The Gold Bat

"When he had let Strachan through that second time, in the second half.

I asked him why on earth he tried to play footer at all. I told him a good kiss-in-the-ring club was about his form. It was rather cheap, but I felt so frightfully sick about it. It"s sickening to be let down like that when you"ve been pressing the whole time, and ought to be scoring every other minute."

"What had he to say on the subject?" asked Clowes.

"Oh, he ga.s.sed a bit until I told him I"d kick him if he said another word. That shut him up."

"You ought to have kicked him. You want all the kicking practice you can get. I never saw anything feebler than that shot of yours after Drummond"s try."

"I"d like to see _you_ take a kick like that. It was nearly on the touch-line. Still, when we play you, we shan"t need to convert any of our tries. We"ll get our thirty points without that. Perhaps you"d like to scratch?"

"As a matter of fact," said Clowes confidentially, "I am going to score seven tries against you off my own bat. You"ll be sorry you ever turned out when we"ve finished with you."

XII

NEWS OF THE GOLD BAT

s...o...b..ossom sat disconsolately on the table in the senior day-room. He was not happy in exile. Brewing in the senior day-room was a mere vulgar brawl, lacking all the refining influences of the study. You had to fight for a place at the fire, and when you had got it "twas not always easy to keep it, and there was no privacy, and the fellows were always bear-fighting, so that it was impossible to read a book quietly for ten consecutive minutes without some a.s.s heaving a cushion at you or turning out the gas. Altogether s...o...b..ossom yearned for the peace of his study, and wished earnestly that Mr Seymour would withdraw the order of banishment. It was the not being able to read that he objected to chiefly. In place of brewing, the ex-proprietors of studies five, six, and seven now made a practice of going to the school shop. It was more expensive and not nearly so comfortable--there is a romance about a study brew which you can never get anywhere else--but it served, and it was not on this score that he grumbled most. What he hated was having to live in a bear-garden. For s...o...b..ossom was a man of moods.

Give him two or three congenial spirits to back him up, and he would lead the revels with the _abandon_ of a Mr Bult.i.tude (after his return to his original form). But he liked to choose his accomplices, and the gay sparks of the senior day-room did not appeal to him. They were not intellectual enough. In his lucid intervals, he was accustomed to be almost abnormally solemn and respectable. When not promoting some unholy rag, s...o...b..ossom resembled an elderly gentleman of studious habits. He liked to sit in a comfortable chair and read a book. It was the impossibility of doing this in the senior day-room that led him to try and think of some other haven where he might rest. Had it been summer, he would have taken some literature out on to the cricket-field or the downs, and put in a little steady reading there, with the aid of a bag of cherries. But with the thermometer low, that was impossible.

He felt very lonely and dismal. He was not a man with many friends. In fact, Barry and the other three were almost the only members of the house with whom he was on speaking-terms. And of these four he saw very little. Drummond and Barry were always out of doors or over at the gymnasium, and as for M"Todd and De Bertini, it was not worth while talking to the one, and impossible to talk to the other. No wonder s...o...b..ossom felt dull. Once Barry and Drummond had taken him over to the gymnasium with them, but this had bored him worse than ever. They had been hard at it all the time--for, unlike a good many of the school, they went to the gymnasium for business, not to lounge--and he had had to sit about watching them. And watching gymnastics was one of the things he most loathed. Since then he had refused to go.

That night matters came to a head. Just as he had settled down to read, somebody, in flinging a cushion across the room, brought down the gas apparatus with a run, and before light was once more restored it was tea-time. After that there was preparation, which lasted for two hours, and by the time he had to go to bed he had not been able to read a single page of the enthralling work with which he was at present occupied.

He had just got into bed when he was struck with a brilliant idea. Why waste the precious hours in sleep? What was that saying of somebody"s, "Five hours for a wise man, six for somebody else--he forgot whom--eight for a fool, nine for an idiot," or words to that effect? Five hours sleep would mean that he need not go to bed till half past two. In the meanwhile he could be finding out exactly what the hero _did_ do when he found out (to his horror) that it was his cousin Jasper who had really killed the old gentleman in the wood. The only question was--how was he to do his reading? Prefects were allowed to work on after lights out in their dormitories by the aid of a candle, but to the ordinary mortal this was forbidden.

Then he was struck with another brilliant idea. It is a curious thing about ideas. You do not get one for over a month, and then there comes a rush of them, all brilliant. Why, he thought, should he not go and read in his study with a dark lantern? He had a dark lantern. It was one of the things he had found lying about at home on the last day of the holidays, and had brought with him to school. It was his custom to go about the house just before the holidays ended, snapping up unconsidered trifles, which might or might not come in useful. This term he had brought back a curious metal vase (which looked Indian, but which had probably been made in Birmingham the year before last), two old coins (of no mortal use to anybody in the world, including himself), and the dark lantern. It was reposing now in the cupboard in his study nearest the window.

He had brought his book up with him on coming to bed, on the chance that he might have time to read a page or two if he woke up early. (He had always been doubtful about that man Jasper. For one thing, he had been seen p.a.w.ning the old gentleman"s watch on the afternoon of the murder, which was a suspicious circ.u.mstance, and then he was not a nice character at all, and just the sort of man who would be likely to murder old gentlemen in woods.) He waited till Mr Seymour had paid his nightly visit--he went the round of the dormitories at about eleven--and then he chuckled gently. If Mill, the dormitory prefect, was awake, the chuckle would make him speak, for Mill was of a suspicious nature, and believed that it was only his unintermitted vigilance which prevented the dormitory ragging all night.

Mill _was_ awake.

"Be quiet, there," he growled. "Shut up that noise."

s...o...b..ossom felt that the time was not yet ripe for his departure. Half an hour later he tried again. There was no rebuke. To make certain he emitted a second chuckle, replete with sinister meaning. A slight snore came from the direction of Mill"s bed. s...o...b..ossom crept out of the room, and hurried to his study. The door was not locked, for Mr Seymour had relied on his commands being sufficient to keep the owner out of it. He slipped in, found and lit the dark lantern, and settled down to read. He read with feverish excitement. The thing was, you see, that though Claud Trevelyan (that was the hero) knew jolly well that it was Jasper who had done the murder, the police didn"t, and, as he (Claud) was too n.o.ble to tell them, he had himself been arrested on suspicion.

s...o...b..ossom was skimming through the pages with starting eyes, when suddenly his attention was taken from his book by a sound. It was a footstep. Somebody was coming down the pa.s.sage, and under the door filtered a thin stream of light. To snap the dark slide over the lantern and dart to the door, so that if it opened he would be behind it, was with him, as Mr Claud Trevelyan might have remarked, the work of a moment. He heard the door of study number five flung open, and then the footsteps pa.s.sed on, and stopped opposite his own den. The handle turned, and the light of a candle flashed into the room, to be extinguished instantly as the draught of the moving door caught it.

s...o...b..ossom heard his visitor utter an exclamation of annoyance, and fumble in his pocket for matches. He recognised the voice. It was Mr Seymour"s. The fact was that Mr Seymour had had the same experience as General Stanley in _The Pirates of Penzance_:

The man who finds his conscience ache, No peace at all enjoys; And, as I lay in bed awake, I thought I heard a noise.

Whether Mr Seymour"s conscience ached or not, cannot, of course, be discovered. But he had certainly thought he heard a noise, and he had come to investigate.

The search for matches had so far proved fruitless. s...o...b..ossom stood and quaked behind the door. The reek of hot tin from the dark lantern grew worse momentarily. Mr Seymour sniffed several times, until s...o...b..ossom thought that he must be discovered. Then, to his immense relief, the master walked away. s...o...b..ossom"s chance had come. Mr Seymour had probably gone to get some matches to relight his candle. It was far from likely that the episode was closed. He would be back again presently. If s...o...b..ossom was going to escape, he must do it now, so he waited till the footsteps had pa.s.sed away, and then darted out in the direction of his dormitory.

As he was pa.s.sing Milton"s study, a white figure glided out of it. All that he had ever read or heard of spectres rushed into s...o...b..ossom"s petrified brain. He wished he was safely in bed. He wished he had never come out of it. He wished he had led a better and n.o.bler life. He wished he had never been born.

The figure pa.s.sed quite close to him as he stood glued against the wall, and he saw it disappear into the dormitory opposite his own, of which Rigby was prefect. He blushed hotly at the thought of the fright he had been in. It was only somebody playing the same game as himself.

He jumped into bed and lay down, having first plunged the lantern bodily into his jug to extinguish it. Its indignant hiss had scarcely died away when Mr Seymour appeared at the door. It had occurred to Mr Seymour that he had smelt something very much out of the ordinary in s...o...b..ossom"s study, a smell uncommonly like that of hot tin. And a suspicion dawned on him that s...o...b..ossom had been in there with a dark lantern. He had come to the dormitory to confirm his suspicions. But a glance showed him how unjust they had been. There was s...o...b..ossom fast asleep. Mr Seymour therefore followed the excellent example of my Lord Tomnoddy on a celebrated occasion, and went off to bed.

It was the custom for the captain of football at Wrykyn to select and publish the team for the Ripton match a week before the day on which it was to be played. On the evening after the Nomads" match, Trevor was sitting in his study writing out the names, when there came a knock at the door, and his f.a.g entered with a letter.

"This has just come, Trevor," he said.

"All right. Put it down."

The f.a.g left the room. Trevor picked up the letter. The handwriting was strange to him. The words had been printed. Then it flashed upon him that he had received a letter once before addressed in the same way--the letter from the League about Barry. Was this, too, from that address? He opened it.

It was.

He read it, and gasped. The worst had happened. The gold bat was in the hands of the enemy.

XIII

VICTIM NUMBER THREE

"With reference to our last communication," ran the letter--the writer evidently believed in the commercial style--"it may interest you to know that the bat you lost by the statue on the night of the 26th of January has come into our possession. _We observe that Barry is still playing for the first fifteen._"

"And will jolly well continue to," muttered Trevor, crumpling the paper viciously into a ball.

He went on writing the names for the Ripton match. The last name on the list was Barry"s.

Then he sat back in his chair, and began to wrestle with this new development. Barry must play. That was certain. All the bluff in the world was not going to keep him from playing the best man at his disposal in the Ripton match. He himself did not count. It was the school he had to think of. This being so, what was likely to happen? Though nothing was said on the point, he felt certain that if he persisted in ignoring the League, that bat would find its way somehow--by devious routes, possibly--to the headmaster or some one else in authority. And then there would be questions--awkward questions--and things would begin to come out. Then a fresh point struck him, which was, that whatever might happen would affect, not himself, but O"Hara. This made it rather more of a problem how to act. Personally, he was one of those dogged characters who can put up with almost anything themselves. If this had been his affair, he would have gone on his way without hesitating.

Evidently the writer of the letter was under the impression that he had been the hero (or villain) of the statue escapade.

If everything came out it did not require any great effort of prophecy to predict what the result would be. O"Hara would go. Promptly. He would receive his marching orders within ten minutes of the discovery of what he had done. He would be expelled twice over, so to speak, once for breaking out at night--one of the most heinous offences in the school code--and once for tarring the statue. Anything that gave the school a bad name in the town was a crime in the eyes of the powers, and this was such a particularly flagrant case. Yes, there was no doubt of that. O"Hara would take the first train home without waiting to pack up. Trevor knew his people well, and he could imagine their feelings when the prodigal strolled into their midst--an old Wrykinian _malgre lui_. As the philosopher said of falling off a ladder, it is not the falling that matters: it is the sudden stopping at the other end. It is not the being expelled that is so peculiarly objectionable: it is the sudden homecoming. With this gloomy vision before him, Trevor almost wavered. But the thought that the selection of the team had nothing whatever to do with his personal feelings strengthened him. He was simply a machine, devised to select the fifteen best men in the school to meet Ripton. In his official capacity of football captain he was not supposed to have any feelings. However, he yielded in so far that he went to Clowes to ask his opinion.

Clowes, having heard everything and seen the letter, unhesitatingly voted for the right course. If fifty mad Irishmen were to be expelled, Barry must play against Ripton. He was the best man, and in he must go.

"That"s what I thought," said Trevor. "It"s bad for O"Hara, though."

Clowes remarked somewhat tritely that business was business.

"Besides," he went on, "you"re a.s.suming that the thing this letter hints at will really come off. I don"t think it will. A man would have to be such an awful blackguard to go as low as that. The least grain of decency in him would stop him. I can imagine a man threatening to do it as a piece of bluff--by the way, the letter doesn"t actually say anything of the sort, though I suppose it hints at it--but I can"t imagine anybody out of a melodrama doing it."

"You can never tell," said Trevor. He felt that this was but an outside chance. The forbearance of one"s antagonist is but a poor thing to trust to at the best of times.

"Are you going to tell O"Hara?" asked Clowes.