Nettles

Two men who have been comrades and classmates at the Alma Mater of John
Harkless and Tom Meredith; two who have belonged to the same dub and
roomed in the same entry; who have pooled their clothes and money in a
common stock for either to draw on; who have shared the fortunes of
athletic war, triumphing together, sometimes with an intense triumphancy;
two men who were once boys getting hazed together, hazing in no unkindly
fashion in their turn, always helping each other to stuff brains the night
before an examination and to blow away the suffocating statistics like
foam the night after; singing, wrestling, dancing, laughing, succeeding
together, through the four kindest years of life; two such brave
companions, meeting in the after years, are touchingly tender and
caressive of each other, but the tenderness takes the shy, United States
form of insulting epithets, and the caresses are blows. If John Harkless
had been in health, uninjured and prosperous, Tom Meredith could no more
have thrown himself on his knees beside him and called him "old friend"
than he could have danced on the slack-wire.

One day they thought the patient sleeping; the nurse fanned him softly,
and Meredith had stolen in and was sitting by the cot. One of Harkless's
eyes had been freed of the bandage, and, when Tom came in, it was closed;
but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye had opened
and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it twinkled with a
comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old Tom Meredith who
was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat there very often
before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not without elegance, yet a
prosperous burgher for all that--was this the slim, rollicking broth of
a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one streak of flame as he spun
around the bases on a home run? Without doubt it was the stupendous fact,
wrought by the alchemy of seven years.