Country Day School came Saturday and put up a good fight, but was defeated by the score of 7 to 3. Ira witnessed that contest from the bench and found more interest in it than in the Mapleton battle because he wanted very much to have Parkinson win. He felt certain that a defeat would make much more difficult the already discouraging task ahead of captain and coach. Then, too, there was a personal side to it. He was, to a limited extent, a member of that brown-legged team, and, naturally enough, he preferred to be associated with success. But he just couldn’t get up any real excitement, even when, in the third period, Country Day scored that field-goal and took the lead, or when, ten minutes later, Parkinson, with Dannis back to yelp and drive, marched from the enemy’s forty-yard line to her nine and then tossed a forward-pass over to Ray White. Of course, now that he knew what it was all about—or some of it!—and realised how hard the brown team was working on that thirty-yard march, he found more interest, but, unlike some of the others around him, he was able to sit quietly on the bench without squirming, didn’t make funny noises in his throat when Wells fumbled a pass and, in brief, kept his heart beating away at its normal speed. But he was glad when it was over and Parkinson had won, and he said as much to Logan, a substitute end, with whom he walked back to the gymnasium.

“I’m glad we won it,” he said in a quietly satisfied tone. “Aren’t you?”

Logan turned and viewed him quizzically. “Are you really?” he asked. “Just like that, eh? Well, if I were you I’d try to restrain my enthusiasm, Rowland. Over-excitement is bad for the heart!”

“Over-exci—Oh, well, I guess I haven’t been here long enough to get very excited about it. I was just thinking that maybe the school would be pleased and be more—feel better disposed toward the team.”

“The school!” scoffed Logan. “Who cares what the school does? We play our own game.” With which somewhat cryptic remark he kicked open the door and hurried in to get undressed before the showers were all occupied.

The next Monday Ira was taken from the seclusion of the fourth squad and handed over to the none too tender mercies of a large, red-faced youth of nineteen named Neely. Dave Neely looked Ira up and down almost, as Ira felt, compassionately. “Oh, all right,” said Neely as though disclaiming further responsibility, “get in with that gang there and see what you can do. You can’t be worse than most of them, I suppose. What’s your name?”

“Rowland.”

“What makes you think you want to play guard, Rowland?”

“Nothing. I mean, I don’t want to play guard, especially.”

“You don’t!” growled Neely. “Then what are you doing here?”

“Coach Driscoll told me to report to you. He didn’t tell me what I was to do. But I’d just as lief be guard as anything.”

“Suffering cats!” groaned Neely. “And this is what happens to a peace-loving citizen like me! Have you ever played guard?”

“No.” Ira shook his head, smiling a little in sympathy with Neely’s outraged feelings. “I haven’t played anywhere. I’m just beginning.”

“Fine! I can see that you’re going to be a huge success. Well, all right.” Neely waved a hand weariedly. “Cut across to that gang and do what you see them do. Only for the love of Mike, try to do it better!”

The “gang” alluded to consisted of some ten or a dozen boys who were divided into two lines. They faced each other and, when one of their number stooped down and trickled a ball back between his wide-spread legs immediately crashed together and lunged and pushed and shoved and gave a good imitation of a small riot. Most of the linesmen were older than Ira, and several of them were larger. He couldn’t find a place to station himself and was still hesitating when Neely arrived, almost on his heels.

“Move up one, Buffum, and let this man in there. You’re a guard, Rowland. The other side has the ball. Now get through.”

The man nearly opposite Ira grunted and trickled the pigskin away. Ira was watching him intently and would have continued to watch had not the youth in front of him plunged into him and sent him reeling back. Dave Neely’s face became apoplectic. “Didn’t you see you were in the gentleman’s way, Rowland?” he demanded with heavy sarcasm. “Why didn’t you lie down and let him go over you?”

Ira regarded him doubtfully. “Should I have stopped him!” he asked.

A roar of laughter arose from the panting players and Neely’s countenance became even redder. “Should you have—Oh, no! Oh, dear, no! Not if it’s too much trouble, Rowland! This is just a little light exercise, you know. Nothing of consequence. We’re just whiling away an idle hour. Why, you—you—Look here, don’t you know anything about the duties of a linesman?”

“I’m afraid not, but if you’ll tell me——”

“Oh, I’ll tell you! Listen now. That brown oblate spheroid, or whatever the scientific name of it is, is a football. Those fellows in front of you are attacking. When you see that football snapped you want to get through and go after it. You have other duties, but that’s enough for now. Get through! Get through! Try it now.”

Away trickled the ball, the lines crashed together and—Ira was lying on the ground four yards behind the opposing line with the ball snuggled to his chest! Neely stared a moment. Then, seeing the grins on the faces of the others, he chuckled. “All right, Rowland,” he called. “Let him up. You needn’t bother to fall on the ball just now, but that is the way I want you to get through. That was all right. Now, then, Tooker, what happened to you?”

Tooker looked puzzled and shook his head vaguely. “I guess he caught me napping,” he replied.

“You guess he did! You know he did! Try it again.”

Ira didn’t get by the next time, for his opponent was prepared, but he gave Tooker all the work he could stand, and Neely grunted approval. They kept at it for some twenty minutes longer, one side playing on defence and then the other. Ira discovered things from watching the rest and Neely instructed between each charge. After that they had ten minutes with the machine, a wooden platform having a padded rail on one side and four small and absolutely inadequate iron wheels beneath. Having loaded the platform with half the squad, Neely set the rest at pushing it ahead with their shoulders set against the rail. It was punishing work for the chargers, only partly compensated for when it became their part to ride and watch the others push.

Work with the linesmen continued for a week without much variety. Always the afternoon started with tackling practice on the dummy and ended with a jog around the field. Ira made progress and Neely no longer viewed him with an air of patient fortitude. In fact, Neely was rather pleased with him and more than once said so. Almost anyone save Ira would have been all perked up by that commendation, and would have had hard work concealing the fact. But Ira only looked mildly gratified and said simply that he was “glad if he was any use, thanks!”

The Cumner High School game went to Parkinson, 18 to 7, and was quite an exciting event if only because of the numerous fumbles and misplays which were about evenly divided between the contending teams. Cumner was light and fast and Parkinson heavier and decidedly slower. A wet field aided the home team by handicapping Cumner’s speedy backfield. All three of Parkinson’s touchdowns resulted from steady line-plunging—diversified by fumbles of the wet ball—and Cumner scored by the overhead route, tossing a long forward-pass across the line in the third quarter. Cumner kicked her goal, while Cole, of Parkinson, missed each attempt. The brown team suffered several injuries that afternoon, for a slippery field invariably takes its toll of the players. Donovan, left guard, sprained his knee badly, French, a tackle, pulled a tendon in his leg and Cole, first-string right half, got a nasty bruise on his head. Cumner, too, sustained injuries, but none were serious.

Ira went back with Gene Goodloe to Williams that evening after a lecture in the auditorium and found Lyons and several football fellows present. He had entertained the notion that the afternoon’s victory was something to be mildly proud of, but after listening, in silence for the most part, to the conversation he saw that he had been far too optimistic. Parkinson had committed every sin in the football category. Everyone agreed on that. The line had been slow and had played too high, the backfield had lacked punch and the ends—well, the least said of the ends the better! Everyone was inclined to be very gloomy, and the injury to Donovan didn’t seem to cheer them up any! Ira went home at ten o’clock realising that football was not merely the pastime he had believed it to be, but something terribly earnest and important, a little more important, evidently, than mid-year examinations or—or a presidential election! He shook his head and sighed as he climbed the stairs at Maggy’s. It was beyond his comprehension, he concluded.

They put him in a line-up one afternoon the next week and he struggled for some ten or twelve minutes in a perfectly hopeless effort to outplay Brackett, of the first squad. Perhaps he shouldn’t have expected to get the best of a veteran like Brackett, but he was, at all events, rather disappointed when he was taken out and sent hobbling off to the showers. He hobbled because someone had ruthlessly stamped on his foot and he had a suspicion that one or two of his toes were crushed and broken beyond repair. Also, his head was still ringing from the hearty impact of someone’s shoe. He was relieved to find that, although red and swollen, the toes were apparently intact, while, as for his head, that responded to cold water and rest.

“Football,” said Ira to himself as he limped down the steps on his way to the town, “is a funny sort of game. You work like the dickens five days a week so you’ll be able to ‘play’ on the sixth. Only I don’t call it playing exactly, at that. Well, if I don’t get killed I suppose I’ll manage to get through the season. Unless, that is, they realise, as I do, that I’m no earthly use to them. I sort of hope they’ll let me go before I break something worse than a couple of toes!”

But it didn’t seem to be their plan to let him go, for two days later, when the first real cut came and the fourth squad ceased to exist, Ira was still kicking his heels on the bench during scrimmage. It seemed to him that Coach Driscoll had let many a better player depart in peace, and he wondered why he was retained. The second team had been made up for nearly a fortnight and Ira had been rather relieved at not being relegated to it. If, he argued, they put him on the second he might prove just good enough to be kept there for the balance of the season, while, if they kept him out for the first it was very likely that after awhile they would recognise his deficiencies and let him off. He was willing to stay there and do what they asked him to do just as long as he was wanted, but he always entertained the hope that some fine day Captain Lyons would gently and kindly inform him that they had decided to worry along without him.

He was given instruction in catching punts, something at which he failed to distinguish himself, and was glad to find that the course was merely a sort of “extra” and intended to qualify him for an emergency rather than to fit him to play in the backfield. Of course, if Driscoll had said: “You go in for Dannis, at quarter, Rowland,” he would have nodded and gone, just as he would have done had he been nonchalantly informed that he was to play right end or centre. But he did secretly hope that, failing to drop him, they would let him continue to play in a guard position. Without flattering himself, he felt that he could play guard fairly well if he wasn’t opposed to some wonder like Brackett or Donovan. Ira’s estimate of himself as a football player was modest those days, for, although he frequently received commendation, he concluded that folks were just being nice to him and “letting him down easy.” Once when Fred Lyons said warmly: “Rowland, you’re certainly shaping, old man, wonderfully!” Ira looked mildly gratified and said “Thank you” and secretly liked Fred better for being gracious to a “dub” like he.

After that first cut Ira could count on playing a few minutes every afternoon. Sometimes he was opposed to the first squad men and sometimes he was lined up with the first against the second team. When the latter event happened he usually gave a fairly good account of himself, always, in fact, when he played at left of centre, for then he was opposed to a rather light and seedy chap named Faulkner, and he could do about as he liked with Faulkner. If they played him at right guard—and they didn’t seem to care much which side of the line they put him—he had his work cut out, for Johns was a hard, fast fellow to stand up to. As the days went by Ira began, rather to his own surprise, to look forward to those more or less brief periods of play. After all, there was something exciting about a physical encounter like that, something very interesting in matching his wit and brawn against the wit and brawn of another. Such times as he gave a good account of himself, Ira went back to the gymnasium and, later, to his room, in quite a glow of satisfaction. The glow didn’t last long, however, and he always ended by laughing at himself for caring whether he or Johns had emerged victor in the struggle.

Parkinson met her first reverse when she went away and played Phillipsburg Academy. Phillipsburg had won from Kenwood by one score the week before and Parkinson was anxious to defeat her. Perhaps Fred Lyons was more anxious than anyone else, for it seemed to him that a victory over a team which had lately defeated Parkinson’s special rival would convince the school at large that the brown team was worthy of support. But it was not to be. With Donovan out of the game, the left side of the Parkinson line was unbelievably weak. Buffum did the best he could, doubtless, but Buffum was not a Donovan and never would be. Cole was not called on until the beginning of the third quarter, by which time Phillipsburg had a lead that Parkinson couldn’t wear down. Coach Driscoll thrust a veritable army of substitutes into the fray in the final ten minutes, but all to no purpose. Ira had his baptism by fire that chilly, blowy October afternoon, and did neither better nor worse than the player he succeeded. Phillipsburg already had the game on ice by a score of 19 to 9, and as she played entirely on the defensive during most of the final period, Ira had little chance to distinguish himself. He played through six minutes, most of which was spent by him, or so he thought afterwards, in running up and down the field. Phillipsburg punted every time she got the ball, with the one thought of keeping the adversary outside her twenty-five-yard line. Parkinson nearly forced another score on her in the last three minutes when a forward pass from Wirt went to a Phillipsburg player and he had almost a clear field ahead of him. Dannis, however, managed to pull him to earth just short of the ten-yard line and when the home team had exhausted two downs in a vain attempt to puncture the brown line, her try-at-goal went a few inches wide of the upright. In the end 19 to 9 was the result, and Parkinson went home with trailing banners.