the past. Gray skies, frequent rains, rotten ice, slush and mud: that’s February. Studying wearies, reading palls, one tires of everything. Room-mates who have lived together in harmony for months throw hair-brushes at each other and don’t speak for days at a time. It is, in brief, a deadly dull, wearisome season, a season in which the healthy boy welcomes anything that promises to enliven his pallid existence, when mischief finds its innings and when the weakest, sorriest joke is hailed as roaring farce. At almost any other time the jest on Jonesie would have been laughed at good-naturedly and forgotten the next day, but now it was a thing to be treasured and acclaimed, nourished and perpetuated. Jonesie knew that until baseball practice started, or—or one of the school dormitories burned to the ground or something equally interesting happened, he would not hear the end of that putrid joke, and that if he had ever been uncertain of the correct meaning of the word monotony that uncertainty was gone!
Disturbed by such knowledge, he stirred fretfully and the book fell to the floor and lay there unheeded while his thoughts engaged the subject of curses. He had always understood that a curse if properly formulated and delivered with earnestness and solemnity invariably did the business. Only just before Christmas Recess he had read a corking story in which a quite ordinary curse had worked wonders. He tried to find flaws in the maledictions he had cast on Cummings but couldn’t. As he recalled them they were perfectly regular, standard curses, and he didn’t see why nothing had happened. Of course, it might be that curses didn’t act right off quick. Or it might be—and Jonesie gave a mental jump at the thought—that it was necessary to sort of help the curse along. Maybe it wasn’t enough to just launch it: maybe you were supposed to get behind and shove! In other words, if he wanted ill-fortune in its most dreaded form to overwhelm the obnoxious Cummings perhaps he had better set his mind at work and sort of—sort of think of something! Not a bad idea at all! Besides, hadn’t he most earnestly promised Cummings to get even with him? He had. Therefor——.
Jonesie knit his troubled brow and half closed his innocent gray-blue eyes and gave himself to the problem. There was no use in attempting physical punishment, for Cummings was seventeen and Jonesie fourteen, and Cummings was tall and broad and mighty and Jonesie was only what his age warranted. No, what was needed, what was demanded was a revenge that would hold Cummings up to public ridicule as Jonesie had been held up and keep him suspended until the world tired of laughing. But just how——.
The door of the adjoining room banged shut and Jonesie knew that Cummings had returned from the library. A second bang proclaimed books deposited on the table. He hoped Cummings had failed to get what he wanted. One usually did at the school library. He heard his hated neighbor draw his chair to the window and heard it creak under its load. If only, thought Jonesie, it would give way instead of always threatening to! Eying the door between the rooms that hid the enemy from sight, Jonesie contemplated a fresh curse; something with more “pep” than yesterday’s; less academic and more in the vernacular. But that would necessitate arising, and he was very comfortable, and he decided to give the original curse another twenty-four hours to deliver the goods; meanwhile, of course, aiding and abetting said curse to the best of his ability so soon as his cogitations should suggest——.
The cogitations ceased and Jonesie, his gaze still on the communicating door, slid noiselessly from the window-seat and tiptoed across the room until he stood in front of it. Then, thrusting hands into pockets to aid thought, he began a slow, close and minute study of it. It was quite an ordinary door, placed there when the dormitory was built in order, presumably, that the two rooms might be thrown together and used as study and sleeping apartment. But Randall’s didn’t believe in too great luxury, and you drew only one room and, if economical, shared it with another fellow. Talbot Cummings didn’t share his, which to Jonesie was most satisfactory. Jonesie whistled under his breath as his eager eyes became acquainted with every niche and angle and knot and bit of hardware before him. Of course the door was locked, and the key was doubtless in safe keeping at the office, but besides being locked it was secured by a bolt on each side; and some secretive former occupant of Jonesie’s room had plugged up the keyhole with red sealing-wax. When it did open it swung into the adjoining room, and, as the hinges were on the inward side of the door, Jonesie was denied contemplation of them. He was also denied contemplation of the knob for the excellent reason that it was not there. He recalled having detached it but couldn’t remember for what purpose. Not that it mattered, however, for what is a knob between enemies?
At intervals Jonesie retired to the window-seat and scowled over his problem. At intervals he arose hopefully and stared anew at the door. Beyond it, unsuspecting of the malign influences at work, Cummings read on in peace. The brief afternoon darkened to twilight. Across the yard pale lemon-yellow pin-points of flame struggled above the entrances. Below the door a thin line of radiance indicated that Cummings had lighted up. But in Jonesie’s room darkness crept from the shadowed corners until only the window remained visible, a grayish oblong in the encompassing gloom. And presently the eerie silence was shattered by the sound of a sinister chuckle.
Daniel Webster Jones, Jr., arose phenomenally early the next morning and at eight o’clock, having attended chapel and eaten a hearty, if hurried breakfast, might have been seen entering the popular hardware emporium of Bliss & Benedict. At four minutes to nine, after a return journey through unfrequented streets and alleys and an entrance to the building by way of the furnace room door, he turned the key in the lock of Number 14 and unburdened himself of numerous packages which he thereupon secreted where they would be safe from the prying eyes of the chamber-maid. After which he seized on certain books and hurried to a nine o’clock recitation.
It cannot be truthfully said that he was a shining success in classrooms that morning, although he managed somehow to “fake” through. His fresh, cherubic countenance shone with the light of a high resolve and for the first time in two days he faced the world with fearless eyes. Whispered jibes fell from him harmlessly. Instructors, noting his innocence and nobility, viewed him with a suspicion born of experience.
At ten-thirty Jonesie had a free half-hour. Returning to his dormitory he glanced across to the second floor of Manning and was filled with gratitude. For there, in the school infirmary, “Sparrow” Bowles was interned with mumps. Three days ago Jonesie had deeply resented his room-mate’s good fortune, charging the Fates with inexcusable favoritism, but to-day he had no fault to find. Envy and all uncharitableness had departed from him. Indeed, instead of begrudging “Sparrow” his luck, he sincerely hoped that the malady would continue for at least a week longer!
I now offer to your attention Talbot Cummings. Cummings was an Upper Middler, a large, somewhat ungainly youth of seventeen addicted to bookishness and boils. But in spite of much reading he was not a learned nor brilliant youth, and in spite of the boils he had little of Job’s patience. He thought rather well of himself, however, and prided himself on a delicate wit which was really rather more blatant than delicate. In spite of the fact that he avoided all forms of athletics and abhorred physical exertion, he was well-built and, when free from gauze and surgeon’s plaster, was rather comely. Upper class fellows viewed him tolerantly and lower class boys pretended an admiration they didn’t feel because he had an uncanny ability for finding their weak spots and holding them up to ridicule. As has been said, Cummings lived alone. In the matter of furnishings he affected artistic simplicity, leaning toward fumed oak and brown leather. His study—he liked to call it study rather than room—was supposed to express individuality. The table was never littered. There was a very good-looking drop-light with a near-Tiffany shade, three or four soberly-clad books, an always-immaculate blotting-pad and a large bronze ink-well which, as he invariably wrote with a fountain-pen, was more ornamental than necessary. So much for the table. The dresser, instead of being the repository for numerous photographs and miscellaneous toilet articles, held a pair of silver-backed military brushes, a silver shoe-horn and one large photograph in a silver frame. The bookcase was always orderly. The window-seat adhered to the color scheme of brown and tan, the tan necessitated by the wall paper, which was not of his choosing. The cushions were of brown ooze leather or craftsman’s canvas. If I have seemed to dwell overlong on the room and its furnishings it is for a reason presently to be perceived.
At a few minutes after twelve that day Cummings threw open the door of his study and paused amazed. Nothing was where it should have been. The lovely near-Tiffany shade rested precariously atop a pile of pillows in the middle of the floor. The drop-light dangled over the edge of the table. The volumes in the bookcase leaned tipsily outward at various angles. The silver-framed photograph smiled blithely from the top of the radiator. And so it went. Everything was elaborately misplaced. Cummings viewed and swallowed hard, doubled his fists and hammered at the portal of Daniel Webster Jones, Jr. There was no reply and the door proved to be locked. Bitterly, Cummings vowed that so his own door should be hereafter! It took him a long time to restore order and he narrowly escaped being late for dinner.
He failed to encounter Jonesie until four o’clock. Then they met in a pool of water in front of Whipple and Cummings spoke his mind to an amazed and uncomprehending audience. Cummings offered to accommodate Jonesie in a number of ways, to wit: to break his head for him, to kick him across the yard, to make his nose even stubbier than it was and to report him to faculty. Jonesie closed with none of the offers. Instead he viewed the irate Cummings with surprise and heard him patiently, and in the end Cummings was assailed by doubts, although he didn’t allow the fact to be known. Surely such an innocent countenance and demeanor could not hide guile! Fearing that he might apologize to Jonesie if he remained longer, he tore himself away, muttering a last unconvincing threat.
Cummings slept that night, as always, with his door locked and a chair-back tilted under the knob. (Once in his first year at Randall’s there had been a midnight visitation attended by unpleasant and degrading ceremonies.) In the morning he awoke to find that the pillows had moved from the window-seat to the foot of the bed, doubtless accounting for a certain half-sensed discomfort. Also that his clothing, left neatly arranged over a chair, now lay scattered over the floor. He arose in a murderous mood and tried the door. It was securely locked, the key was in place and there was the guardian chair just as he had left it. He cast unjustly suspicious looks at the eleven-inch transom. It was closed as usual, nor could it be opened from without in any case. He went to the window. Below was a sheer twelve feet of straight brick wall. From his casement to the casement on either side the distance was a good three yards. Then and not until then his gaze fell on the communicating door and he said “Ha” triumphantly and seized the knob. It came forth in his hands and he staggered half across the room. When he had recovered himself he said “Huh!” But further investigations left him still puzzled, for the stout bolt on his own side of the door was shot into its socket and secured. Cummings went to breakfast in a detached frame of mind that caused him to walk into Mr. Mundy, the Hall Master, in the corridor, and, later, to say “yes” when he meant to say “no.” As a result of the latter mistake “Puffin” Welch seized on his second roll and devoured it before Cummings awoke to the situation.
Thus, then, began the amazing series of depredatory visitations that befell Talbot Cummings; or, rather, his study, for so long as he was on hand nothing befell. All one morning he remained uncomfortably concealed beneath the bed, thereby cutting four recitations and being obliged to invent an unconvincing attack of toothache. And while he lay there, inhaling dust, he heard Jonesie arrive gayly next door, remain for a half-hour of song and depart lightsomely. It was while he was describing that toothache to the Principal that vandalism again occurred. When he returned, far from happy, he found that, in spite of locked door and window, his near-Tiffany shade sat on the rug surmounted by “Travels in Arctic Lands” and the bronze ink-well, the latter, fortunately, empty. The silver-framed photograph lay on its face and the contents of the lower dresser drawer, or most of them, were lying about the floor. Cummings dropped into a chair, grabbed his neatly-arranged hair in both hands and raged.
Like most persons who appreciate a joke on another, Cummings hated ridicule when directed against himself. It was principally for this reason that for three days he kept the matter quiet. A lesser reason was that he didn’t like to believe that anyone was smarter than Talbot Cummings and that he thought he could eventually outwit the perpetrator of the dastardly deeds. His suspicions had long since returned irrevocably to Jonesie. He recalled the incident of the composition and Jonesie’s threats to get even. But there was no use charging that youth again with the crime until he had proof, and proof was not forthcoming. At first he suspected Jonesie of having a duplicate key to the corridor door, but reflection told him that all the duplicate keys in the world wouldn’t allow Jonesie or anyone else to enter the room and retire without disturbing the key that was on the inside or the chair that was under the knob. And after he had added a specially large and heavy bolt he was still more certain that the vandal did not come in that way. Neither did he enter by the window. He proved that by locking it and finding it still locked after the bed-clothes had transferred themselves to the window-seat. Nor was it possible that Jonesie came in by the communicating door, for there was the undisturbed bolt, a key-hole filled with sealing-wax and a piece of paper still reposing between door and frame, just where Cummings had craftily placed it. Cummings spent so much time trying to solve the mystery that studies suffered and he was spoken to harshly more than once. The thing even began to affect his appetite, and at last, when seven separate times he had found his study turned topsy-turvy, he offered an armistice.
“Come in!” called Jonesie.
Entered Cummings, smiling knowingly, and seated himself with a fine nonchalance. Jonesie, looking up from Latin, eyed him with disfavor.
“What you grinning about?” he demanded coldly.
Cummings winked and leered. “You win,” he announced cheerfully, and managed a deprecatory laugh. Jonesie frowned darkly.
“Win what?”
“You know. I don’t know how you do it—That is, I’m not certain, but I have an idea. Anyhow, it’s clever, Jonesie. You had me guessing at first, all right. But I guess we’re quits now, eh?”
“Would you mind giving me a hint? I’ve got Latin and math to get and there isn’t much time for conundrums, Cummings. If it’s one of the ‘What’s-the-difference-between’ kind, I never could guess those.”
“Oh, don’t keep it up. I tell you I give in, don’t I? What more do you want?”
“Say, what are you gabbing about, anyway?” inquired Jonesie crossly. “If you’ve got something on your mind come out with it.”
“You know plaguey well what I’m talking about,” replied Cummings, losing his temper. “I came in here ready to call quits. If you won’t have it, all right. Then I’ll go to Faculty. A joke’s a joke, but you don’t need to keep it up forever!”
“Of course not; that’s what they call monotony,” Jonesie agreed blandly. Cummings scowled.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, you won’t when you get hauled up at the Office.”
“What for?”
“What for! For—for making a beastly pig-pen of my study! For upsetting my things! You know what for!”
“Not again?” exclaimed Jonesie in shocked tones.
“Half a dozen times! More! I’m sick of it. A joke’s a joke——”
“You said that before,” said the other, sweetly. “Now look here, Cummings: you blamed me two or three days ago for ‘pieing’ your room. I stood for that, but I’m not going to have you keep it up all——”
“Then you quit——”
“—The year. If—if you annoy me any more with—with your unjust accusations I’ll go straight to Faculty. It—it’s getting monotonous.”
Cummings’s jaw fell and for a moment speech deserted him. At last: “You’ll go to Faculty! Ha, ha! Why, you—you little button-nosed——”
“Never mind my nose. At least I keep it out of other fellows’ affairs! I don’t——”
“You keep it out of my study then! Just once more——”
“Don’t be an ass, Cummings,” begged Jonesie. “How could I get into your old study if the door’s locked? Use your bean.”
“I don’t know how you do it! I wish I did! But you do it! I’m sick of it. And you’ll break something first thing you know! I—I ought to knock the stuffing out of you, Jonesie, that’s what I ought to do. I’ve stood mor’n most fellows would stand.”
“Try it and see what happens, old dear.”
“Oh, yes, you’d run to Faculty with it!”
“Like a shot,” agreed Jonesie.
“All right, two can do that. It’ll be probation for you just as soon——”
“That doesn’t frighten me. When a fellow’s conscience is clear——”
“Yah!” Cummings made for the door. “We’ll see! Just wait!”
“Right-o! But, I say, Cummings. If you want to know what I think, I think it’s spooks!”
Cummings slammed the door behind him and Jonesie looking past the green-shaded drop-light, fixed his gaze on a recently acquired article of adornment, a large, brightly-colored calendar, which hung on the knobless door, and winked gravely.
“Funny about Cummings’s spooks, isn’t it?” observed Jonesie later to Turner, of the Lower Middle.
“Haven’t heard,” replied Turner eagerly. “What is it?”
Jonesie seemed surprised at the other’s ignorance and enlightened it. He really made a very interesting yarn of it and when he had finished Turner was grinning from ear to ear. “Fine!” he chortled. “Oh, corking! And, say, Jonesie.” Turner’s right eye closed slyly. “Of course you know nothing about it, eh?”
“Me? Give you my word, Tom, I haven’t set foot in his room in weeks! Besides, how could I? How could any fellow, with his door locked and everything? It’s spooks, that’s what it is.”
Turner was Randall’s nearest approach to a town crier. If Jonesie didn’t want the story to spread he shouldn’t have told Turner. It was careless of him, for inside of two hours the mysterious happenings in Talbot Cummings’s room were known all over the school. Cummings attempted denial, but it was no use. Randall’s had found a new sensation and refused to be deprived of it. Cummings had to tell his story over and over, until he was sick and tired of it. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it been accepted seriously, but it wasn’t. His audiences invariably became hilarious and offered all sorts of nonsensical advice, like putting sticky fly-paper on the floor, erecting barbed-wire entanglements or ringing burglar-alarms. The younger boys, long intimidated, fairly haunted Cummings and with solemn countenances begged to be told about the spooks. His room became a Mecca for the curious and he had no privacy. Cummings was most unhappy, so unhappy that when he awoke the following morning and, in spite of having laid awake and watchful until well after two, found his counterpane abloom like a flower garden with his neckties, he metaphorically threw up the sponge. Those ties had been neatly arranged in the top drawer of his dresser, and the top drawer was now not only tightly closed but the key was turned in the lock! It was too much! It was—yes, sir, it was spooky! Cummings dressed hurriedly and tumbled down to Mr. Mundy’s study and incoherently told his tale. Mr. Mundy was young and a man of action. In four minutes he was at the scene of the crime.
Ten minutes later he owned to defeat. He had found the window secured, the door between the rooms showed that it had not been opened at least in months by the accumulation of dust and lint in the interstices, the transom was impossible and Cummings had shown him how the corridor door had been fastened: lock turned and key left cross-wise, bolt shot and engaged, chair wedged under knob. Mr. Mundy frowned and shook his head. There was just one explanation. He offered it kindly. “What you’ve been doing, my boy, is walking in your sleep. Maybe you don’t get enough exercise during the day. Then sleeping with everything shut up like this——”
“But I don’t walk in my sleep in the daytime, do I?” asked Cummings wildly. Mr. Mundy looked blank.
“N-no, but are you—ahem—are you quite certain——”
“Yes, sir,” declared Cummings bitterly. “It’s worse in the daytime.”
“Hum. And he denies it utterly?”
“Yes, he does, but I know it’s him, Mr. Mundy!”
“He,” corrected the instructor from force of habit. “I’ll have a talk with him. Stay here.”
Jonesie opened promptly, the picture of smiling innocence. And he spoke so convincingly! “Mr. Mundy, I really think you’d ought to do something about him, sir,” he said concernedly. “He comes in here and tells the strangest stories and accuses me of annoying him. He says I go into his room and disarrange his things when he’s out. He even says I do it when he’s in bed. He’s threatened to lick me, sir.” Cummings, listening beyond the door, shook a fist helplessly. “You know that isn’t right, sir,” pleaded Jonesie. “He says himself he locks the room up tight. I ask you, sir, how I could get in there if I wanted to.”
“Quite so, Jones, quite so, but—ahem—hasn’t there been some ill-feeling between you two recently?”
“Why, he came in here and swiped a composition of mine off the table and read it to the fellows and had a laugh on me, but that was days ago and I don’t care anything about it now, sir. If he’d just stop having these—these hallucinations of his——”
“Hallucinations, eh?” Mr. Mundy repressed a smile. “I wonder.” He sauntered to the communicating door and studied it attentively. He even lifted the large and brilliant calendar and looked behind it, and Jonesie, watching politely and imperturbably, blinked twice. Then Mr. Mundy gazed at the place where the knob should have been.
“Where’s the knob?”
“I don’t know, sir. It’s been gone a long while.”
“Hm.” The instructor seemed about to ask a second question, but changed his mind. Instead, he threw his weight against the door. It didn’t even creak. He turned to Jonesie.
“When was the last time you were in Cummings’s room?” he asked suddenly.
“About nine weeks ago, sir. It was before Christmas recess.”
“That’s the absolute truth, Jones?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” Jonesie looked slightly hurt.
“Very well. That’s all. If I were you I’d—ahem—I’d find that knob, Jones. Or one like it.”
The door closed behind the instructor and Jonesie subsided in the nearest chair, grinning like the famous Cheshire Cat.
Next door Mr. Mundy spoke firmly but kindly to Cummings. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d go in for some sort of regular exercise besides your gymnasium work. Be out of doors more, Cummings. You might take a good long walk every day; three or four miles. Aren’t worrying about anything, are you?”
“I’m worrying about having my room upset every time I turn my back,” said the boy excitedly. “That’s what——”
“Yes, yes,” soothed Mr. Mundy. “But I think if you’ll follow my advice regarding the walks and being out of doors you’ll find that—ahem—your worries will cease. About three miles to-day, to start with, eh? And drop in this evening and tell me where you went and what you saw.” He nodded encouragingly and departed.
Oddly enough, Cummings did just what Jonesie had done a minute before. That is, he subsided into a chair. But he didn’t grin. He groaned. “Three miles!” he muttered. “Great Scott!”
But he did them. He didn’t dare not to. And when he stumbled back, at five, foot-sore and aching from the unaccustomed effort, he found his study sickeningly confused. “It’s fine for him,” he thought bitterly. “He knows I’m safe out of the way for an hour. Mundy makes me sick!”
Supper that evening was torture, for he was tired and discouraged to start with and everyone he met asked about his spooks. He lost his temper completely with Turner and that youth had the cheek to read him a lecture on manners. He anticipated some satisfaction in reporting to Mr. Mundy that his walk had not prevented the “pieing” of his study, but the instructor told him that he mustn’t expect his prescription to work so soon. “Keep on, Cummings,” he said cheerfully. “It’ll soon tell. Try four miles to-morrow.”
But Cummings was through. He climbed wearily upstairs and knocked at Number 14. “When do you want to quit, Jonesie?” he asked humbly.
“I won’t pretend to ignorance of your meaning,” replied Jonesie grandly. “I’ve been thinking about your case, Cummings, and I’ve solved it.” Cummings moistened his lips but said nothing. “It’s your conscience that’s at the bottom of all this, old man. I believe that if you clear your conscience you’ll stop imagining things.”
“Imagining!” gasped Cummings.
Jonesie nodded. “You have something on your conscience, haven’t you? You’ve done something you’re sorry for? Something you repent of, Cummings?”
Cummings nodded, all fight gone. “I guess so,” he muttered. “I—I’m sorry, Jonesie. I apologize.”
“For what?”
“You know. Reading that composition.”
“Oh! Why, I’d most forgotten that. So many things have happened since to—to vary the monotony, Cummings. But it’s decent of you to apologize, old man. And I accept it. I never hold grudges, Cummings. That’s not my way. If I can’t show fellows somehow that they have made a mistake, why, I forget it. So that’s all right.”
“And—and it won’t happen again?” pleaded Cummings.
“Not if my theory is right, old dear, and I think it is. In fact I almost think I can promise, Cummings, that it won’t happen again.”
It didn’t. Jonesie’s theory was vindicated.
Three days later “Sparrow” Bowles returned from the infirmary, and one of the first things he did was to take exception to Jonesie’s beautiful calendar. But if he hoped to start something he was disappointed. “That’s all right,” said Jonesie, “take it down. I’m through with it, anyway.” So “Sparrow” removed it, and, having done so, regarded the door closely.
“Someone,” said “Sparrow,” “has been monkeying with this panel. Looks to me like it had been out. That’s funny!”
Jonesie yawned. “Maybe the heat’s loosened it,” he suggested.
A few days later “Sparrow” observed: “Hello, I didn’t know you had one of these electric torches.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, son,” said Jonesie; adding to himself: “You don’t know what can be done with a fishing rod with a piece of wire on the end of it, for one thing!”