Whatever his faults, the president of the new league possessed unquestionably the virtue of activity. While the Westcott boys, scattered up and down the coast from Long Island Sound to Bar Harbor, were amusing themselves in their own idle but wholesome fashion,—camping, cruising, racing boats, playing tennis matches, and exchanging visits,—Mr. John Smith was devoting his surplus energy to the cause. One tangible result of his labors formed the basis of much curious questioning when Westcott’s gathered at the end of September for the year’s work. A prize was to be offered to stimulate interest in the contests of the league. Though many of the Westcott graduates had been laid under contribution and might be supposed to know definitely the purpose for which their money had been expended, it was soon discovered that no one possessed information extending beyond the statements in the newspapers. These began with encomiums on Mr. John Smith for his enthusiastic and efficient services and the success with which he had “rallied about him his hosts of friends”; they ended with congratulations to the new league on having a man of Mr. Smith’s caliber and influence at its head. In between was sandwiched the meagre news that a cup was to be competed for by the schools on terms to be announced later.

But Westcott’s had no notion of waiting until later. The boys stirred up the contributing graduates, and the graduates addressed to Mr. Smith certain pointed inquiries which suggested to the astute leader that it would be wise to announce the conditions immediately, even at the risk of losing some advantage for his own school. He appeared, therefore, at Westcott’s, one day during the second week of the term, bearing a big box of tinted cardboard, and made a speech to the assembled school in which he set forth the conditions of the gift and the high hopes of the givers. Then, with great impressiveness and in the midst of quivering expectancy, he removed the cover of the box, undid a bag of canton flannel and held forth the glittering thing to the general admiration.

“To remain from year to year in the possession of the school which shall last have won it, and to be held permanently when three times won.”

To this announcement the school gave bountiful applause. The older boys, though harassed by grave doubts of their ability to fulfil the conditions, understood the privilege offered them and were grateful; while the knee-trousered, flattering themselves with the assurance that the splendid, two-handled vase, like a reward for good behavior, must ultimately be theirs, smote their hands together long and violently. Whereupon Mr. John Smith, who showed himself to be a sharp-featured, somewhat over-dressed young man, with no semblance of that personal diffidence with which great men are often handicapped, smiled blandly, restored the treasure to its double envelope, shook hands with Mr. Westcott, gave the school another benevolent and congratulatory smirk, and departed—bearing his cup with him.

At the recess period for the first and second, four fellows took places round the small table in the corner of the lunch room; a fifth seized a chair and pushed in among them as if he belonged there. Others bought themselves handfuls of munchable food at the other end of the room and hurried to get a position at the railing which separated the hot-lunchers from those who patronized the counter. The confusion of half a dozen talking at once obscured the opening of the discussion.

“The crew’s in it. That’s good for us,” declared Rolfe, getting the first hearing in the babel. “We’ll trust you to win that for us, Pete.”

Talbot, the captain of the crew, would probably have disputed this loud assumption if he had been given an opportunity to speak; but others were readier of tongue.

“And the track’s out!” cried Seamans. He held a sandwich untasted within three inches of his lips and stared over the railing into Rolfe’s face with an expression of disgust.

“Bad for you, Sim,” called out Jack Sumner. “You’ll have to go in for baseball.—Some soup, please.”

“Newbury lost all her track men last year, that’s why the track’s out.” Talbot had found his tongue.

“That’s not the reason,” proclaimed Sumner. “Mr. Westcott doesn’t believe in track work for schoolboys. He thinks it’s too much of a strain for young fellows like us. Your brother Bob has the same idea. He told me just the other day that it usually spoiled fellows for college running.”

“Smithy would have put it in all the same, if Newbury had any show for it.”

“I don’t quite understand about those conditions,” came from the lips of a boy at the railing, who was poising a buttered bread stick before a broad, big-featured face crowned with shaggy hair.

“You never understand anything, Fluffy,” cut in Wilmot. “A fellow who asks ‘why’ about the laws of falling bodies—”

He hesitated, giving Fluffy a chance to ejaculate, “You don’t know yourself—”

“And don’t care!” retorted Wilmot. “I know they fall, and there’s a rule about it.”

“I don’t mean falling bodies, I mean about the cup!” Fluffy got this out in the face of a storm that threatened to sweep him the whole length of the railing. No one wanted to hear a debate between Fluffy Dobbs and Wilmot on the laws of falling bodies.

“It’s clear enough,” said Sumner. “There are three sports that count, football, baseball, and crew. Whoever wins two of them gets the cup for a year. The school that gets it three times has it to keep.”

“Do you understand that, Fluffy?” called Wilmot. “Because if you don’t, we’ll get you a map and a guide-book.”

“But supposing each of the three schools wins at one sport?” proposed Fluffy, undisturbed by Wilmot’s jeers, to which he was evidently well accustomed.

“No score!” returned Sumner, quickly.

“Are they going to have special crew races with Newbury and Trowbridge?” asked Tracy.

“No, we all row in the Interscholastic.”

“Then the first thing for us to do is to win at football,” said Trask. “It’s up to you fellows to start the thing right.”

“Easy enough for you to say when you don’t play,” said a tall, wiry, light-haired boy who up to this time had been listening in silence. “Give us the material, and we’ll do it. We can’t make bricks without straw.” Harrison was captain of the eleven.

“Oh, yes, you can, only it’s harder. A really good captain could make a team out of ’most anything. Any fool captain can win with a bunch of stars.” Wilmot’s significant grin disarmed this seemingly insulting remark of all its sting. Everybody respected Eliot Harrison, and Wilmot enjoyed a liberty of his own.

“The lot we had out yesterday was more like a flock of goats than a bunch of stars,” growled Pete.

“A goat ought to be mighty good in the centre of the line,” said Wilmot, reflectively. “He could butt a hole right through the other side, and that’s about all guard and centre have to do. Now if you could only get a few good butting goats into the line—”

“Or teach your own goats to butt,” suggested Tracy.

Wilmot slammed the table. “That’s the best idea yet! Get a goat as assistant coach, a good old side-hill, can-eating, whiskered billy that’s practiced butting from his youth up. He’d show the line how to open holes!”

The audience warmed noisily to Wilmot’s proposition.

“He’d look fine on the side-lines, wouldn’t he?” This sarcastic comment came from sober-faced little Stanley Hale of the sixth, whose class, by the necessities of the school schedule, shared the recess hour of the older boys. The influence of the kindergarten and the fairy tale was still effective in Stanley’s mind. Ideas still translated themselves for his intelligence into pictures, and the picture of the goat stood out vividly before him.

“He could be a mascot, Stan,” said Sumner, turning to smile at Stanley.

“He’d be a great help in the cheering,” went on Wilmot. “The sixth could give him lessons. He’d cheer bass to their soprano.”

By this time there was a general and hilarious interest in the development of Wilmot’s suggestion which rendered impossible all serious discussion of the morning’s announcement. Foolish jesting became epidemic, and wit soon ran into silliness. Two boys showed no disposition to share in the levity. Harrison smiled but rarely, and then feebly and against his will; Talbot’s scowl grew deeper and blacker as Wilmot’s fancy spread from the centre, where it had originated, out into the ranks of the clumsy-wits who seized upon it with rough hands, tossed it to and fro, squeezed it dry of whatever freshness and cleverness it might have contained, and dropped it in ennui for some new catchword ten minutes later.

The bystanders drifted forth for a walk, the sixth ran into the yard and played goat tag, the pursuer being the goat.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that kind of thing, Steve,” began Harrison, when the coast was clear. “It hurts the team to make sport of it or any one on it.”

Wilmot opened his eyes. “I didn’t make sport of it. I just offered a suggestion. You don’t have to take it, if you don’t want to.”

“We’ve got to have the respect and support of the school if we are going to do anything,” went on Harrison, trying to be sensible and keep his temper. “All that talk about goats makes the team ridiculous.”

“It puts everything to the bad right at the beginning of the season,” broke in Talbot, roughly. “If you want to spoil all our chances, just keep it up. You don’t care, of course, as long as you get your fun out of it, but the rest of us have a little school spirit left and a little self-respect!”

“Who introduced the subject, anyway?” demanded Wilmot, triumphantly. “It was you that did it, and it was you that called the team goats. I just built on your suggestion.”

“I won’t argue it,” answered Pete, savagely. “You’d twist my words against me. But just try the goat business with the crew, and see what you’ll get. Harry may put up with it if he wants to. I wouldn’t!”

“Now you’re getting peevish.” Wilmot rose from the table, still keeping his smile of indifference, but by no means content at heart. “I don’t like you when you’re peevish!”

The bell rang; the boys came flocking in and crowded up the stairway. Harrison took Tracy’s arm as they leisurely followed the stream.

“Isn’t that new fellow at Adams’s coming out?”

“Who? Hardie?”

“Yes. He sat opposite us at luncheon to-day with the kids and didn’t peep.”

“He hasn’t said much to any one yet. He’ll be out to-day if he gets his clothes.”

“Do you think he’ll be good for anything?” pursued the captain, anxiously. “We need about six more good men.”

Tracy gave his chin a side tip that might have expressed doubt, or merely reserve of judgment. “I don’t know. He isn’t very heavy, but if you’d seen him chucking trunks around this morning, you’d think him fairly strong.”

“Trunks?”

“Yes, we piled a few in front of his door last night.”

“It’s a good thing to be strong, but a lot depends on spirit,” began Harrison. What further he may have intended to say, we shall never know, for the sight of Mr. Spaulding standing at the head of the stairs put a sudden gag upon his lips.