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Pinkerton!’ Mr Gregg cried, lunging to the door, and called again down the corridor: ‘Mr Pinkerton!’
    Soon the charges were known all over Blaze. Joe Boyd told us the story that evening at dinner; he had heard it from Hoppy Hopkins, who had heard it from a fellow in Form
C.
    This was the story. Before Trouble came to Blaze, he had been at naval school in Maryland, where (so it was said) he had proved himself unusually inept. With his shabby gear, his supercilious
quips, his inability to stand to attention, the penalties he incurred for his classmates were legion. None of them liked him; or rather, only one did. This was Scotty Ridgeway, the handsome,
popular son of an admiral who had distinguished himself in the Spanish–American War. Scotty Ridgeway, like his father, was a model of seamanly prowess, but Scotty’s academic work was
not up to much. All he wanted was naval glory. Bad grades would not only deprive him of his place as an officer cadet, but disgrace him in his father’s eyes. Quietly, he grew desperate: but
Trouble was on hand. When an important test loomed, Trouble broke into the school office, stealing the papers to give to his friend.
    Soon the crime was traced, but worse was to come when a diary discovered in Trouble’s desk revealed crimes still darker. Trouble, it appeared, had been at the centre of a circle of
corruption. Scotty Ridgeway was the first of his victims; later, the two of them initiated others into the vilest depravities.
    The scandal rocked the school. Only the most stringent efforts kept it from the public prints. Admiral Ridgeway, at all costs, had to be prevented from knowing the charges; Senator Pinkerton,
defending his son, threatened legal action. In the end, Scotty Ridgeway was saved, while B. F. Pinkerton II was compelled to leave and was banned from ever serving in the US Navy.
    ‘Quite a story.’ Elmsley winked at me from across the table.
    ‘It’s the biggest secret – the biggest ever,’ said Joe Boyd, awed.
    ‘Not much of a secret,’ said Le Vol, ‘if all of us know it. Who found this out, anyway?’
    ‘Someone,’ said Elmsley, ‘who’s not fond of Trouble.’
    Trouble’s glory departed as swiftly as it had arrived. He had no peace. In corridors, fellows shouldered roughly past him. Towels flicked at him in the bathroom. One
day, several fellows held his head down a toilet bowl and pulled the chain. His smallness became a curse to him. He was tripped up, pushed into walls; the stairs, which he had taken so confidently
before, became places of danger where a mischievous hand, a malevolent foot, might seek him out. More than once he stumbled and fell. ‘Watch it, little boy!’ and ‘Get away from
me!’ came the wails of outrage as he cannoned into fellows further down.
    Cubicle number thirty was desecrated. First the silken quilt was hacked with knives, set alight, pissed on, then flung from a window. Obscene additions covered the colourful pictures.
Jubilantly, fellows flung Trouble’s phonograph records like discuses up and down the corridors, inundating the brown linoleum with a jagged sea of black.
    They smashed the phonograph too.
    In study hall and at dinner, Trouble sat alone. Of the acolytes, none remained. True, some had lingered – the Townsend twins had been the last to hold out – but the burden of
conformity was too much. To take Trouble’s part was to invite assault, derision, the vilest accusations. For a few days fellows shook their heads, wondering how Trouble had taken us all in;
then none spoke of the past any more. Trouble might never have enchanted any of us.
    The masters did not know what was going on. The world of the boys, like the secret lives of animals, unfolded beneath their awareness. If Mr Gregg thought again of the incident with the
blackboard, he must have seen it as an isolated outrage, not the first in an evil chain. In class, Trouble betrayed little, sitting in silent dignity. The stares, the whispered