"Here is a letter from Rattleton," said Merry, picking up another from the mail he had just received. "I wonder how he takes it?"
"Read it and find aout," advised Gallup.
"A wise suggestion," bowed Frank, with mock gravity, tearing it open.
This is what he read:
"Dear Merry: Cheese it! What do you take us for--a lot of chumps? We"re onto you! Eight thousand fiddlesticks! I"m going to have the check framed and hang it in my room. It will be a reminder of you.
"Say, that was tough about your fizzle in Puelbo! It came just when we were hoping, you know. The fellows have been gathering at the fence and talking about you and your return to college since Browning came back and told us how you were making a barrel of money with your play. Now the report of your disaster is spread broadcast, and we know you cannot come back. It"s tough.
"Diamond is in a blue funk. He hasn"t been half the man he was since you went away. Hasn"t seemed to care much of anything about studying or doing anything else, and, as a result, it is pretty certain he"ll be dropped a cla.s.s.
"But Diamond is not the only one. You know Browning was dropped once. He is too lazy to study, but, in order to keep in your cla.s.s, he might have pulled through had you been here. Now it is known for an almost certain thing that he will not be able to pa.s.s exams, and you know what that means.
"I"m not going to say anything about myself. It"s dull here.
None of your friends took any interest in the college theatricals last winter, and the show was on the b.u.m. The whole shooting match made a lot of guys of themselves.
"Baseball has been dead slow, so far this season. We are down in the mud, with Princeton crowing. It takes you, Merry, to twist the Tiger"s tail! What was the matter? Everything. All the pitchers could do for us was to toss "em up and get batted out of the box. The new men were not in it. They had gla.s.s arms, and the old reliables had dead wings. It was pitiful! I can"t write any more about it.
"I"d like to see you, Frank! Would I? Ask me! Oh, say! don"t you think you can arrange it so you can come East this summer? Come and see me. Say, come and stay all summer with me at my home! We won"t do a thing but have a great time. Write to me and give me your promise you will come. Don"t you refuse me, old man.
"Yours till death,
"Rattles.
"Here"s another!" cried Frank. "If that doesn"t beat! Why, they all think those checks fakes!"
"As I said before," said Hodge, "you see what your reputation as a practical joker is doing for you."
"I see," nodded Frank. "It is giving me a chance to get a big joke on those fellows. They will drop dead when they learn those checks actually are good."
"Waal, I should say yes!" nodded Ephraim. "Jest naow they"re kainder thinkin" yeou are an object fer charity."
"Here"s Browning"s letter."
"Mr. Frank Merriwell, Millionaire and Philanthropist.
"Dear Sir: I seize my pen in my hand, being unable to seize it with my foot, and hasten to acknowledge the receipt of your princely gift. With my usual energy and haste, I dash off these few lines at the rate of ten thousand words a minute, only stopping to rest after each word. After cashing your check with the p.a.w.nbroker, I shall use the few dollars remaining to settle in part with my tailor, who has insisted in a most ungentlemanly manner on the payment of his little bill, which has been running but a short time--less than two years, I think. The sordid greed and annoying persistence of this man has much embarra.s.sed me, and I would pay him off entirely, if it were not that I wish to get my personal property out of my "uncle"s" safe-deposit vault, where it has been resting for some time.
"It is evident to me that you have money to burn in an open grate. That is great, as Griswold would say. And it was so kind of you to remember your old friends. The little hint accompanying each check that thus you divided the spoils of our great trip across the continent was not sufficient to deceive anyone into the belief that this was other than a generous act on your part and a free gift.
"There is not much news to write, save that everybody is in the dumps and everything has turned blue. I suppose some of the others will tell you all about things, so that will save me the task, which you know I would intensely enjoy, as I do love to work. It is the joy of my life to labor. I spend as much time as possible each day working on a comfortable couch in my room; but I will confess that I might not work quite so hard if it was not necessary to draw at the pipe in order to smoke up.
"When are you coming East? Aren"t you getting tired of the West?
Why can"t you make a visit to Yale before vacation time? You would be received with great _eclat_. Excuse my French. I have to fling it around occasionally, when I can"t think of any Latin or Greek. Why do you suppose Latin and Greek were invented? Why didn"t those old duffers use English, and save us poor devils no end of grinding?
"Unfortunately, I have just upset the ink, and, having no more, I must quit.
"Yours energetically,
"Bruce Browning."
"Well, it"s simply marvelous that he stuck to it long enough to write all that!" laughed Frank. "And he, like the others, thinks the check a fake."
Hodge got up and stood looking sullenly out of the window.
"What"s the matter, Bart?" asked Merry, detecting that there was something wrong.
"Nothing," muttered the dark-faced fellow.
"Oh, come! Was there anything in those letters you did not like?"
"No. It was something there was not in the letters."
"What?"
"Not one of those fellows even mentioned me!" cried Hodge, fiercely whirling about. "I didn"t care a rap about Diamond and Rattleton, but Browning would have showed a trace of decency if he had said a word about me. He made a bad blunder and was forced to confess it, but I"ll bet he doesn"t think a whit more of me now."
"Oh, you are too sensitive, old man. They did not even write anything in particular for news, and think how many of my friends at college they failed to mention."
"Oh, well; they knew I was with you, and one of them might have asked for me. I hope you may go back to Yale, Merry, but wild horses could not drag me back there! I hate them all!"
"Hate them, Hodge?"
"Yes, hate them!" Bart almost shouted. "They are a lot of cads! There is not a whole man among them!"
Then he strode out of the room, giving the door a bang behind him.
Of course Frank made haste to reply to the letters of his college chums, a.s.suring them that the checks were perfectly good, and adding that, although he had some reputation as a practical joker, he was not quite crazy enough to utter a worthless check on a well-known bank, as that would be a criminal act.
Frank mentioned Hodge, and, without saying so in so many words, gave them to understand that Bart felt the slight of not being spoken of in any of the letters from his former acquaintances.
One thing Frank did not tell them, and that was that he was on the point of starting out again with his play, having renamed it, and rewritten it, and added a sensational feature of the "spectacular" order in the view of a boat race between Yale, Harvard and Cornell.
Even though he was venturing everything on the success of the piece, Merry realized now better than ever before that no man was so infallible that he could always correctly foretell the fate of an untried play.
It is a great speculation to put a play on the road at large expense.
The oldest managers are sometimes deceived in the value of a dramatic piece of property, and it is not an infrequent thing that they lose thousands of dollars in staging and producing a play in which they have the greatest confidence, but which the theater-going public absolutely refuses to accept.
Frank had been very confident that his second play would be a winner in its original form, but disaster had befallen it at the very start. He might have kept it on the road as it stood, for, at the very moment when he seemed hopelessly stranded without a dollar in the world, fortune had smiled upon him by placing in his hands the wealth which he had found in the Utah Desert at the time of his bicycle tour across the continent.
But Merry had realized that, in the condition in which it then stood, it was more than probable that the play would prove an utter failure should he try to force it upon the public.
This caused him to take prompt action. First he brought the company to Denver, holding all of them, save the two men who had caused him no small amount of trouble, namely, Lloyd Fowler and Charlie Harper.
Calmly reviewing his play at Twin Star Ranch, Frank decided that the comedy element was not strong enough in the piece to make it a popular success on the road; accordingly he introduced two new characters. It would be necessary, in order to produce the effect that he desired, to employ a number of "supers" in each place where the play was given, as he did not believe he would be warranted in the expense of carrying nonspeaking characters with him.