Roger Hardie knew absolutely no one at Westcott’s when he moved into his room at Adams’s that fall. His father was engaged in the Argentine trade; and the day after Roger was safely established in school the whole family sailed for Buenos Aires to spend the winter there. He took his fate stoically, trying hard to persuade himself that he should soon feel at home, but he could not avoid the sense of isolation and exclusion which comes naturally to one of a very few new boys among a great many very intimate old ones; and he lacked entirely the aptitude for quick friendships. Boys are seldom temperate in their opinions of their own merits. Eliminate the over-confident who run to freshness and the under-confident who lack courage to assert themselves, and there remain but a small percentage who wisely follow the middle course. The over-modest in the end is likely to outstrip the over-bold, whose rash spirit is easily broken by unexpected and humiliating defeats. The average boy, however, takes very little thought for ultimate results. He lives vividly in the present, is captivated by boldness and dash and ready wit, ranks caution with timidity, and suspects steadiness to be mere feebleness in disguise.

Roger was naturally reticent; he was likewise inclined to regard himself as neither attractive nor clever. The first impression which he produced on his mates at Adams’s was that of mediocrity. They took him at his own valuation and disregarded him. The consciousness that he wasn’t considered worth while increased his reticence, and at the same time stirred his obstinacy. He certainly didn’t care for the boys if they didn’t care for him. He would go one way, and let them go another.

Hardie’s pique was enhanced by the apparently different reception accorded to another new Adamsite, Archibald Dunn. As a matter of fact, the principle followed by the boys in the treatment of the two cases was identical: each was accepted at the outset at his face value. While Hardie made no claim to ability, importance, or friends among the great, Dunn’s method was to assume everything, to throw himself frankly on the credulity and friendliness of his new companions. Of course he played football; he had been end on the Westport High School at the beginning of last season, but a shoulder bruise got in the practice had thrown him out of the regular games. He liked baseball better; he and a friend of his, who made the Yale Freshmen, used to be the battery of a corking little nine they got up at their summer place. His favorite sport was automobiling; in his first half-hour in Tracy’s room he told five astonishing stories of marvellous escapes from death or the police. He sailed, too,—used to take charge of his uncle’s forty-footer in cruises. Dunn’s manners were undeniably easy. In twenty-four hours he knew all the small boys at Adams’s by their nicknames, and treated the older ones as if they were intimates of years’ standing.

The Tracys, Ben and Louis, might smile a little incredulously at the broadest of Dunn’s claims, but he amused them, and, provisionally at least, they accepted him. “He’s good sport, anyway,” said Ben, on the second day of school, while describing the Adams household to Sumner. “He can talk more than any person I ever saw, and he likes himself to beat the band, but he seems to be a good fellow to have round.”

“What about Hardie?”

“Oh, he’s a zero, a good little boy that never speaks unless he’s spoken to. He sat up in his room all last evening, grinding at algebra and Latin. Just think of being so fierce about the first day’s lessons!”

“All the new ones do that,” opined Sumner; “they’re scared.”

“Dunn didn’t. He loafed round Louis’s room, telling stories, the first two hours, and spent the rest of the evening looking for a trot to Xenophon. He says it’s a waste of time trying to get along without one.”

“Flunked to-day, didn’t he?”

“Don’t know. He’s not in any of my classes.”

By favor of chance, Dunn did not flunk. He was called up in Latin on grammar questions which he happened to know. Hardie did not escape so easily. His lot fell upon a difficult passage which in his preparation he had not fully understood. Confused by the new surroundings and agitated by a nervous eagerness to do well, he floundered along like a pig in the mud, getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing but the amusement of a cruelly grinning class.

To escape unscathed without having prepared a lesson was, of course, a piece of good fortune which a boy could not expect to experience often. Before the week was out, Dunn had been pretty well gauged by his teachers, and one of the most conscientious had already begun in the simple old-fashioned way—which Dunn reviled as antiquated—to detain him after school to make up neglected work. But what he lost in prestige by classroom deficiencies—boys never charge such failures up against a good comrade—he made ample amends for by marked success on the football field, where he was generally regarded as the most promising addition to the available material which the new season had brought.

Here Dunn’s own lively tongue had prepared for him a favorable reception. While he did not actually declare himself a great player, his ready vocabulary of football terms, his anecdotes of games which he had seen or taken part in, the air of familiarity with styles of play which he showed—all marked him as a veteran. Besides this, he was an end, and the eleven lacked an end. With Harrison, the captain, at one extremity of the line and Dunn at the other, the two important wings of the fighting force would be well equipped. The idea pleased the school fancy and produced a strong prejudice in Dunn’s favor. The boys believed in him because they needed him, and it was more agreeable to believe than to doubt.

The first week’s work on the football field, as every one knows, is largely concerned with the individual elements of the game,—tackling, dropping on the ball, running down under punts, charging. Through these Dunn’s self-confidence and previous experience carried him with flying colors. He threw himself on the ball with admirable spirit; and the way in which he scampered down the field after punts, getting the direction of the kick by a single, quick, accurate glance over his shoulder, and fairly hugging the waiting receiver, was a joy to the beholder. In open work he was not quite so successful. He missed a few hard tackles, but he made some good ones, and the balance remained in his favor. Talbot was so malevolent as to remark that Dunn got the smaller fellows and let the big ones by, but Talbot was from aye a surly growler. The opinion which Dunn himself delivered in the dressing rooms after the first tackling practice found by far the wider acceptance.

“Nobody can tackle in the open in cold blood,” he averred. “A fellow might get his man every time in a game when he feels the excitement and forgets everything but the play, and yet miss every tackle when you put him out to show what he can do. There was a half-back we had in school who afterwards made the Dartmouth eleven; he couldn’t make one out of a dozen of those practice tackles. They’re dangerous, too. If I was a coach, I’d cut ’em out altogether.”

After the middle of the week there were short line-ups in which Dunn played left end. Behind him was all the superior weight and prestige of the first backs, and before him as opposing tackle only “Skinny” Fairbanks, who had barely made the third the year before. Dunn’s work here was of the lively, striking kind that sets partial spectators agog with delight. He shoved Fairbanks back for holes as if Fairbanks were a dummy. When the ball by way of variety was given to the second, he lay outside like a keen-eyed bird of prey and fell upon the fearful seconders with a sudden, calamitous swoop. Hardie stood on the side-lines the day before the first real game, and reproached himself for a feeling of envy. Apparently he and Dunn had started fair in school but a few days before, and now Dunn was leagues beyond him. He felt inclined to send word to the dilatory outfitter that he shouldn’t want any football clothes at all.

Then on the first Saturday came the game with the Suffolk school, which Newbury had just soundly beaten. It was a discouraging contest that took the fire out of the hearts of the players and set the school to jesting about the team. Westcott’s won in the last five minutes through a long run by Harrison, who got the ball on a fumble and carried it half the length of the field; but the record of six to nothing looked very small alongside of Newbury’s twenty-six to eight. The plan of the coach had been to push the attack generally through the left side of the line behind Eaton and Dunn; and when Suffolk had the ball to concentrate the secondary defence behind centre and right, leaving the strong wing to make its own resistance. The scheme did not work, and after much waste of time was abandoned. Holes did not develop where they were expected, and Suffolk pounded the left with great success. The fault was not easy to place. Dunn seemed so devoted to playing a safe outside that he rarely got into the path of the Suffolk runner; and the Suffolk right, it was generally conceded, had been greatly strengthened since the Newbury game. Two bad fumbles that lost Westcott the ball at critical moments were charged against Horr, the half-back.

“You could have saved us the ball both times if you’d only dropped quick enough!” Talbot remarked with undisguised frankness to Dunn, as the team walked moodily into the dressing rooms after the game.

“I couldn’t, really!” protested Dunn. “Once some one piled into me just as I was going to drop, and the other time I tried to pick it up because I had a clear field, and my foot slipped. It was the correct thing to do, wasn’t it, Harry?”

“I didn’t see,” answered the captain. “I thought you might have got Jefferson, though, on that crisscross.”

“The end blocked me off just as I was going to tackle. Eaton really ought to have taken him.”

“It’s your business not to be blocked off!” snapped Talbot.

“Shut up, Pete!” called the captain. “What’s the good of kicking now? None of us played well.”

“My playing was rotten, I know,” rejoined the pessimist, “but I don’t shirk the responsibility for it.”

“It takes time for a team to get shaken together,” said Dunn. “We’ll all do better when we’ve had more practice.”

Dunn’s remark showed a forgiving and conciliatory spirit that by all the rules of story-book morality should have extracted from a contrite Talbot an apology; but the surly half-back went his way unappeased.