"What's doing?"

"Swearing-match! Going to make Little Stevie cuss! Better get in on it.
Some fight! Tennelly sent 'Whisk' for a whole basket of superannuated
cackle-berries"--he motioned back to a freshman bearing a basket of
ancient eggs--"we're going to blindfold Steve and put oysters down his
back, and then finish up with the fire-hose. Oh, the seven plagues of
Egypt aren't in it with what we're going to do; and when we get done if
Little Stevie don't let out a string of good, honest cuss-words like a
man then I'll eat my hat. Little Stevie's got good stuff in him if it
can only be brought out. We're a-going to bring it out. Then we're going
to celebrate by taking him over to the theater and making him see 'The
Scarlet Woman.' It'll be a little old miracle, all right, if he has any
of his whining Puritanical ideas left in him after we get through with
him. Come on! Get on the job!"

Drifting along with the surging tide of students, Courtland sauntered
down the corridor to the door at the extreme end where roomed the
victim.

He rather liked Stephen Marshall. There was good stuff in him; all the
fellows recognized that. Only he was woefully unsophisticated,
abnormally innocent, frankly religious, and a little too openly white in
his life. It seemed a rebuke to the other fellows, unconscious though it
might be. He felt with the rest that the fellow needed a lesson.
Especially since the bald way in which he had dared to stand up for the
old-fashioned view of miracles in biblical-lit. class that morning. Of
course an ignorance like that wouldn't go down, and it was best he
should learn it at once and get to be a good fellow without loss of