The Mark of the Knife

CHAPTER I

THE NEWCOMER

Ridgley School, with its white buildings set comfortably among the maples and the oaks that crown the flat top of the hill a mile to the west of the village of Hamilton, attracts and holds the attention of all eyes that fall upon it. Partly perhaps because the dormitories and the recreation halls fit into the landscape and do not jut boldly and crudely above the trees – as so many buildings on hilltops do – there is an air of hominess and informality about the place which new visitors generally notice and mention to Doctor Wells, its head.

But it is one thing to ride up to Ridgley School in an automobile from the Hamilton Station with half a dozen other new Ridgleyites, some of whom have already become your friends, and to get your first view of the campus while cheerful voices are sounding in your ears, and quite another thing to walk up the long winding road from the village alone and to wonder as you come nearer and nearer to those neat white buildings whether you will succeed in making any friends at all among the fellows who have come up in the automobiles. Under those conditions Ridgley School might seem cold and austere and full of unpleasant possibilities.

That in fact was the situation of the newcomer who was walking swiftly toward the white buildings one morning late in September. He was entering upon an adventure that filled him with mingled excitement and gloom – excitement because of the mystery of the new life opening before him, gloom because of the necessity of giving up so much that had made him happy in the past. He went directly to the office of the Head in the building nearest the road and announced himself to Doctor Wells:

"I am Findley Holbrook."

Doctor Wells, whose face looked young in spite of the gray hair at his temples, got up from his chair and shook hands gravely. "I'm glad to see you, Findley," he said; "I hope you're going to like the school and that the school will like you. We've assigned you to Gannett Hall; I'll have one of the masters take you over and introduce you to the boys who've already come. We don't do much to-day except get settled. Did you bring your things?"

"My father is going to bring them up this noon," Findley replied. "I thought I'd better come early to start in with the other fellows."

Doctor Wells put him in charge of Mr. Stevens, who took him over to Gannett Hall, a three-story building with its ivy-covered front to the campus and its back to the tennis courts. A dozen boys were standing on the steps; they had been talking and laughing, but as the newcomer approached them with the master, their voices died away and they paused in their conversations. A black-haired boy, tall and heavily built, immediately called out:

"Hello, Teeny-bits!"

The new boy recognized the one who had hailed him as Tracey Campbell, who had been in the class above him in the public school at Greensboro. "Teeny-bits" was the name by which Findley Holbrook had been known ever since he could remember and to hear himself thus addressed brought to him a momentarily pleasant feeling, even though Tracey Campbell had never been a special friend of his. When Findley was younger he had been so small that some one had called him "Teeny-bits" and the name had stuck. At the public school in Greensboro, in the village of Hamilton, in his home, every one called him Teeny-bits, and though the name did not apply to him now as appropriately as it had applied when he was four or five years younger, it still fitted him so well that no one questioned it.

Mr. Stevens smiled as he heard it from Tracey Campbell's lips and glanced at his young companion. A compact, slim body somewhat under the average height for seventeen, square shoulders, a very youthful mouth, eyes that seemed older than the rest of him and light brown, almost tow-colored hair, were the characteristics of Teeny-bits Holbrook that Mr. Stevens, the English master, saw. He said to himself that Teeny-bits was an apt nickname.

There were other characteristics that Mr. Stevens did not see; one of them revealed itself half an hour after the master had introduced Teeny-bits to the members of the school who occupied the third-floor rooms in Gannett Hall. The newcomer found himself possessed of a small and plain, but comfortable room, in which a bed, a chest of drawers, a table and two chairs were the chief articles of furniture. It looked out on the tennis courts and commanded a view of Hamilton village with its twin church spires sticking up through the trees like white spar-buoys out of a green sea. It made Teeny-bits a little homesick to look down there. His thoughts were quickly turned in other directions, however. Several of the boys came into his room, led by a tall, over-grown fellow who had been standing on the steps of the hall when Teeny-bits had entered. He came in at the head of the others, grinning confidently as if he were looking forward to something that would provide amusement.

"Friends," he said in the stagey sort of voice that a person might use in talking to an audience, "meet Teeny-bits – that's his name."

The boys behind the leader smiled in a way that suggested something else about to happen.

"Let me introduce myself," said the tall boy. "I'm Bassett, the Western Whirlwind, manager of Terrible Turner, the fighting bear-cat."

All of the boys laughed or snickered, and Teeny-bits smiled expectantly.

"Here is Terrible Turner himself," said Bassett, laying his hand on the shoulder of a pug-nosed lad whose freckled face wore a queer look of combined insolence and friendliness. "For the honor of the school he will wrestle you to test your mettle – he's a wrestler from way-back. Do you accept the challenge?"

Teeny-bits looked at Terrible Turner and then at Bassett, the Whirlwind.

"No," he said, "I don't want to wrestle in these clothes."

"Take off your coat, then; we consider it an insult to the whole school if you don't accept the challenge. Are you afraid of Terrible Turner? He's no bigger than you are."

Teeny-bits saw that the freckle-faced boy was in fact no larger than he, but he did not seem any the more inclined to accept the call to combat.

After waiting a moment, Bassett said in a taunting voice: "Friends, let me introduce you to Teeny-bits, the quitter."

The words had an effect that the Western Whirlwind scarcely expected. Teeny-bits solemnly pulled off his coat, laid it on the bed, and replied to the challenge.

"I won't wrestle with Turner," he said. "He's younger than I am. I'll wrestle with you."

The action that took place during the next few minutes was not quickly forgotten by the members of Ridgley School who were fortunate enough to witness it. In their eyes, for the time being at least, it surpassed the battle of the Marne.

Bassett made a scornful reply to Teeny-bits' challenge and let escape the remark that he wasn't a "baby-killer" and wouldn't wrestle any "bantams."

The words were still in his mouth when Teeny-bits launched himself upon him. There was a brief collision and with a mighty thump Bassett, the Whirlwind, hit the floor flat on his back.

A mighty howl went up from the onlookers; it carried to the farthest corners of Gannett Hall, – and there was such a note of pure enjoyment and hilarious surprise in it that every son of Ridgley upon whose ears it fell wasted no time in abandoning whatever was at hand and dashing madly to the scene of combat. As Bassett struggled to his feet all the roomers in Gannett Hall began to converge on Teeny-bits' room, and by the time the Western Whirlwind had thrown off his coat and laid hold on his opponent again, they were crowding in at the door and craning their necks to get a view of the fracas.

Bassett's face was the color of a ripe tomato; he considered that he had been caught off his guard, and the hilarious shout of his erstwhile admiring audience caused chagrin, disgust and rage to sweep over him in swift succession. He was mad clear through, and he meant to teach this impudent young Teeny-bits a lesson. He was twenty-five pounds heavier and half a head taller than the newcomer, and he had no other thought in his mind than that he could quickly regain his prestige and wipe out his disgrace, – and he meant to do it in no gentle manner. Teeny-bits should hit the floor and hit it hard, and if the fall should shake the whole building he would not care.

With a bull-like rush Bassett made for Teeny-bits, seized him with rough hands and gave a heave that was intended to finish the bout in one brilliant coup. But in some clever way his small opponent with quick work of his hands secured the under holds and though Bassett lifted him off the floor he clung on like a leech, found his feet after a second and saved himself from going down. The Western Whirlwind wrenched and twisted and heaved; he tugged with both hands, striving mightily to "break the back" of his opponent, he grunted as he worked and left no doubt in the minds of the howling audience that he meant to put an effective finish on the combat. The wonder of the crowd was that Teeny-bits did not immediately fall an easy victim. They gave him the ready sympathy that is generally accorded to the under dog.

"Hold him off, Teeny-bits!"

"Don't let him get you!"

"That's the way!"

"Look out!"

"Trip him up!"

Those were the shouts that filled the room with pandemonium. One moment the struggling pair were over against the wall, the next they bumped the bed or knocked over a chair. Surprise showed on the face of Bassett; he could not understand how this little chap was able to keep his feet. He grunted more fiercely and tried to get a new grip, but Teeny-bits squirmed and shifted and somehow saved himself. The Western Whirlwind began to puff and wheeze; sweat came out on his forehead and his face became redder than ever. Then for an instant he let up in his heaves as if to take breath for a new and more furious attack.

It was a fatal pause. Until that moment Teeny-bits had been content to cling on and make a defensive fight of it. Now suddenly he changed his tactics to the offensive. By clever leg-work he got Bassett lurching backward. He pressed home his advantage and while a shout of amazement and delight rang in his ears, brought his big antagonist down to the floor with a jar that made the windows rattle.

Bassett, the Whirlwind, lay on his back, half dazed with amazement and feeling too weak to rise because most of the wind seemed to have been knocked out of him. Once more, as of old, David had slain Goliath, and the victor was receiving congratulations.

At that moment a boy larger than any who had been in the room pushed his way through the crowd. "No fighting in the dormitory!" he cried. "What's all this about?" And then he saw Bassett just rising weakly to a sitting posture and observed the other boys slapping Teeny-bits on the back. He gazed in doubt from one to the other and then said to the diminutive conqueror: "Did you put this big lummux down?"

"You bet he did!" cried a dozen voices.

"Well, you did a mighty good job," he declared. "You're new here, but a lot of these other fellows are not, and they know as well as I do that we're not supposed to fight or have wrestling matches in the dormitories. Get on your feet there, Bassett, and mind your own business hereafter. I know well enough that you started this. You got just what you deserved, didn't you!"

In an authoritative way that was confident without being "bossy" he ordered the boys out of the room, and when the last of them had gone and the sound of their joking remarks to the crestfallen Bassett was receding, he said to Teeny-bits:

"You must be a whale of a scrapper for your size – and I'm mighty glad you gave that fresh-mouthed Bassett a good lesson. But don't get into any more trouble with him. You know we have a sort of self-government here, and we can't be smashing up things in the dormitory. I room downstairs in Number 26. Come in sometime soon."

Later in the day Teeny-bits learned that his visitor was Neil Durant, pitcher on the baseball team, and captain of the football eleven. He was dormitory leader, which meant that he represented Gannett Hall on the self-government committee of the school. Turner, who gave Teeny-bits the information, was only one of many boys who dropped in that day to see the conqueror of Bassett, the Whirlwind. Turner – the same Terrible Turner who had been willing enough for combat earlier in the morning – confessed with a grin that he was pretty glad Teeny-bits hadn't wrestled with him! "If I'd hit the floor as hard as Bassett did, I'd bet my backbone would have been broken into forty pieces," he said. "Oh, what a pippin of a thump!"

Teeny-bits liked Turner's frank, outspoken way. He made up his mind that he liked him still better when Turner said:

"None of the fellows call me Terrible Turner, you know – that was just some bunk that Bassett invented. They all call me Snubby – on account of my nose, I guess."

That noon an incident occurred that some of the roomers in Gannett Hall noticed: just before lunch Teeny-bits' trunk came. Mr. Holbrook brought it up from the village in a buggy drawn by a sorrel horse and with Teeny-bits' help carried it to the room on the third floor. Several of the boys remembered seeing Mr. Holbrook in the Hamilton station and when Teeny-bits introduced him as his father they suddenly realized that the conqueror of Whirlwind Bassett and the bearer of the queer nickname was the son of the station agent and a native of the little hamlet that nestled at the foot of the hill.

Mr. Holbrook was white-haired and he walked with a slight limp that made him seem old. He looked at Teeny-bits' new friends with a kindly twinkle in his eyes and told them that they were all "lucky boys to go to such a fine school" and advised them to "study hard so as to be smart men." If he had not been Teeny-bits' father, they might have thought he was a queer old duffer.

When Mr. Holbrook had said good-by to Teeny-bits he went over to Doctor Wells' office and remained alone with the Head for half an hour. At the end of that time he came out and drove the old sorrel horse through the campus and down the hill toward the village. One or two of the boys who saw him wondered what he had been talking about so long with the Head.

Old Daniel Holbrook with the limp and the white hair meant every word that he had said about the boys being lucky to go to such a fine school, but he meant it particularly in the case of Teeny-bits, whose situation in life was entirely different from the situation of most of the other Ridgleyites. They came to Ridgley from half the states in the Union – from California and Ohio and the Carolinas and New York and New England – they came well-equipped and carried themselves with a manner that suggested the well-to-do homes they had left. Teeny-bits Holbrook was there because he had won the scholarship that under the terms of the endowment of the school was awarded each year to a public-school student who lived within the confines of Sherburne County. Fennimore Ridgley, whose coal mines had yielded the fortune with which he had founded the school on the hill above the village of Hamilton, had been born and bred in Sherburne County. He had long been lying in a peaceful grave with a tall granite shaft above it, but each year one of the boys of Sherburne County received a gift from him – the privilege of coming free of expense to Ridgley. For two years Teeny-bits had been going to the high school at Greensboro, covering the four miles on his bicycle morning and afternoon. Then the unbelievable had happened: he had won the Ridgley scholarship, and father and mother Holbrook, whose hearts were centered on his future, received the news as a direct gift from Heaven. Their pride in him made up for the loneliness of the house after he had gone.

The career of Teeny-bits at Ridgley was not to be without its incidents, it seemed. He had been a roomer in Gannett Hall only ten days and the feeling of newness had not worn off when the school was treated to a sensation that caused no little talk and brought him into more prominence than had the victory in the wrestling match.

On a Wednesday morning before breakfast a sheet of paper was found tacked to the bulletin board that hung inside the door of the dormitory. The message that it bore had been typed crudely as if the person who had done it were a novice in the use of the typewriter. It consisted of two straggling lines and the words were:

"Beware of Teeny-bits! Holbrook is not his name! He's ashamed to tell the truth!"

Two dozen boys saw the paper and read the message before Snubby Turner tore it down and carried it up to Teeny-bits' room. They told other boys about it and no end of talk went round the school.

"This was on the bulletin board," said Snubby to Teeny-bits. "A lot of the fellows wonder what the dickens it means."

"You're a good friend of mine, Snubby," said Teeny-bits, "and I'll tell you what it means. I wonder if Bassett put it up – but I don't see how he knew anything about me – unless Tracey Campbell told him. Tracey lives over in Greensboro and went to public school with me."

"Bassett tags around after him like a tame sheep – I don't like either one of them," said Snubby.

The story that Teeny-bits told his friend was the same story that Mr. Holbrook had told Doctor Wells.

Teeny-bits had never known who his father and mother were – and yet his mother, or at least the woman whom he believed to be his mother, lay buried in the village cemetery. Her grave was marked with a plain slab of marble in which was cut the brief inscription:

"An unknown Mother. Died August 9th. 1903."

Teeny-bits remembered well the story of that tragic day as told him by the man whom he had always fondly known as Dad, – old Dad Holbrook with the white hair and the limp. On that long-ago day a train had crawled slowly into the station at Hamilton. There was a hot box on one of the cars, and while the train waited for the heated metal to cool, a woman with a small child – a boy of about a year and a half – stepped down to the track to find relief from the stifling air of the car. The Chicago express had come hurtling down the track at fifty miles an hour. Warning shouts had gone up, but the young woman had appeared oblivious of her danger. Those who saw the tragedy were convinced that she was deaf. At any rate every one agreed that she was unaware of the oncoming express until too late. Then, sensing the danger or hearing at last the shriek of the whistle behind her, she snatched up the child and tried to leap to safety. The realization that she was too late must have come upon her, for in the last fraction of a second she tossed the child to one side. The express, grinding all its brakes in a vain endeavor to stop, had instantly killed her. The baby escaped with a few scratches.

The matter of identifying the unfortunate mother had at first seemed not too difficult, but a search of the bag that she had left in her seat in the car revealed nothing that in any way offered a clue as to who she was or whence she had come. Daniel Holbrook had attended to the burial of the unknown mother and had taken the child home, thinking their relatives would soon appear to claim him. But no one had ever come for the boy and none of the notices that the Holbrooks had put in the newspapers had brought a claimant. After a year the Holbrooks had adopted the child and had put a stone over the unnamed grave in the cemetery.

When Teeny-bits finished telling his story, Snubby Turner's eyes were round with wonder. Instead of detracting from the prestige of Teeny-bits, the story had the effect of enhancing it, and if the person who put the paper on the bulletin board intended it to effect an injury, his attempt defeated itself, for the true story of Teeny-bits rapidly spread by word of mouth and, instead of bringing him into disrepute, cast about him a certain air of mystery that caused the boys in other dormitories to seek him out to make his acquaintance. Thus, through no effort of his own, Teeny-bits Holbrook found himself somewhat of a character at Ridgley School before he had been there two weeks.

CHAPTER II

A BLEMISH

In the middle of October Teeny-bits surprised every one by going out for the football team. Even his most loyal friends thought that he had lost his senses. The team was particularly heavy this year; the first-string men were big, well-formed, aggressive players of the type of Neil Durant, who weighed one hundred and sixty pounds with not an ounce of fat, and who was quite as good a half-back, it was said, as many college players. The most that Teeny-bits could hope for was a place on the scrub, but that meant drudgery of the worst sort and a daily mauling that was enough to take the courage out of larger boys than he.

"They'll make Hamburger steak out of you!" warned Snubby Turner. "You'd better not do it."

"Good night, Teeny-bits! do you want to commit suicide!" said Fred Harper. "I'll hang a wreath on your door."

But the first team did not put an end to Teeny-bits' career. They laughed when the coach gave him a chance on the scrub one afternoon and laughed harder when he at last got a chance to carry the ball and by clever dodging succeeded in making a twenty-yard gain. He slipped out of the grasp of Ned Stillson and nearly eluded big Tom Curwood, who covered Teeny-bits so completely when he finally had him down that ball and runner were almost completely out of sight.

"He's as slippery as an eel," said big Tom.

"And so small you can't see him," growled Ned Stillson.

After that the first team watched him like tomcats watching a mouse and Teeny-bits got no chance to break away.

In the locker room after practice Mr. Murray, the coach, came over and laid a friendly hand on his arm. "Keep it up," he said; "if you weighed about twenty-five pounds more, by jingo, I believe you'd make the team."

The members of the eleven also were friendly and treated him as they might have treated a mascot in whom they had great faith. In the shower-bath room Neil Durant jumped out from under the cold spray and shook the water from his lean, firmly-muscled body just as Teeny-bits came in. The big half-back looked admiringly at the new candidate for the scrub and said:

"Good work, Teeny-bits! You're the original bear-cat all right."

Teeny-bits grinned appreciatively as he stepped under the shower. Neil stood near by, drying himself with a Turkish towel. As the smaller boy turned this way and that under the spattering water the half-back looked critically at his compact body and firm muscles. To be sure, Teeny-bits was small, but he was shaped like a young god and modeled with perfect symmetry. Something else, however, attracted Neil's attention.

"That's a peculiar mark you have on the back of your shoulder," he said, as Teeny-bits turned off the water.

"It's a sort of birthmark, I guess," said Teeny-bits. "My trademark."

What Neil Durant referred to was a five inch, terra-cotta colored blemish on Teeny-bits' smooth back. The shape of the mark was what made it peculiar. It resembled strikingly a dagger-like knife with a tapering blade and a thin handle. Once seen it was not likely to be forgotten.

In the same manner that the true story of Teeny-bits had spread through the school after his unknown ill-wisher had tried to injure his name by posting the notice on the Gannett Hall bulletin board, the news spread from boy to boy that the conqueror of Bassett and the new candidate for the scrub bore on the smooth skin of his shoulder a strange and curiously formed mark, and during the days that immediately followed Teeny-bits' first appearance on the football field, more than one candidate for the team made it a point to be present in the shower-bath room in order that he might cast seemingly casual glances at the unusual mark. Some of the Ridgleyites were more open in their curiosity and did not hesitate to question Teeny-bits, but they all received answers similar to the one that Neil Durant had received. To Teeny-bits there was nothing strange about the mark, for it had been there from the time of his earliest memory and he had thought little more about it than he had of the fact that he possessed hands and feet. Snubby Turner, whose bump of curiosity was as big as a watermelon, lingered one night in Teeny-bits' room while the new boy was undressing.