At last, however, the driver stopped before the dormitory where Mott had his room and Foster said, “Will, I’ll look after this fellow if you’ll attend to Peter John.”

“Nobody—­no freshman in p’ticular—­ish going to help me!” exclaimed Mott noisily.  “I can walk a chalk line, I can.  Keep your eyes on me and you’ll see how it’s done.”

“All right.  Get out, then,” said Foster hastily.

Mott lurched out of the cab, and the driver, at Foster’s word, at once started on and neither of the boys glanced behind to see how it fared with the intoxicated sophomore.  They were eager now to dispose of their classmate, and as soon as the taxi halted in front of Leland Hall they tried to arouse the slumbering freshman.  At last, by dint of their united efforts, they succeeded in lifting him to the ground, and then they somehow got him up the stairway and soon had him in his bed.  When their labors were ended Will exclaimed, “It must be midnight.  Surely the people couldn’t see who we were except when the cab passed the street lights, but I’m afraid some of them knew then.”

“That isn’t so bad.  I don’t care half so much about their seeing as I do about something else.”

“What’s that?”

“What they saw.  Poor fool!” he added bitterly as he turned and glanced at the bed whereon Peter John was lying and noisily sleeping.  “I did my best to hold him back, but he would go on with Mott.”

“Do you think he lost his money too?”

“Haven’t a doubt of it.”

“And he didn’t have very much to lose.”

“It was all he had.  It would have been the same if it had been seven thousand instead of just plain seven.  He was so set up by the attentions of Mott that he was an easy mark.  I never saw anything like it.”

“Well, all I can say is that I hope I sha’n’t again, but probably I shall if he stays in college,” said Will bitterly.

“It’s in him, that’s about all one can say,” said Foster.  “If it hadn’t been here it would have been somewhere else.  And yet they say that a college is a dangerous place for a young fellow to be in.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“No more do I. There are all kinds here the same as there are pretty much everywhere, and all there is of it is that a fellow has a little more freedom to follow out just what he wants to do.”

“Come on,” suggested Will, starting toward the door.  “We can’t do anything more for Peter John.  He’ll probably be around to see us to-morrow.”

As the boys approached the doorway they met Hawley and at his urgent request turned back into the room with him.  The big freshman glanced at his sleeping room-mate and then laughed as he said, “Too young.  Ought not to have left his mother yet.”  As neither of the boys replied, Hawley continued, “He’ll have to quit that or he’ll queer himself in the college.  I don’t know that he can do that any more successfully than he has done already though,” he added.