Part 101

"No."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No, I'm sleepy!"

"Sleepy!" said Dennis in such amazement that he no longer had any strength to argue, and left the room convinced that Stover was heroically concealing an agony of pain.

Stover immediately settled his tired body, sunk his nose to the level of the covers and floated blissfully off into the land of dreams. The next night and the next it was the same. For a whole month Dink slept, wasting not a one of the precious moments of the night, sleeping through the slow-moving recitations, sleeping on the green turf of afternoons, pillowed on Tough McCarty or the Tennessee Shad, and watching others scampering around the diamond in incomprehensible activity; but the month was the month of April and his years sixteen. In the first week of May Stover awakened, the drowsiness dropped from him and the spirit of perpetual motion again returned. Still, the distance between himself and his past remained. He had changed, become graver, more laconic, moving with sedateness, like Garry Cockrell, whose tricks of speech and gestures he imitated, holding himself rather aloof from the populace, curiously conscious that the change had come, and sometimes looking back with profound melancholy on the youth that had now passed irrevocably away.

During this period of somewhat fragile self-importance, the acquaintance with Tough McCarty had strengthened into an eternal friendship in a manner that had a certain touch of humor.

McCarty, after the close of the football season, had repeatedly sought out his late antagonist, but, though Dink at the bottom of his soul was thrilled with the thought that here at last was the friend of friends, the Damon to his Pythias, the chum who was to stand shoulder to his shoulder, and so on, still there was too much self-conscious pride in him to yield immediately to this feeling.

McCarty perceived the reserve without quite analyzing it, and was puzzled at the barriers that still intervened.

During the winter, when Dink was resolutely set in the pursuit of that beau-ideal, which had a marked resemblance with a certain creation of Bret Harte's, Mr. Jack Hamlin, "gentleman sport," as Dennis would have called him, McCarty found little opportunity for friendly intercourse. He disapproved of many of Dink's friendships, not so much from a moralistic point of view as from Stover's not exercising the principle of selection. As this phase was intensified and Stover became the object of criticism of his classmates for hanging at the heels of fifth-formers and neglecting his own territory, McCarty resolved that the plain duty of a friend required him to administer a moral lecture.

This heroic resolve threw him into confusion for a week, for, in the first place, he had been accustomed to receive rather than to give words of warning and, in the second place, he was fully aware of the difficulties of opening up the subject at all.

After much anxious and gloomy cogitation he hit upon a novel plan and, approaching Stover at the end of the last recitation, gave him a mysterious wink.

"What's up?" said Dink instantly.

McCarty pulled him aside:

"I've got a couple of A. No. 1 millionaire cigars," he said in a whisper. "If you've got nothing better, why, come along."

"I'm yours on the jump," said Dink, trying to give to his words a joy which he was far from feeling in his stomach.

"You smoke cigars?"

"Do I!"

"Come on, then!"

It was the last day of March, which had gone out like a lamb, leaving the ground still chill and moist with the memory of departed snows. They went down by the pond in the shelter of the grove and McCarty proudly produced two cigars coated with gilt foil.

"They look the real thing to me," said Dink, eying the long projectiles with a rakish, professional look.

Now, Dink had never smoked a cigar in his life and was alarmed at the thought of the task before him; but he was resolved to die a lingering death rather than allow that humiliating secret to be discovered.

"You bet they're the real thing," said Tough McCarty, slipping off the foil. "Real, black beauties! Get the flavor?"

Dink approached the ominous black cigar to his nose, sniffed it rapturously and cocked a knowing eye.

"Aha!"

"Real Havanas!"

"They certainly smell good!"

"Swiped 'em off my brother-in-law, forty-five centers."

"I believe it. Say, what do you call 'em?"