Stover, whisking home in his automobile, turned the incident over in his mind, and decided that he would say nothing about it,—if the others didn’t,—at least until after the game. The fellows in the influential set at Westcott’s were terribly sensitive about points of honor, and it was hardly worth while to risk position by running counter to the general sentiment in a matter which really didn’t concern him at all. After they’d lost the game, they might think more highly of his advice.

Stover himself was firmly imbued with the notion that winning is the sole test, and reason for existence, of an athletic team. If a team couldn’t win, in his opinion it might as well disband; there was no sense in keeping it up. These views he held directly from his father, by example and precept. Stover, Senior, prided himself on “getting there” in business. Those who didn’t get there, who got only halfway there, or refused to sacrifice certain principles in order to get there, were in his eyes flabby failures. Protests represented but the inevitable wails of the defeated, criticism the expression of envy; the man who won could afford to laugh at both. Stover, Junior, accepting fully the idea that defeat was inherently disgraceful, applied it to his own life in his own way. He was ashamed to be on a losing team. Low marks in examinations put him sadly out of humor, for they classed him with the despised unsuccessful. For the same reason, notwithstanding a bold air of indifference, it irked him sorely that he was not popular.

Dunn likewise came to recognize that he had made a misstep. He said to Harrison next morning, “I guess you fellows were right about that Callahan matter; it wouldn’t have done much good, anyway.” Harrison, glad to perceive that Dunn understood the falseness of his position, answered pleasantly, and let the incident slip from his mind. He found enough material for anxiety in the problem of Talbot’s strained knee, the perfecting of Mac in the use of signals, and the elaboration of a new scheme for a forward pass from a fake kick.

Callahan’s offer cropped up again on Friday night, as Wilmot and Harrison sat in Pete’s bedroom, drawing out a long good night. The pair had brought in a rubber to work on the injured knee, distrusting Pete’s fiercely repeated assertion, “It’s all right and doesn’t need any rubbing.” Determined to see that their trouble was not taken in vain, they stayed on during the process, in the face of rudely inhospitable suggestions from Talbot that they go home and let him alone. They lingered still after the masseur had departed.

“Anything new about Jason’s friend, the coach?” asked Wilmot, making a try with his cap at the top of a brass candlestick which stood on the mantel. The cap fell short, and Talbot put his foot on it. Wilmot flung himself back in his chair.

“What coach?”

“The one that blew in at Adams’s the other day and offered to sell state secrets. Harrigan or Cullinan or Hooligan—I don’t remember his name.”

The look of disgust on Harrison’s face showed that he understood. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of him since.”

“I wonder if Jason wrote him,” mused Wilmot. “You ought to have given me the job, Harry. I’d have done it in slick style.”

Harrison shook his head. “It would be taking too much notice of him. Jason came up next day and acknowledged that it was all wrong. I don’t think he did anything more about it.”

“Jason doesn’t know right from wrong, anyway,” observed Wilmot.

“You could say that of some others I know,” interposed Talbot, with a significant emphasis. Wilmot, however, showed no curiosity to learn who these others might be.

“Why can’t you get the other fellows’ signals right in the game?” he proposed, suddenly alert. “Four-eleven-forty-four!—right half-back outside left tackle. Two-eleven-twenty-three-six-million-and-six!—right half-back crawls between centre’s legs. Deduction: right half-back is eleven. Keep this up through the game, and you’ll have the whole system. You win by mental superiority—solve cryptograms on the run. Sherlock Holmes applied to football!”

Talbot smiled with complacent contempt. “That shows how much you know about football. You’re in the class with the person who wrote a football story that I read once in a weekly paper. The two elevens played the game, and after it was over and the one team had beaten the other, it was discovered that some one on the winning team had broken training before the game. The winners, therefore, forfeited the game to the losers.”

“No, seriously,” insisted Wilmot, “why couldn’t it be done?”

“Because it takes all your attention to play your game,” said Pete. “You can’t be puzzling out conundrums when you’re watching with all your soul to see the ball move. I suppose you’d have us call time to rub a leg, and sit down with a pencil and figure the thing out.”

“No, not that, but I should think a few of the old hands like you and Harry and Jimmy Eaton, and quick wits like McDowell—”

“McDowell stands ’way back on the defence, you idiot!” interrupted Pete. “He can’t even hear the other team’s signals!”

“Like somebody else, then,” continued Wilmot, unabashed by the compliment. “I should think a few fellows might each get a hint, and then all together would have enough to amount to something. What do you say, Harry?”

“It’s possible, but not worth while,” answered Harrison. “You’d lose in trying to do it more than you could gain by anything you could find out. The best way is to play a hard, safe game and be ready for whatever happens along. Come on, I want to go to bed!”

The school turned out in force for the game. Though hidden within lay the expectation of defeat, the older boys were assured that the team had a chance, and gathered gladly, the gambler’s hope in their hearts. To the younger ones the spectacle was in itself all-attractive, to say nothing of the joy of sharing the new responsibility of supporting a team which belonged to them. If some, in ignorance of their privilege, needed persuasion, there was Mike McKay to furnish it, through the potent influence of himself and his crowd. Two urchins of the sixth, who had guilelessly announced their intention of seeing the Harvard-Dartmouth game instead, were threatened by Mike with excommunication; he would cut them off, from that time on, from all help on lessons from their classmates, unless they performed their duty. They were ready in their places. Papas and mammas were there, everybody’s sister and her girl friends; and swarms of recent graduates from across the Charles, vigorous aids to school cheer-leaders and stayers-up of faint hearts. An extended line of autos was stalled along the fence. Nor were the Newburyites behind in the demonstration. It was confidence (a stronger force than hope) that swelled their numbers and gave vigor to their voices.

But the proudest, most important, most conspicuous figure was that of President John Smith. Increased in height by a brown derby, swelled in girth by a fat fur coat,—he had meant that the day should be cool,—with an alderman and two newspaper reporters in his train and the officials of the game his employees, he paced to and fro within the side-lines and enjoyed his greatness and the greatness of the day. Only a badge was lacking to complete happiness. In the reporters he had two friends on whose helpful services he could count. Alderman Skillen was a political power in President John’s district, with a son on the Newbury team. If only young Skillen would distinguish himself; if only Westcott’s would put up a stiff but not victorious game; if only the reporters could give the right turn to their laudatory phrases, and the alderman be properly impressed with the power and the influence and the potential value of the mainspring of it all,—the day might well mark the beginning of a strong upward twist in the life curve of John Smith. The suspicion whispered into his ear that morning by the Newbury captain that the renegade coach might have betrayed the game to Westcott’s had not so much as ruffled the surface of his optimism.

The game began. Hexam, the Newbury half-back, drove the ball on the kick-off down into the hands of Mac,^[1] who clutched it tight, and with his jerky, darting see-saw, threaded his way up the field behind Talbot and Hardie and Eaton and any one else he could use as a cover, for thirty good yards. He went down buried deep, like a greased pig finally swamped by numbers. Then when the small Westcottites were chirping over the prospect of a quick advance to the goal line, Talbot, without trying a single rush, punted long and low, sending the ball out of bounds on the twenty-yard line.

The Newburyites now had their chance, with the length of the field before them, and hammered away with moderate success, now on this side, now on that, till Eaton broke through on a slow-starting end-play and nabbed the runner yards behind the line. Forced to kick or try a forward pass, Newbury chose the second alternative and lost the ball. Again Pete punted, to the disappointment of the eager Westcott spectators, and again Newbury started near her goal line on the slow pound-pound down the field.

A half-dozen short gains had been made, when, on a second down, Talbot pulled Roger aside. “Seven in third place means outside Eaton,” he panted. “Watch out!”

“Six, four, seven, twenty-two, forty-four!” sang out the Newbury quarter. Hardie crept in a double pace; Talbot, line half-back, advanced a step; and Eaton nerved himself for a spring. The ball moved; Eaton, moving with it, evaded his opponent and smashed into the interference behind the line. The bearer of the ball, seeing Talbot in the gap in front and Hardie swinging in upon him from outside, tossed the ball to a mate behind who let it slip through his hands. Roger threw himself at it as it fell. When the heap was split open, there lay the Westcott end at the bottom, curled round the ball like a rat around an egg.

Now, within striking distance of the Newbury goal line, Westcott’s abandoned the kicking game and took to aggressive, fast play. Sequence B carried them forward fifteen yards, a fortunate try at right end gave them five yards more, Eaton and Hardie twice opened a clean lane for Bradford through the sputtering Skillen. Even Bumpus succeeded in getting some kind of a lift from underneath on big Firman, and assisted to establish a first down. The unexpectedly fast and furious attack confused the Newbury resistance. Within the ten-yard line Mac gave himself a chance, and scurrying to the right the proper measure, squirmed over the last eight yards under Harrison’s protection and dived home past clutching hands and struggling bodies. Westcott’s had scored a certain five!

In the intermission Harrison contributed an outside-right-tackle signal which he had learned from the repetitious Newbury quarter, and Bumpus the number which usually preceded onslaughts on centre.

“Don’t try to find out anything more!” commanded Yards. “Put your whole soul into the play. You’ve got the game if you can only hold them.”

Back they trotted, with smirched faces and tired limbs, but eager and determined. Their schoolmates on the cheering benches howled joyfully at them as they passed, but a certain gentleman wearing a brown derby and fur overcoat, and accompanied by a short, rotund man, easily recognizable by his diamond shirt-stud, thick mustache, and fat, red-veined face, gave them but ungracious looks. These looks presaged words equally ungracious to be uttered after the game, but the players passed on, unaware that the eye of President John Smith rested on them in disapproval.

I wish I might relate all the feats of heroes performed during the second half of this game which seemed to Mike McKay the most wholly satisfying contest he had ever witnessed. The chapter, however, has already run its length, and more football is coming. The ball made many futile journeys to and fro. Thrice the Newbury captain forced his quarter to alter the signals because Westcott’s change showed that the coming move was understood. Twice a Newbury man got an on-side kick behind the Westcott secondary defence, only to go down in McDowell’s grasp. Once Mac risked a long forward pass in the middle of the field on a first down, and Harrison, getting it near the side-line, made a forty-yard run to a touch-down. Once Skillen hit Hardie a swinging blow with his fist as the Westcott end would interfere between him and the ball; and escaped the eye of the umpire. Once more he tried the same pretty trick and retired from the field in consequence. Time slipped away, and with it Newbury’s chance and Newbury’s courage. At the last blast of the referee’s whistle the score stood eleven to nothing in favor of Harrison’s team.