Chapter 7 text

I woke up in a large room, all to myself. There was a part of me that had forgotten that Finny was ever my roommate, and the bad terms that we had been on did not really matter what was going on between us anyways. Brinker Hadley came over to me and said, "I can see you have real influence around here. This big room all to yourself. I wish I knew how to manage things like you" (79). I could not figure out why the "hub" of the class was congratulating me on influence. I said to Brinker, "I feel like a smoke, don't you? Lets go down to the Butt Room" (80). The Butt Room was something like a dungeon. It was in the basement, or the bowels, or the dormitory. There were about ten smokers already there. As I walked out of the Butt Room I saw Chet Douglass, Quackenbush, and Leper told me that they had a job to do. The job that they began to describe to me was to shovel off the railroad. Brinker put his arm around me and told me that we were on the same "team". As we started walking to go shovel on the railroad that we volunteered to do, I saw Leper in the middle of a meadow, cross-country skiing. He told me that he was looking for a beaver dam and he wanted me to come along and join him. Before we had finished shoveling around 4:30 the main line had been cleared and the first train rattled slowly through, it was a troop train. At this instant this was one Leper realized he wanted to enlist and be a part of the war. I said, "Did you find the dam, Leper?" (90). Brinker had no idea what dam it was so I simply explained to him that it was a beaver dam that Leper and I had known about but he still did not understand what it was. It was not in the Devon itself, it was in one of the tributaries. The beaver had never come out itself but we had still known about the dam.