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HERE is scandal and gloom at Pine River College. The president is under suspicion. The football coach is explaining. The registrar says he knows nothing about it. The business office refuses to disclose facts. The State Association of Colleges, after an investigation, has reproved and rejected.

The whole thing has to do with the motives and abilities of Mike Nowisky. Mike lives on a farm near the college. His people are poor. They have not "been over" long. At high school Mike had listened to representatives of various institutions of learning tell how gloriously shiny is the halo about the head of the youth who works his way through college. Mike learned English in school, and American everywhere. He wasn't sure whether the boy with the halo worked the faculty or worked with his hands. His adventurous soul was willing to try anything once. He had worked with his great hands; he had smiled his slow contagious smile at the young women fresh from the university who taught him in high school. Mike longed for college. College seemed gorgeous. There was the glittering band at football games. He exulted in their proud marching, his feet beating time and his heart beating overtime. His music-loving soul responded to the joyous carollings of the glee club. "Swinging Down the Lane" was tantalizing enough, but when those youthful throats poured out undying loyalty to dear old Pine River, "matchless college of the West," he longed to add his high tenor to the collective vow of deathless affection. The high visibility of the red ribbons diagonally across their more or less snowy shirt-fronts suggested royalty. True he felt the "dress suit" would be awkward on his bulging form, though the young fellows who wore them seemed at home

in them. (He had not heard the president tell the glee club how their appearance reminded him of the famous scripture, "and they rent their clothes.") Mike loved above all to sing.

And here began the trouble.

Mike presented himself in the president's office "to find out about this working yourself through college," at a time when the glee-club coach was lamenting that the club was all shot to pieces. The professors who had scouted for students had discovered a wealth of football material, a goodly galaxy of debating stars, plenty of valedictorians and salutatorians of high-school classes, but not a real tenor. There were basses enough and plenty for the middle parts, and two or three who could reach the high notes and accomplish barber-shop effects of a rasping sort; but a real tenor hadn't registered in Pine River. If the dress suits with the flamboyant red ribbons were again to bring renown to the old college on the spring-vacation trip, a real tenor must be discovered.

Mike spoke con amore of his desire and came near tremolo in his eagerness. The president encouraged him but was cautiously vague. The good jobs in the dining-room were all taken. The two hotels down-town had all their waiters. The janitor's assistants had already been assigned. Every known furnace not stoked by its owner or its owner's wife had been spoken for. The laundries had agents, the clothes-pressers had agents, the sodafountains had mixers, stores had boys for Saturdays: there had been early birds after all the jobs.

Mike was appealing. It was hard to be certain whether it was his smile, or his beautiful voice or his eagerness. The glee-club coach was a man of action, however. "Say, boy," he blurted, before the president had done much but listen (and the president was a rare listener), "do you sing? Can you carry a tune? Do you know music? Oh, here, come to my studio. I want to see you."

Uncomprehending, the tall lad obeyed. With Old World courtesy he bowed low to the president and followed this strange, sudden man who didn't say a farewell word to his chief.

Mike could sing. He knew music. He could carry tune-anywhere, but especially in the high altitudes. Soon he was left to hold down a chair in the studio while the now excited music man hurried back into the president's sanctum with determination in both eyes.

"Say, we've got to have him. He's the tenor. He's one tenor in a thousand. He'll make the glee club. I'll board him myself and room him. He can tend the furnace or the baby or help my wife with the dishes. Holy Paderewski, he's got a voice like a seraph in a first-string angel choir. Can't you give him a scholarship? I don't care about that fool rule the faculty have about no scholarships for freshmen. He's got to stay. I'll take up a collection. I—”

But the president shook his head. "I'll not bait a new student. No scholarship until a student shows real scholarship ability. Besides they're all gone. Fund's exhausted. Overdrawn. I could use twenty-five hundred dollars that isn't in sight for proved students in the upper classes. Never were there so many.'

But Mike's appealing smile was being remembered. "Wait! I've a fund of my own, and it isn't bound by rules. Let me look. I've got it! I'll give him enough for tuition. Sign him up."

And so he was registered. Nowisky, Michael Krowatsky, became to the faculty a freshman, and to a joyous student body, instructive in its christenings, Nowisky became "Volstead," and his first name, never used, was announced to be Prohibition.

But so long as Mike knew himself to be a freshman, they could call him what they pleased. He would be Volstead or Carrie Nation or Frances Willard. He would tend the baby or the furnace or the lawnmower, if he could only be one of the joyous crowd.

The athletic coach had the best football squad of his experience and no quarterback. Alert as he was with the training of his perspiring giants, he longed for a quarter-back. His captain could do the

head work and could call signals, his backs were promising; but for a fast quarter-back with big hands to throw passes he would sell his hardened soul.

And with his absurd little green cap on his shock of blonde hair there was Mike on the side-lines. The coach looked him over, felt him over, then bowled him over with words like the singing teacher's: "I want you!"

Mike was conscious and ill at ease in a football suit. His tough arm obeyed instructions and he threw. Could-hepass? The coach was ecstatic. For three days underlings handled the line, the ends, and the backs. A four-year man belabored the freshman aspirants to football glory, while the coach and Mike worked behind the gymnasium alone, save for two incredulous ends of experience who caught the Volstead passes. Sworn to secrecy Volstead spent night hours with his new tyrant, the coach. He learned it as though his ancestors had all been letter men. It wasn't reasonable, it wasn't precedented, but he absorbed football like a sponge. He was ready for the first game.

Soon no secrecy existed. The quarterback was a sensation. If there had been any doubt about the Pine River claim to the State championship it was gone. The students who nicknamed him said he was a bear, a whiz, and a wonder. The newspapers of the whole State carried his fame. The championship was settled.

And the scandal spread. Pine River had bought him. He was being given board, room, and tuition to play football. The association called the athletic conference representatives together and the damnable facts were before them. Nowisky, Michael Krowatsky, was declared ineligible. He had come to Pine River with no money. One Pine River professor was giving him board and room. The president, so long a stickler for institutional proprieties, had violated his own rules and had made an exception of Mike by granting him free tuition on account of his athletic ability, and this from the one president in the State who had been loudest in his denunciation of athletic abuses, and most prompt to protest against the subterfuges of unprincipled coaches. Volstead was disqualified. Pine River College was proved a liar, a cheat,

Again the newspapers carried columns about the Wonderful Pole. All explanations were laughed to scorn. It was too easy, too palpable a fraud. They'd helped him-listen, those Pine River folks had given him money because he could sing! Because he was a tenor! Tell it to Sweeny! Whoever heard of Pine River caring about tenors? Hadn't they had the football championship for ten years? That was how, was it: the president had a private fund. He had, had he? Well, most presidents had sense enough to let the alumni pay the football men, or let the business men pay out the

their stores. The president's fund! That's a good one. Rah for music! Three Rahs for Art! Pine River pays tenors!

So Nowisky had brought gloom-as much gloom as the original Volstead. Never again can he compete in athletics. Let him sing. Let him wear a red ribbon diagonally across his shirt front, let him wear a borrowed or rented suit of evening clothes. The State Athletic Association is free from scandal, and Pine River, instead of its annual hilarious football banquet, can this year call together a great crowd of cheering friends and-let-theglee-club-sing.

HE thirty-year reunion of the class was drawing to a close. We sat around the table in the comfortable state induced by a good dinner, choice cigars, and a little illegal comfort, for, as Jack Chilton, our president, said truly, "it takes about two drinks to make a man feel like an alumnus." From the very start at the Phi Chi House, where we had amused ourselves guessing the names of the children and grandchildren, through the motor trips and the spread at Ben Goddard's palatial suburban home, and the baseball game and the alumni parade, the beaming countenance of the president had carried everything off triumphantly. The class was his hobby; it had been for years the substitute for the wife he never had and the children of whom he may have dreamed, and the classes which have the good luck to have a Jack Chilton in them will know what I mean. On the last night at the dinner which was to wind up the two days' revival of old and fragrant memories, he was surpassing himself.

For the tenth time he had risen, rapped on the round table of the University Club for order, and cleared his throat.

"Fellows," he began, "it had been the hope of the committee to have every man in the class present at this reunion, and until to-night we expected that at this final dinner, at least, we'd have the whole crowd together. But something has happened to Downs and Upton. Both sent word they were coming, and I don't understand what's kept them. They had a long way to come, of course, and something's happened to them. At any rate, we're sorry they're not here, and if there were anything left to drink, we'd drink their healths, for they were good fellows. But Bill Jeffers here has drunk up all there is."

Jeffers interrupted. "You're an optimist, Jack," he said. "You wouldn't know them if you saw them, you old bluff, for they haven't been to a reunion for twenty years at least."

It was a matter of pride to Jack Chilton that he had known everybody in the class, and a retort was just forming on his lips when a deep voice from behind him sounded above the mellow din of the dinner-table.