Page:The Winning Touchdown.djvu/44

32 the chair. He was an honest man, he was a poor man, he was a man born to poverty and under an unlucky star, but never, never, never! not if you were to give him a million dollars, would he take a chair from a student's room, without permission.

"For vy should I, ven I can buys dem efery day?" he demanded, with a pathetic gesture of his forward-thrust hands.

"Well, I guess it isn't here," spoke Tom, regretfully, when they had exhausted all the possibilities. "Yet you were at college to-day, Komsky."

"Vy, sure I vos at der college to-day. Nearly efery veek I am there, ain't it? Yet I have not your chair."

It was evident that he was telling the truth. He did not have the chair then, though he might have had it, and have sold it to some other student, perhaps one from Boxer Hall or Fairview, for those lads also patronized the secondhand dealers, and Komsky was one of the largest.

"Cæsar's grandmother!" cried Tom, in dismay, as this possibility suggested itself, "just suppose Langridge or some of those chaps had our chair! Say, maybe Langridge put up the game!"

"Hardly possible," asserted Phil. "Come on, we'll have a look in some of the other shops, then