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The journey by rail was a long one, and it afforded leisure for so much cogitation that when Jerrard napped he dreamed that the ends of his nerves were nailed to his desk back in the P. K. & R. general offices, and that as he proceeded he was unreeling them as a spider spins its thread.
Some chairs were overturned; Jerrard and a friend, hearing the door open, had turned round. Leaning against the table, very flushed, his eyes shining, his hair covered with dust, waving his arms and singing in a quivering voice, was a small boy, very drunk. A glass and a whisky bottle were on the table. "You damned hound!" Peter was trembling from head to foot. "You shall get kicked out for this."
The passage was deserted, and, for a moment, there was no sound save some one shouting down in the cricket field and the buzzing of the fly on the pane. Then he heard voices from behind Jerrard's door. "No, I say Jerrard don't give me any more please ... please don't." "There I say hold his mouth open; that's right, pour it down. We'll have him singing in a moment."
On that same evening he called a meeting of the Monitors; they were bound to meet if one of their number had anything of sufficient importance to declare, but they came reluctantly and showed Peter that they resented his action. When they heard what Peter had to say their attitude was even more mutinous. Jerrard, the school's best bowler, was their one thought.
The railroad man opened his mouth to make a discourteous retort reflecting on the driver's judgment of distances, but just then one of the rear wheels slipped off a rock. It came down kerchunk. Jerrard bit his cheek and his tongue. After that he sat and held to his seat with a hopeless idea that the end of the road was running away from them.
Jerrard an experiment in culvert construction, in which he took an originator's pride. The band kept on playing and the men roared choruses. After the young engineer had bellowed his explanation in Jerrard's ear, and Jerrard had howled back some warm compliments, striving to make himself heard above the uproar, the two climbed the embankment and approached the coach. The band was quiet now.
The young man advanced from the city to meet him with the coolness of one who has been taught to restrain his emotions, and armed with determination to win the battle that would make or break him, so far as his employers were concerned. Jerrard was the avant-courier of this novel railroad.
"I suppose what I did might be termed that, tho I wasn't intending to be meddlesome, Mr. Jerrard." "Nothing in general instructions, was there, to lead a cub assistant in the engineering corps to revise a boarding house bill of fare?" "No, sir."
But when they were well out on the carry road in the buckboard, Jerrard, gazing on the indescribable mixture of reproach, horror, pain and astonishment that the president's face presented laughed until Whittaker forgot dignity, cares and fears, and laughed, too.
They were not, by an absurd and ancient rule, allowed to punish any grave offence without reporting it to the head-master. If, therefore, they took any action at all, it must be reported, Jerrard would be expelled, a boon companion and the great cricket match of the year, would be lost. And all this through that interfering prig of a Westcott!
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