When Lester awoke and looked at his watch, he was horrified to find that it was nine o’clock. He leaped out of bed and dressed frantically. Why hadn’t Richard wakened him! Richard had gone—feeling, no doubt, that he could best display his consideration for his overworked roommate by letting him sleep as long as he could.
“Two hours—less than two hours—to write that theme!” muttered Lester, as he slipped into his clothes. “I’ll have to go without breakfast, at that.”
He seated himself at his desk, but his mind was too panicky to respond to his need. He filled a page and a half with commonplace narrative, read it over, and realized in despair that, even though he went on in that manner for the prescribed number of words, it would do him no good. He must turn in a piece of work that had some merit if he was to escape failure.
Taking a fresh sheet of paper, he began an essay on athletics. But it seemed impossible for him to write anything on that subject without substantially duplicating David’s work; moreover, it became all too apparent that, even though his thoughts should flow smoothly, he would not have time to complete the task. The clock struck ten; he cast his papers aside, caught up his notebook, and hurried away to a lecture on fine arts.
Although he took a few notes during the lecture, he gave little attention to what the professor was saying. His mind was busy trying to find justification for an act that he contemplated with aversion. “It isn’t as if it were going to hurt anybody,” he kept saying to himself. “It won’t affect David’s standing in the least.” The thought of it became more tolerable when he decided that at some time in the future he would tell David the whole story. “He’ll understand, when I make a clean breast of it all,” Lester assured himself. Somehow the determination to confess the truth eventually to David, who would be the only sufferer—except that he wouldn’t really suffer!—seemed to Lester to minimize very much the seriousness of the offense, to make it almost pardonable. He rehearsed, of course, the various other excuses that had insinuated themselves into his mind—the exhaustion, mental and physical, following his sustained and successful efforts in his other courses, the fact that he and David had so often talked over the ideas embodied in the theme and that he could not therefore be really charged with taking something that was not altogether his own. They were flimsy excuses, yet he was not ashamed to get some comfort and encouragement from them.
After the lecture on fine arts Lester returned to his room, took the typewritten theme out of his desk, and copied off in longhand the last half-page of it, which bore David’s name on the back. Then he substituted his copy for the typewritten page and wrote his name on it. He tore up the page that he had removed and threw it into his waste-basket. David had not given the theme a title; Lester wrote in the heading, “The Place of Athletics in College Life.” And above this title he wrote, “Please do not read in class.” The instructor, Professor Worthington, frequently read some of the best themes to the class, but had announced that he would respect the wishes of any one who did not care to have his theme so read.
Having thus safeguarded himself against detection, Lester decided to dispose of David’s first draft. He took the pages, crumpled them up, and put them into the fireplace and then touched a lighted match to them. In a few minutes they were ashes.
Lester was reading a magazine when his roommate entered. “Hello, Lester,” said Richard. “You seem to be taking things easily for a change. Have you got that theme done that’s been worrying you?”
“Yes,” said Lester, “it’s all done.”
“That’s fine. It would have been a shame to be stumped by that after all that you’ve put through in the last two weeks.”
There was a knock on the door, and David entered. Lester instinctively put his hand to the inside pocket of his coat to make sure that the theme was hidden.
“How are you coming along, Lester?” David asked. “Get your theme done all right?”
“It’s done,” said Lester.
“Good work. The queerest thing has happened about mine. It’s disappeared absolutely. I’ve turned my room upside down, hunting for it.”
“You must have left it somewhere—in the library, perhaps,” suggested Richard.
“No, I haven’t taken it outside my room. Besides, the rough draft as well as the typewritten copy has vanished. I could have sworn that I left them on my desk last night when I went out. I spent the evening at home, reading to Mr. Dean. It was late when I got back to my room, and I really didn’t notice whether the theme was on my desk then or not. This morning when I looked for it I couldn’t find it. Somebody must have taken it to play a trick on me, but he’d better get it back to me soon.”
“Who would do a thing like that?” asked Richard.
“Oh, it may be some one’s idea of a joke,” replied David.
“Even if it’s lost it won’t make any special difference to you, will it?” asked Lester. “You’re all right in the course?”
“Oh, yes, I’m all right in the course, though I suppose it would probably lower my mark. But the thing is so mysterious—the disappearance of both the rough draft and the typewritten copy!”
“What do you make of it, my dear Wallace?” said Richard, turning to Lester.
“Nothing. It’s queer enough certainly. What was the theme about, Dave?”
Even as he spoke he wondered if his voice could sound natural when he was feeling so utterly contemptible.
“Oh, about athletics in college and just how seriously a fellow should take them, and all that kind of thing. Some of the old arguments you and I have had, Lester, worked up into an essay. It was rather good, too, if I do say it. That’s why it makes me so tired to lose it.”
“I guess it’s not lost,” said Richard. “Somebody must have taken it as a joke and will return it to you before the hour.”
Lester made no comment. He was wishing that he had courage enough to pull the theme out of his pocket, and return it on the spot. He felt that he might have done so if he had not torn up the page bearing David’s name and substituted that incriminating page bearing his own. There was no possibility now of his passing his action off as a joke, and he could not bear the ignominy of confessing to Richard as well as to David.
The twelve-o’clock bell rang. Lester rose. “Going over to class?” he said to David.
“Yes,” David answered, “I’ll stop in my room on the way downstairs on the chance that the merry joker has returned my theme.”
Lester waited on the landing while David made a hurried search.
“Nothing doing,” David said as he emerged and closed the door. “I hate to lose that theme. It was about the best I’ve written in the course.”
They reached the classroom just as the exercises for the hour were about to begin. Lester and David both went to the professor’s desk, which was piled with the themes that the members of the class had deposited there. Lester drew the theme from his pocket and quickly thrust it into the pile. He lingered to hear what David would say.
“Mr. Worthington,” said David, “I had my theme all written and copied yesterday. To-day I’ve looked everywhere for it, and it’s simply disappeared. I don’t understand it—whether it got thrown away by mistake or what happened to it.”
“You say that you had it all written and ready to hand in?” said Professor Worthington.
“Yes, sir.”
“Perhaps it will turn up in a day or two. Anyway, I’ll give you an extension of a week. I don’t feel that I can excuse you from handing in the theme, but you may have a week in which to make it up.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Lester, having overheard the conversation, went to his seat with a new anxiety to worry him. It troubled him all through the hour.
After the class he joined David. “It’s a shame,” he said, “that Worthington wouldn’t excuse that theme when you told him how it was. What are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, I’ll make it up. He’s given me a week to do it in.”
“I don’t suppose you can rewrite the theme, can you?”
“I ought to be able to. I have it pretty well in mind.”
“But it would be such a stupid job, doing it all over again. You probably wouldn’t do it nearly so well as you did it the first time. I should think you’d better write on something else; you’d have more interest then.”
“I won’t go at it at once, anyway. I’ll wait a couple of days and then see how I feel about it.”
“I think you’d make a great mistake not to take a fresh subject,” said Lester earnestly. “Working over the old one—you’d make it sort of perfunctory and lifeless. You’d better take my advice and tackle something new.”
“Well, I’ll see if any new idea comes to me. But it probably won’t, and I guess the old theme wouldn’t lose much from rewriting. I remember it pretty well.”
“I know, but when you come to writing it all out again, you’ll find it so tedious that you won’t do yourself justice.”
“I’ve got a week, anyway, and I shan’t go at it at once.”
Lester saw no valid ground on which he might pursue the argument. When he entered his room, Richard Bradley turned from the desk at which he was sitting. “Here’s a queer thing, Lester,” he said. “A little while ago I wanted to look up a notice in to-day’s Crimson, and I couldn’t find the sheet anywhere. So I pulled out your waste-basket to see if you’d thrown it in there, and this piece of that theme of Dave’s caught my eye.” He held up the torn piece with David’s name and the name of the course and the date written on the back.
“Isn’t that the limit!” said Lester. He felt that his face was set and that his voice was querulous rather than expressive of astonishment, but he could not dissemble more successfully; the shock of this new discovery was too unkind. “How do you suppose it got there?” He made no effort to take the paper and examine it.
“I can’t imagine.”
“Have you told Dave about it?”
“No; I went down to his room when I discovered it, but he was out.”
“Well, he was probably in here with his theme some time in the last two or three days when neither of us was in and decided he didn’t like the last page of it. So he probably just chucked it into my waste-basket and went home and wrote another last page.”
“I suppose that might have been it,” said Richard doubtfully.
“There’s no other way of accounting for it that I can see,” said Lester. “And I tell you, Dick, if I were you I wouldn’t go to Dave about this thing. Professor Worthington’s given him a week’s extension to make up the theme, and the less he thinks about the old one the better job he’ll do on the new. He’s bothered himself almost distracted over what happened to that theme, and we want to get his mind off it completely. Let’s see the thing, anyway.”
Richard gave Lester the paper, and Lester scrutinized it thoughtfully. “Of course,” he said, “that’s just what happened. It’s the last page; he wanted for some reason to rewrite it and so he just chucked it away wherever he happened to be. Let’s chuck it back into the waste-basket and not bother him about it. Since when have you taken to scavenging in waste-baskets, Dick?”
“Well,” said Richard slowly, “I didn’t find what I wanted. So I guess I won’t do it again.”