Page:Lynch Williams--The girl and the game.djvu/43

 not show it. They took for granted that he was still a loafer.

He was, to be sure, in the thick of the present plotting, but that seemed only reasonable from his point of view. He had stirred up the racket last year—this was before he had turned serious—and as a result little Reddy Armstrong was nearly killed by a blow from a Mexican bolo. Reddy was a great friend of Stehman's. Therefore, it was necessary to even matters up with the Mexican, especially since the latter had vowed to shoot Stehman on sight. Wasn't that reasonable? But how were the Faculty to know all that? Even Faculties are not infallible. If this Faculty had been infallible it would not have sent out at just this point an edict in which glared the word "forbid." That is a word which human males of a certain age do not always fancy.

"Forbid us, eh?" their eyes said to each other on the way out from chapel. "Well, well, well; that's a different matter."

With Jack Stehman it stirred the lingering