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He heard a door open and shut and he sniffed a strange odor; food cooking and smoke, it seemed to suggest, but strange food and strange smoke. Another flight of steps was mounted, another door was opened, and Teeny-bits felt himself deposited upon something that seemed like a mattress.
Whoever these men were who had bound him in so strange a manner, they had done their work well. Minutes passed, and still the automobile rolled on swiftly; whither it was carrying him north or south or east or west Teeny-bits had no way of knowing. Finally it began to move more slowly and after a few moments vibrated as if passing over cobble-stones.
There was some little delay, for Teeny-bits, surprised and dismayed, had settled himself lower in his seat, hoping thereby to escape detection until a demand had started for some other member of the team. But the Ridgleyites who were sitting beside him yelled, "Here he is!" and Neil Durant, perceiving him at last, leaped down from the platform and laid hold on him with vigorous hands.
Teeny-bits did not wait to listen, but began to move toward the door; he expected the men to jump in front of him and bar the way, but neither of them stirred until he was actually stepping out of the room. Teeny-bits ran stiffly down a dimly lighted flight of steps, then down another flight and out into a dark alleyway.
"Three or four weeks ago, Teeny-bits," said the coach, "I looked upon you as an interesting possibility for the team next year. Now you've landed on the eleven, and I'm sure you can make good. You're quick and you've got a good eye for plays, but I want you to make up your mind that you are going to show us something that you never thought you had in you.
Stevens and had said to him: "I have just been discovering some things that make it necessary for me to tell you that last Monday night, while the football mass meeting was going on, I slid down a fire-rope and crawled into Tracey Campbell's room to see if I could discover if he was the one who had been stealing things from the fellows' rooms and that while I was doing it Teeny-bits came along and saw me, though I didn't know it at the time, and that is the reason why you found him out there behind the dormitory."
Instead of jumping down and returning to his seat, Teeny-bits left the platform by the back way and hurried out of the building by the rear door. He wanted to be alone just then.
Pa Holbrook took the mining engineer's hand in his two old, gnarled ones and said something that made Teeny-bits very happy: "Ma and I are old folks and we've kind of worried, you can understand, about Teeny-bits not having any family when we pass on.
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. "I want to see that knife-thing on your back that I heard the fellows talking about," said Snubby frankly. "Come over under the light so I can get a good look. That is queer the hilt of the knife is curved a little just the same on both sides.
She had come to her rival with the best team in her history and she meant to enjoy every moment of a triumph which she was confident would be colossal. In all this excitement Teeny-bits' absence was not at first noticed. At breakfast some one asked for him and some one else said: "I guess he's already eaten and gone; he probably didn't want to listen to our football gossip."
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