Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/49

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38
THE ANCIENT GRUDGE

and his other friends drew him. For Stewart was still loyal in doing all he could for his room-mate, even while disapproving of his pursuits. Athletics, chemistry, "philanthropic work among the laboring classes"—even if one had a keen interest in them and expected, as Floyd sometimes declared he did, to pass one's life in intimate relations with them—seemed to Stewart a lamentable perversion of a college career. He had no remorse whatever for his own, diversified as it was by adventurous experiences with the Faculty and, once or twice, with the Cambridge police.

The break came one afternoon in the fall of their junior year. The Harvard football eleven was playing a game with an Indian college team; Floyd had arrived early and taken a seat in the middle section of the stand. The first half had hardly begun when the spectators near the gate rose and cheered something that was evidently not a feature of the game; the others stood up in curiosity, and finally Floyd saw three odd figures dancing along at the foot of the bank of seats. Clad in red and blue blankets ornamented with beads, wearing feather head-dresses and yellow moccasins, and with their faces hideously painted, they came capering and yelling. Floyd stared. Then he saw that they were closely followed by Stewart and Jim Hobart. They stopped in front of the centre section; Stewart and Jim led them up to seats beside Floyd, who now recognized the three as sophomores recently elected into a society of which he was a member. Stewart and Jim had evidently taken them in hand and devised this performance as part of their initiation.

Stewart, having seated himself, turned to Floyd with a gleam of enthusiastic amusement.

"Pretty good Indians, are n't they?" he said. "Look at their tom-toms." He pointed to the tin pails slung at their waists, on which they had been beating with drumsticks. "Between the halves we're going to send them out on the field to do a war-dance."