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T. Haviland Hicks Senior

J >> J. Raymond Elderdice >> T. Haviland Hicks Senior



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Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




T. HAVILAND HICKS SENIOR

BY J. RAYMOND ELDERDICE



TO MASTER LLOYD ELDERDICE



CONTENTS


I. HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN
II. "LEAVE IT TO HICKS"
III. HICKS' PRODIGIOUS PRODIGY
IV. QUOTING SCOOP SAWYER'S LETTER
V. HICKS MAKES A DECISION
VI. HICKS MAKES A SPEECH
VII. HICKS STARTS ANOTHER MYSTERY
VIII. COACH CORRIDAN SURPRISES THE ELEVEN
IX. THEOPHILUS' MISSIONARY WORK
X. THOR'S AWAKENING
XI. "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL"
XII. THEOPHILUS BETRAYS HICKS
XIII. HICKS--CLASS KID--YALE '96
XIV. THE GREATER GOAL
XV. HICKS HAS A "HUNCH"
XVI. THANKS TO CAESAR NAPOLEON
XVII. HICKS MAKES A RASH PROPHECY
XVIII. T. HAVILAND HICKS, JR.'S HEADWORK
XIX. BANNISTER GIVES HICKS A SURPRISE PARTY
XX. "VALE, ALMA MATER!"






T. HAVILAND HICKS, SENIOR

CHAPTER I

HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN





"Oh, a bold, bad man was Chuckwalla Bill--
An' he lived in a shanty on Tom-cat Hill;
Ten notches on the six-gun he toted on his hip--
For he'd sent ten buckos on the One-way Trip!"

Big Butch Brewster, captain and full-back of the Bannister College football
squad, his behemoth bulk swathed in heavy blankets and crowded into a
narrow bunk, shifted his vast tonnage restlessly. He was dreaming of the
wild and woolly West, and like a six-reel Western drama thrown on the
screen in a moving-picture show, he visioned in his slumbers a vivid and
spectacular panorama.

The first lurid scene was the Deserted Limited held up at a tank station in
the great Mojave Desert by a lone, masked bandit who winged the dreaming
Butch in the shoulder, the latter being an express guard who resisted.
After the desperado, Two-Gun Steve, had forced the engineer to run the
train back to a siding, he had ordered Butch to vamoose. Quite naturally,
then, the collegian next found himself staggering across the arid expanse,
until at last, half dead from a burning thirst, seeking vainly for a
water-hole, the vast stretch of sandy, sagebrush-studded wastes shimmered
into a gorgeous ocean of sparkling blue waters. Then, as he collapsed on
the scorching-hot sand, helpless, the cool water so near, suddenly the
scene shifted.

In quick and vivid succession, Butch Brewster beheld a burning stockade
besieged by howling Indians, and a frontier town shot up by recklessly
riding cowboys on a jamboree. Then he became a tenderfoot, badgered by
yelling, shooting roisterers, and later a sheriff, bravely leading his
posse to a sensational battle with that same Two-Gun Steve and his gang,
entrenched in a rock-bound mountain defile.

Finally, he stood with hands above his head in company with other
passengers of the Sagebrush Stagecoach, while a huge, red-shirted Westerner
with a fierce black mustache and a six-shooter in each hand belching
bullets at Butch's dancing feet, roared out huskily: "Oh--I'm a ring-tailed
roarer (bang-bang)! I'm a rip-snortin', high-falutin', loop-the-loopin'
bad man (bang-bang)! I'm wild an' woolly, an' full o' fleas, an' hard
to curry below the knees--I'm a roarin' wild-cat, an' it's my night to howl
(bang-bang)! Yip-yip-yip-yeee!"

Big Butch, opening his eyes and starting up, gazed about him in sheer
surprise; for an instant, in that state of bewilderment that comes with
sudden awakening, he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse,
and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at
the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed
in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them--Western cowboys,
perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside
was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he
had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn
voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling character, and accompanied by
that same banjo twanging, which tortured the campus, and bothered would-be
studious youths!

"I'm not in a moving-picture show," Butch informed himself, as he donned
khaki trousers, football sweater, and heavy shoes. "I'm not on a Western
ranch, either. I'm in the sleep-shack of Camp Bannister, the football
training-camp of the Bannister College squad! Those fellows in the bunks
are not cowboys, Indians, and bandits--they are my teammates! I did dream
stuff that would shame a Wild West scenario, but I understand it all
now--my dreams were influenced by T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.!"

At that dramatic moment, to substantiate his statement, the raucous voice,
accompanied by resounding chords strummed on a banjo, sounded again. The
vocal and instrumental chaos was frequently punctured by revolver reports,
as the torturesome Caruso outside roared:

"Oh, Chuckwalla Bill thought life was sweet--
Till he met up with Sure-shot Pete;
A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw--
But Sure-shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"

The pachydermic Butch, fully dressed--and awake, raging in his wrath like
an active volcano, glanced at his watch, and discovered that it was exactly
five A.M.! Intensely pacified by this knowledge, he lumbered toward the
bunkhouse door and flung it open, determined to crush the pestersome youth
who thus unfeelingly disturbed the quietude of Camp Bannister at such an
unearthly hour! However, his grim purpose was temporarily thwarted--before
him spread a beautiful panorama, a vast canvas painted in rich hues and
colors, that indescribably charming masterpiece of nature, entitled dawn.

Butch, gazing from the bunkhouse doorway toward the pebbly shore of the
placid lake stretching out for two miles before him, beheld Old Sol,
blood-red, peeping above the wooded hills on the far-off, opposite strand
of Lake Conowingo; the luminous orb laid a flaming pathway across the
shimmering waters, and golden bars of light, like gleaming fingers
outstretched, fell athwart the tall pines that towered on the high bluff
back of the camp. The glorious sunshine, succeeding a flood of rosy color,
inundated the scene; it bathed in a gorgeous radiance the early autumn
woods, it illumined the bunkhouse, and another rude shanty known to the
squad as the grub-shack, it poured down on old Hinky-Dink, the ancient
negro cookee, setting the breakfast tables just outside the canvas
cook-tent.

"Deed, cross mah heart, Mistah Butch," grinned old Hinky-Dink, seeing, as
a motion picture director would express it, "Wrath registered on the
countenance" of Butch Brewster, "Ah done tole dat young Hicks dat a bird
what cain't sing an' will sing mus' be made not to sing! Ah done info'med
him dat yo'-all was layin' fo' him, cause he done bus' up yo' sleep!"

A jay bird, a flashing bit of vivid blue, shot from a tall pine, jeering
shrilly at Butch; out on the lake, a trout leaped above the water for an
infinitesimal second, its shining scales gleaming in the sunshine. From the
cook-tent, where old Hinky-Dink grumbled at the frying pan, the appetizing
odor of frying fish assailed the football captain, softening his wrath.

High above the shanties, on a tall flagpole made from a straight young
pine, floated a big gold and green banner, its bright colors gleaming in
the sunshine; it bore the words:

CAMP BANNISTER
TRAINING CAMP
THE FOOTBALL SQUAD
BANNISTER COLLEGE

Head Coach Corridan, smashing the precedent that had made former Gold and
Green squads have their training camp at Bannister College, had brought
the Varsity and second-string stars to this camp on the shore of Lake
Conowingo, in the Pennsylvania mountains. For two weeks, one of which had
passed, they were to train at Camp Bannister, until college officially
opened; swimming, hunting, cross-country runs, and a healthful outdoor
existence would give the athletes superb condition, and daily scrimmages on
the level field back of the bluff rounded out an eleven that promised to be
the strongest in Bannister history.

As big, good-natured Butch Brewster stood in the bunkhouse doorway, his
wrath at the pestiferous Hicks forgotten, in his rapture at the glorious
dawn, he saw something that showed why his dreams had been of the wild
West! The expression of indignation, however, yielded to one of humorous
affection, as he gazed toward the shore.

"I can't be angry with Hicks!" breathed Butch, beholding a spectacle more
impressive than dawn. "So, the irrepressible wretch has Coach Corridan's
revolvers, used in starting our training sprints, and a lot of blank
cartridges! He is giving an imitation of a Western bad man. No wonder
I dreamed of Indians, cowboys, and hold-ups; I'll have revenge on the
heartless villain, routing me out at five!"

He saw a massive rock, rising thirty feet in air, its sheer walls scaled
only by a rope-ladder the collegians had rigged up on one side. Atop of
"Lookout There!" as the campers humorously designated the rock, roosted
a youth who possessed the colossal structure of a splinter, and whose
cherubic countenance was decorated with a Cheshire cat grin. Quite unaware
that his riotous efforts had brought out the wrathful Butch Brewster,
the youthful narrator of Chuckwalla Bill's stormy career continued his
excessively noisy séance.

His costume was strictly in character with his song. He wore a sombrero,
picked up on his Exposition trip the past vacation, a lurid red
outing-shirt, and he had wrapped a blanket around each locomotive limb to
imitate a cowboy's chaps. Two revolvers suspended from a loosened belt, à
la wild West, and as Butch stared, the embryo Western bad man twanged a
banjo noisily, and roared the concluding stanza of his desperado hero's
history:

"Said Chuckwalla Bill, 'Oh, boys, plant me
With my boots on--on the wide prair-eee'--
Where the coyotes howl, they planted Bill--
An' so far as I know, he's sleepin' there still!"

"Here they come," grinned Butch, hearing a tumult in the bunkhouse, and
a confused Babel of voices. "Hicks has awakened the camp. Now watch the
fellows wreak summary vengeance on his toothpick frame!"

From the sleep-shack, aroused at that weird hour by the clamor of the
irrepressible youth, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., tumbled others of the squad,
in varying stages of déshabille; big Beef McNaughton, right half-back,
Roddy Perkins, the Titian-haired right-end, Pudge Langdon, a ponderous
tackle, and Monty Merriweather, a clean-cut, aggressive candidate for left
end. From within, other wrathy youths howled vociferous protests at their
tormentor:

"Stop that noise; put your muzzle on again, Hicks!"--"Where's the fire?
Say, Hicks, muffle your exhaust!"--"Say, Coach, must we endure this day and
night?"

The bunkhouse fairly erupted angry collegians, boiling out like bees
swarming from a disturbed hive; Hefty Hollingsworth, the Herculean
center-rush. Biff Pemberton, left half-back, Bunch Bingham, Tug Cardiff,
and Buster Brown, three huge last-year substitutes; second-string players,
Don Carterson, Cherub Challoner, Skeet Wigglesworth, and Scoop Sawyer. A
dozen others, from sheer laziness, hugged their bunks devotedly, despite
the terrific turmoil outside.

"It's a disgrace, a howling shame!" exploded Beef, his elephantine frame
swathed in blankets to conceal a lack of vestiture, "Last night, until
midnight, that graceless wretch roosted on 'Lookout There' and because the
glorious moonlight made him sentimental and slushy, he twanged his banjo
and warbled such mushy stuff as 'My Love is young and fair. My Love has
golden hair!' When does he expect us to sleep?"

"He doesn't!" explained Monty Merriweather, with succinct lucidity,
grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold
shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock,
while I climb up the rope-ladder and close with him! Then some of you
prehistoric pachyderms ascend, and we'll chuck that pestersome insect into
the cold, cold lake--"

"Done!" chuckled Butch Brewster, delightedly. So, while he, Beef
McNaughton, Hefty Hollingsworth, and others beguiled the jeering Hicks,
expressing in dynamic, red-hot sentences their exact opinions of his
perfidy, the athletic Monty imitated a mountain-scaling Italian soldier.
He climbed stealthily up the swaying rope-ladder; nearer and nearer to the
unsuspecting youth he crept, while the cherubic Hicks, to tantalize the
group below, again burst forth:

"Whoop-eee! I'm a bold, bad man (bang-bang)! I got ten notches on my
ole six-gun--I'm a killer. I wings a man before breakfast every day! I
got a private burying-ground, where I plants my victims (bang-bang)!
Yip-yip-yip-yee! Oh, I'm a--Ouch, Monty--leggo me--Oh, I'll be
good--why didn't I pull that rope-ladder up here? Don't bust my banjo
--don't let Butch get me--"

Monty Merriweather, reaching the flat top of the rock, had courageously
flung himself, without regard for the Bad Man's desperate record, on the
startled Hicks, whose first thought was for his beloved banjo. While he
held the blithesome tormentor helpless, Butch, Beef, and Roddy Perkins
climbed the rope-ladder, and the grinning youth was soon in their clutches,
while the collegians below, like a Roman, mob aroused by the oratory of Mr.
Mark Antony, howled for revenge:

"Bust the old banjo over his head, Butch!"--"Sing to him, Beef--that's
an awful revenge on Hicks!"--"Tie him to the rock--make him miss his
breakfast!"

"Hicks," growled Butch, eyeing his sunny comrade ominously, "you ought to
be tarred and feathered, and shot at sunrise! When Bannister opens, you
will be a Senior, and you'll disgrace '19's dignity! This is a sample of
what we have endured at college for three years, and the worst is yet to
come! You have committed the awful atrocity of awakening Camp Bannister
at five A. M. with your ridiculous imitation, of a Western desperado. To
dampen your ardor, we will chuck you into the cold lake--just as you are!"

"Help! Assistance! Aid! Succor!" shouted the happy-go-lucky Hicks, as the
behemoth Butch and Beef seized him, swinging him aloft with ludicrous ease,
"Police! Fire! Murder! Take care of my banjo, Monty. Tell all the fellows
at old Bannister I died game, and plant Hair-Trigger Bill with his boots
on! Oooo, Beef, Butch, have a heart, that water is cold!"

T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., relieved of banjo and revolvers, but his
shadow-like structure still clad in shoes, trousers, with imitation "chaps"
and flamboyant red shirt, with his classic head still adorned by
the sombrero, was swung back and forth by the two bulky football
stars--once--twice--

"Three--Let him go!" shouted Butch Brewster, and like a falling meteor,
the splinter-like youth, who had already fallen from grace, shot from the
rock, head-first, disappearing with a spectacular splash in the icy waters
of Lake Conowingo. Knowing Hicks to be as much at home in the water as a
fish in an aquarium, the hilarious squad on shore prepared to jeer his
reappearance above the water; however, their program was interrupted by
old Hinky-Dink, who stood in the cook-tent doorway, belaboring a dishpan
lustily with a soup-ladle, and shouting:

"Breakfus' am served; fus' an' las' call fo' breakfus; all dem what am late
don't git no breakfus!"

"Breakfast!" exclaimed Monty Merriweather, who, with Roddy, Butch, and
Beef, remained on the rock, despite the summons of the Cookee. "Hurry up,
Hicks, I'm ravenous. Say, Butch, suppose all that Western regalia makes him
water-logged; he's a terribly long while down there! Didn't he look like
the hero in a moving-picture feature? We've given him the water-cure, but
he will do that same stunt over again. That sunny-souled Hicks is simply
Incorrigible!"

A second later, the grinning, cheery countenance of T. Haviland Hicks,
Jr., shot above the water, and simultaneously with his appearance, just as
though he had been chanting below the surface, for the entertainment of the
finny denizens of Lake Conowingo, the irrepressible youth roared:

"A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw--
But Sure-Shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"






CHAPTER II

"LEAVE IT TO HICKS"


Head Coach Patrick Henry Corridan, known to toil-tortured Gold and Green
football squads from time immemorial as "the Slave-Driver," Captain Butch
Brewster, and serious Deacon Radford, the star Bannister quarter-back,
foregathered around a table in the Camp Bannister grub-shack.

It was ten-thirty of the morning whose dawn T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had
blithesomely hailed with an impromptu musicale and saengerfest on "Lookout
There!" rock, and the football triumvirate were in togs. The squad, over in
the bunkhouse, noisily donned gridiron armor for the morning practice, and
the pestiferous Hicks was maintaining a mysterious silence, somewhere.

This football trio, on whom rested the responsibility of rounding out a
winning Bannister eleven, vastly resembled a coterie of German generals,
back of the trenches, studying a war-map. Before them was spread what
seemed to be a large checker-board. It was a miniature gridiron, with the
chalk-marks painted in white; there were thumb-tacks stuck here and there,
some with flat tops painted green and gold, others, representing the enemy,
were solid red. The former had names printed on them, Butch, Roddy,
Beef, and so on. By sticking these on the board, the three directors of
Bannister's football destiny could work out new plays, and originate
possible winning lineups.

"We've just got to win the State Championship this season, Coach!" declared
Butch, banging the table emphatically, as he stated a self-evident fact.
"It's my last year for Old Bannister, and so with Beef and Pudge. I'll give
every ounce of strength I possess In every game, to make that pennant float
over Bannister Field!"

"Bannister will win it!" vowed the behemoth Beef, his good-natured
countenance grim, and his jaw set. "Not for five years has a Gold and Green
team won the Championship--not since the year before Butch and I were
Freshmen! We've got a splendid bunch of material to build a team with,
and--"

"Our biggest problem is this," spoke Coach Corridan, as with a phenomenal
display of strength he took Beef McNaughton between thumb and forefinger
and placed him on the field. "We must strengthen both line and backfield,
for we lost by graduation Babe McCabe, Heavy Hughes, and Jack Merritt. Now,
to replace that lost power--"

Just then, from directly beneath the open window by which they had
gathered, like the midnight serenade of a romantic lover, sounded
the well-known foghorn voice of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., as to the
plunkety-plunk of a banjo accompaniment, he warbled melodiously:

"Gone are the days--I used to spend with Car-o-li-nah!
She had the sunshine in her laughter (plunkety-plunk)
Just like that state they named her after--"

"Hicks!" announced Butch, stealthily approaching the window, and
beckoning his companions. "Easy--look at him, Deke, there he is, Hicks,
the irrepressible! We might as well attempt to stab a rhinocerous to death
with a humming-bird's feather, as to try and reform him!"

Arrayed like a lily of the field, a model of sartorial splendor, Hicks
occupied a chair beneath the window, tilted back gracefully against the
side of the grub-shack. He had decked his splinter-structure with a
dazzling Palm Beach suit, and a glorious pink silk shirt, off-set by a
lurid scarf. A Panama hat decorated his head, white Oxfords and flamboyant
hosiery adorned his feet, while the inevitable Cheshire cat grin beautified
his cherubic countenance. A latest "best seller" was propped on his knees,
and as he perused its thrilling pages, he carelessly strummed his beloved
banjo, and in stentorian tones chanted a sentimental ballad:

"Gone are the days--the golden days I'm dreaming of,
I think I hear her softly calling (plunkety-plunk)
'Will you be back? Will you be back? (plunk-plunk)
Back to the Car-o-li-nah you love?'"(plunkety-plunk),

For three golden campus years T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had gayly pursued the
even tenor (or basso, since he possessed a foghorn, subterranean voice)
of his Bannister career. He absolutely refused to take life seriously, and
he was forever arousing the wrath--mostly pretended, for no one could be
really angry with the genial youth--of his comrades, by twanging his banjo
and roaring out rollicking ballads at all hours. He was never so happy
as when entertaining a crowd of happy students in his cozy quarters,
or escorting a Hicks' Personally Conducted expedition downtown for a
Beef-Steak Bust, at his expense, at Jerry's, the rendezvous of hungry
collegians.

However, despite his butterfly existence, Hicks, possessed of a
scintillating mind, always set the scholastic pace for 1919, by means of
occasional study-sprints, as he characteristically called them. But when it
came to helping his beloved Dad realize a long-cherished ambition to behold
his only son and heir shatter Hicks, Sr.'s, celebrated athletic records, it
was a different story. T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., ever since he committed
the farcical faux pas of running the wrong way with the pigskin in
the Freshman-Sophomore football contest of his first year, had been a
super-colossal athletic joke at old Bannister.

His record to date, beside that reverse touchdown that won for the
Sophomores, consisted of scoring a home-run with the bases congested, on a
strike-out; of smashing hurdles and cross-bars on the track; endangering
his heedless career with the shot and hammer; and making a ridiculous farce
of every event he entered, to the vast hilarity of the students, who, with
the exception of Butch Brewster, had no idea his ridiculous efforts were in
earnest. In the high-jump, however, Hicks had given considerable promise,
which to date the grasshopper collegian had failed to keep.

Hicks, the lovable, impulsive, and irrepressible, with his invariable sunny
disposition, his generous nature, and his democratic, loyal comradeship
for everybody, was loved by old Bannister. The students forgave him his
pestersome ways, his frequent torturing of them with banjo-twanging and
rollicking ballads. His classmates idolized him, Juniors and Sophomores
were his true friends, and entering Freshmen always regarded this
happy-go-lucky youth as a demigod of the campus.

Big Butch Brewster, who was forever futilely lecturing the heedless Hicks,
thrust his head from the grub-shack window, fought down a grin, and sternly
arraigned his graceless comrade:

"Hicks, you frivolous, campus-cluttering, infinitesimal atom of nothing,
you labor under the insane delusion that college life is a continuous
vaudeville show. You absolutely refuse to take your Bannister years
seriously, you banjo-thumping, pillow-punishing, campus-torturing
nonentity. You will never grasp the splendid opportunities within your
reach! You have no ambition but to strum that banjo, roar ridiculous songs,
fuss up like a tailor's dummy, and pester your comrades, or drag them down
to Jerry's for the eats! You won't be earnest, you Human Cipher, Before you
entered Bannister, you formed your ideas and ideals of campus life from
colored posters, moving-pictures, magazine stories, and stage dramas like
'Brown of Harvard"; you have surely lived up, or down, to those ideals,
you--"

"Them's harsh words, Butch!" joyously responded the grinning Hicks,
unchastened, for he knew good Butch Brewster would not, for a fortune, have
him forsake his care-free nature. "Thou loyal comrade of my happy campus
years, what wouldst thou of me?--have me don sack-cloth and ashes, strike
'The Funeral March' on my golden lyre, and cry out in anguish, 'ai! ai!
'Nay, nay, a couple of nays; college years are all too brief; hence I
shall, by my own original process, extract from them all the sunshine and
happiness possible, and by my wonderful musical and vocal powers, bring joy
to my colleagues, who--Ouch, Butch--look out for that nail, you inhuman
elephant--"

Big Butch, at that juncture of Hicks' monologue, had effectively terminated
it by leaning from the window, grasping his unsuspecting comrade by the
scruff of the neck, and dragging him over the window-ledge, into the
grub-shack, and the presence of Coach Corridan and Deacon Radford.
Strenuous objection was registered, both by the futilely struggling Hicks,
and a nail projecting from the sill, which caught in the Palm Beach
trousers and ripped a long rent in them; fortunately, Hicks' anatomy
escaped a similar fate.

"A ripping good move, eh-what?" chuckled Hicks, twisting like a
contortionist, to view the damage done his vestiture, "Hello, what have we
here?--the German field-map, by the Van Dyke beard of the Prophet! I
bring the Kaiser's order, ham and eggs, and a cup of coffee. No, that's a
mistake. General Hen Von Kluck, lead a brigade of submarines up yon hill to
thunder the Russian fort! Von Hindering-Bug, send a flock of aeroplanes and
Zeppelins to the Allied trenches, the enemy is shooting Russian caviare
at--"

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