Then he sat back in his chair, and began to wrestle with this new
development. Barry must play. That was certain. All the bluff in the
world was not going to keep him from playing the best man at his disposal
in the Ripton match. He himself did not count. It was the school he had
to think of. This being so, what was likely to happen? Though nothing
was said on the point, he felt certain that if he persisted in ignoring
the League, that bat would find its way somehow--by devious routes,
possibly--to the headmaster or some one else in authority. And then
there would be questions--awkward questions--and things would begin
to come out. Then a fresh point struck him, which was, that whatever
might happen would affect, not himself, but O'Hara. This made it rather
more of a problem how to act. Personally, he was one of those dogged
characters who can put up with almost anything themselves. If this had
been his affair, he would have gone on his way without hesitating.
Evidently the writer of the letter was under the impression that he
had been the hero (or villain) of the statue escapade.

If everything came out it did not require any great effort of prophecy
to predict what the result would be. O'Hara would go. Promptly. He
would receive his marching orders within ten minutes of the discovery
of what he had done. He would be expelled twice over, so to speak, once
for breaking out at night--one of the most heinous offences in the
school code--and once for tarring the statue. Anything that gave the
school a bad name in the town was a crime in the eyes of the powers,
and this was such a particularly flagrant case. Yes, there was no doubt
of that. O'Hara would take the first train home without waiting to pack
up. Trevor knew his people well, and he could imagine their feelings
when the prodigal strolled into their midst--an old Wrykinian _malgre
lui_. As the philosopher said of falling off a ladder, it is not the
falling that matters: it is the sudden stopping at the other end. It is