oath of helplessness—­he had forgotten his knife.  They cut his hair, but it cost them two bloody noses and one black eye.  At the flag-rush later he did not forget.  The sophomores had enticed the freshmen into the gymnasium, stripped them of their clothes, and carried them away, whereat the freshmen got into the locker-rooms of the girls, and a few moments later rushed from the gymnasium in bloomers to find the sophomores crowded about the base of the pole, one of them with an axe in his hand, and Jason at the top with his hand again in his shirt.

“Chop away!” he was shouting, “but I’ll git some o’ ye when this pole comes down.”  Above the din rose John Burnham’s voice, stern and angry, calling Jason’s name.  The student with the axe had halted at the unmistakable sincerity of the boy’s threat.

“Jason,” called Burnham again, for he knew what the boy meant, and the lad tossed knife and scabbard over the heads of the crowd to the grass, and slid down the pole.  And in the fight that followed, the mountain boy fought with a calm, half-smiling ferocity that made the wavering freshmen instinctively surge behind him as a leader, and the onlooking foot-ball coach quickly mark him for his own.  Even at the first foot-ball “rally,” where he learned the college yells, Jason had been singled out, for the mountaineer measures distance by the carry of his voice and with a “whoop an’ a holler” the boy could cover a mile.  Above the din, Jason’s clear cry was, so to speak, like a cracker on the whip of the cheer, and the “yell-master,” a swaying figure of frenzied enthusiasm, caught his eye in time, nodded approvingly, and saw in him a possible yell-leader for the freshman class.  After the rally the piano was rolled joyously to the centre of the gymnasium and a pale-faced lad began to thump it vigorously, much to Jason’s disapproval, for he could not understand how a boy could, or would, play anything but a banjo or a fiddle.  Then, with the accompaniment of a snare-drum, there was a merry, informal dance, at which Jason and Mavis looked yearningly on.  And, as that night long ago in the mountains, Gray and Marjorie floated like feathers past them, and over Gray’s shoulder the girl’s eyes caught Jason’s fixed on her, and Mavis’s fixed on Gray; so on the next round she stopped a moment near them.

“I’m going to teach you to dance, Jason,” she said, as though she were tossing a gauntlet to somebody, “and Gray can teach Mavis.”

“Sure,” laughed Gray, and off they whirled again.

The eyes of the two mountaineers met, and they might have been back in their childhood again, standing on the sunny river-bank and waiting for Gray and Marjorie to pass, for what their tongues said then their eyes said now: 

“I seed you a-lookin’ at him.”

“‘Tain’t so—­I seed you a-lookin’ at her.”