Well, it was just this. The American students, of whom there were a large number there, kept pretty much to themselves, and no love was lost between them and the Germans. They had an American Club to which they all belonged, just to keep them together and see any fellow through who was in a scrape. He, and some of the American students, were sitting in the beer-garden close to a table of Germans. Forgetting the neighbourhood, he had tilted his chair, and leant back in it, and so come against a German head. The owner jumped up, and a sharp altercation followed, ending in the German's calling him out with swords. This he refused, but sent a challenge to fight with pistols by the president of the club, a real fine man, who had shot his two men down South before he went to Heidelberg. The answer to this was his arrest, and arrest was a very serious thing now. For some little time since a German and an American fought with swords first, and then with pistols. The American had his face cut open from the eye right down across the mouth, but when it came to pistols he shot the German, who died in an hour. So he was in jail, and challenging with pistols had been made an offence punishable by imprisonment, and that was no joke in a German military prison.
Did he expect the university authorities would send after him then?
No; but his folk were all in Germany for the winter. He had a younger brother at Heidelberg who had taken his bag down to the station for him, and would have let his father know, as he had told him to. If he had telegraphed, the old gentleman might come straight off and stop him yet, but he rather guessed he would be so mad he wouldn't come. No; he didn't expect to see his folk again for three or four years.
But why? After all, sending a challenge of which nothing came was not so very heinous an offence.
Yes, but it was the second time. He had run from an American university to escape expulsion for having set fire to an outhouse. Then he went straight to New York, which he wanted to see, and stopped till his money was all gone. His father was mad enough about that.
I said plainly that I didn't wonder, and was going to add something by way of improving the occasion, but for a look of such deep sorrow which passed over the boy's face that I thought his conscience might be left to do the work better than I could.
He opened his bag, and took out a photograph, and then his six-shooter — a self-cocking German one, he said, which was quicker and carried a heavier ball than any he had seen in America; and then his pipes and cigar-tubes; and then he rolled a cigarette, and lighted it; and, as the dawn was now come, began to ask questions about the country.
But all in vain; back the scenes he was running from came, do what he would. His youngest brother, a little fellow of ten, was down with fever. He had spoilt Christmas for the whole family. It would cut them up awfully.
But to a suggestion that he should go straight back he could not listen. No, he was going straight through to California, the best place for him. He had never done any good yet, but he was going to do it now. He had got a letter or two to Californians from some of his fellow-students, which would give him some opening. He wouldn't see his people for four or five years, till he got something to show them. He would have to pitch right in, or else starve. He would go right into the first thing that came along out there, and make something.
As we got further down the line the morning cleared, and we had many fellow-passengers; but my young friend, as I might almost call him by this time, stuck to me, and seemed to get some relief by talking of his past doings and future prospects. I found that he had been at Würtzburg for a short time before going to Heidelberg, so had had a student's experience of two of the most celebrated German universities. My own ideas of those seats of learning, being for the most part derived from the writings of Mr. Matthew Arnold, received, I am bound to own, rather severe shocks from the evidently truthful experience of this one medical student.
He had simply paid his necessary florins (about Il. worth) for his matriculation fee, and double that sum for two sets of lectures for which he entered. He had passed no matriculation examination, or indeed any other; had attended lectures or not, just as he pleased — about one in three he put as his average — but there was no roll-call or register, and no one that he knew of seemed to care the least whether he was there or not. However, he seemed to think that but for his unlucky little difficulty he could easily at this rate have passed examination for the degree of doctor of medicines. The doctor's degree was a mighty fine thing, and
