Nothing But the Truth

Nothing But the Truth

CHAPTER I—THE TEMERITY OF BOB


“It can’t be done.”

“Of course, it can.”

“A man couldn’t survive the ordeal.”

“Could do it myself.”

The scene was the University Club. The talk spread over a good deal of
space, as talk will when pink cocktails, or “green gardens in a glass”
confront, or are in front of, the talkees. Dickie said it couldn’t be
done and Bob said it was possible and that he could do it. He might not
have felt such confidence had it not been for the verdant stimulation.
He could have done anything just then, so why not this particular feat
or stunt? And who was this temerarious one and what was he like?

As an excellent specimen of a masculine young animal, genus homo, Bob
Bennett was good to look on. Some of those young ladies who wave banners
when young men strain their backs and their arms and their legs in the
cause of learning, had, in the days of the not remote past, dubbed him,
sub rosa, the “blue-eyed Apollo.” Some of the fellows not so
euphemistically inclined had, however, during that same glorious period
found frequent occasion to refer to him less classically, if more
truthfully, as “that darn fool, Bob Bennett.” That was on account of a
streak of wildness in him, for he was a free bold creature, was Bob.
Conventional bars and gates chafed him. He may have looked like a
“blue-eyed Apollo,” but his spirit had the wings of a wild goose, than
which there are no faster birds—for a wild goose is the biplane of the
empyrean.