



Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team










T. HAVILAND HICKS SENIOR

BY J. RAYMOND ELDERDICE



TO MASTER LLOYD ELDERDICE



CONTENTS


     I. HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN
    II. "LEAVE IT TO HICKS"
   III. HICKS' PRODIGIOUS PRODIGY
    IV. QUOTING SCOOP SAWYER'S LETTER
     V. HICKS MAKES A DECISION
    VI. HICKS MAKES A SPEECH
   VII. HICKS STARTS ANOTHER MYSTERY
  VIII. COACH CORRIDAN SURPRISES THE ELEVEN
    IX. THEOPHILUS' MISSIONARY WORK
     X. THOR'S AWAKENING
    XI. "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL"
   XII. THEOPHILUS BETRAYS HICKS
  XIII. HICKS--CLASS KID--YALE '96
   XIV. THE GREATER GOAL
    XV. HICKS HAS A "HUNCH"
   XVI. THANKS TO CAESAR NAPOLEON
  XVII. HICKS MAKES A RASH PROPHECY
 XVIII. T. HAVILAND HICKS, JR.'S HEADWORK
   XIX. BANNISTER GIVES HICKS A SURPRISE PARTY
    XX. "VALE, ALMA MATER!"






T. HAVILAND HICKS, SENIOR




CHAPTER I

HICKS--WILD WEST BAD MAN


  "Oh, a bold, bad man was Chuckwalla Bill--
  An' he lived in a shanty on Tom-cat Hill;
  Ten notches on the six-gun he toted on his hip--
  For he'd sent ten buckos on the One-way Trip!"

Big Butch Brewster, captain and full-back of the Bannister College football
squad, his behemoth bulk swathed in heavy blankets and crowded into a
narrow bunk, shifted his vast tonnage restlessly. He was dreaming of the
wild and woolly West, and like a six-reel Western drama thrown on the
screen in a moving-picture show, he visioned in his slumbers a vivid and
spectacular panorama.

The first lurid scene was the Deserted Limited held up at a tank station in
the great Mojave Desert by a lone, masked bandit who winged the dreaming
Butch in the shoulder, the latter being an express guard who resisted.
After the desperado, Two-Gun Steve, had forced the engineer to run the
train back to a siding, he had ordered Butch to vamoose. Quite naturally,
then, the collegian next found himself staggering across the arid expanse,
until at last, half dead from a burning thirst, seeking vainly for a
water-hole, the vast stretch of sandy, sagebrush-studded wastes shimmered
into a gorgeous ocean of sparkling blue waters. Then, as he collapsed on
the scorching-hot sand, helpless, the cool water so near, suddenly the
scene shifted.

In quick and vivid succession, Butch Brewster beheld a burning stockade
besieged by howling Indians, and a frontier town shot up by recklessly
riding cowboys on a jamboree. Then he became a tenderfoot, badgered by
yelling, shooting roisterers, and later a sheriff, bravely leading his
posse to a sensational battle with that same Two-Gun Steve and his gang,
entrenched in a rock-bound mountain defile.

Finally, he stood with hands above his head in company with other
passengers of the Sagebrush Stagecoach, while a huge, red-shirted Westerner
with a fierce black mustache and a six-shooter in each hand belching
bullets at Butch's dancing feet, roared out huskily: "Oh--I'm a ring-tailed
roarer (_bang-bang_)! I'm a rip-snortin', high-falutin', loop-the-loopin'
_bad_ man (_bang-bang_)! I'm wild an' woolly, an' full o' fleas, an' hard
to curry below the knees--I'm a roarin' wild-cat, an' it's my night to howl
(_bang-bang_)! Yip-yip-yip-_yeee_!"

Big Butch, opening his eyes and starting up, gazed about him in sheer
surprise; for an instant, in that state of bewilderment that comes with
sudden awakening, he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse,
and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at
the interior of a rough shack built of pine boards, with bunks constructed
in tiers on both sides. There were figures in them--Western cowboys,
perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that the voice drifting from the outside
was strangely familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he remembered he
had gone in the dim and dusty past, he had often heard that same fog-horn
voice, roaring songs of a less blood-curdling character, and accompanied by
that same banjo twanging, which tortured the campus, and bothered would-be
studious youths!

"I'm not in a moving-picture show," Butch informed himself, as he donned
khaki trousers, football sweater, and heavy shoes. "I'm not on a Western
ranch, either. I'm in the sleep-shack of Camp Bannister, the football
training-camp of the Bannister College squad! Those fellows in the bunks
are not cowboys, Indians, and bandits--they are my teammates! I did dream
stuff that would shame a Wild West scenario, but I understand it all
now--my dreams were influenced by T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.!"

At that dramatic moment, to substantiate his statement, the raucous voice,
accompanied by resounding chords strummed on a banjo, sounded again. The
vocal and instrumental chaos was frequently punctured by revolver reports,
as the torturesome Caruso outside roared:

  "Oh, Chuckwalla Bill thought life was sweet--
  Till he met up with Sure-shot Pete;
  A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw--
  But Sure-shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"

The pachydermic Butch, fully dressed--and awake, raging in his wrath like
an active volcano, glanced at his watch, and discovered that it was exactly
five A.M.! Intensely pacified by this knowledge, he lumbered toward the
bunkhouse door and flung it open, determined to crush the pestersome youth
who thus unfeelingly disturbed the quietude of Camp Bannister at such an
unearthly hour! However, his grim purpose was temporarily thwarted--before
him spread a beautiful panorama, a vast canvas painted in rich hues and
colors, that indescribably charming masterpiece of nature, entitled dawn.

Butch, gazing from the bunkhouse doorway toward the pebbly shore of the
placid lake stretching out for two miles before him, beheld Old Sol,
blood-red, peeping above the wooded hills on the far-off, opposite strand
of Lake Conowingo; the luminous orb laid a flaming pathway across the
shimmering waters, and golden bars of light, like gleaming fingers
outstretched, fell athwart the tall pines that towered on the high bluff
back of the camp. The glorious sunshine, succeeding a flood of rosy color,
inundated the scene; it bathed in a gorgeous radiance the early autumn
woods, it illumined the bunkhouse, and another rude shanty known to the
squad as the grub-shack, it poured down on old Hinky-Dink, the ancient
<DW64> cookee, setting the breakfast tables just outside the canvas
cook-tent.

"Deed, cross mah heart, Mistah Butch," grinned old Hinky-Dink, seeing, as
a motion picture director would express it, "Wrath registered on the
countenance" of Butch Brewster, "Ah done tole dat young Hicks dat a bird
what cain't sing an' will sing mus' be made _not_ to sing! Ah done info'med
him dat yo'-all was layin' fo' him, cause he done bus' up yo' sleep!"

A jay bird, a flashing bit of vivid blue, shot from a tall pine, jeering
shrilly at Butch; out on the lake, a trout leaped above the water for an
infinitesimal second, its shining scales gleaming in the sunshine. From the
cook-tent, where old Hinky-Dink grumbled at the frying pan, the appetizing
odor of frying fish assailed the football captain, softening his wrath.

High above the shanties, on a tall flagpole made from a straight young
pine, floated a big gold and green banner, its bright colors gleaming in
the sunshine; it bore the words:

    CAMP BANNISTER
    TRAINING CAMP
    THE FOOTBALL SQUAD
    BANNISTER COLLEGE

Head Coach Corridan, smashing the precedent that had made former Gold and
Green squads have their training camp at Bannister College, had brought
the Varsity and second-string