“ ‘Dickie, I want to shake hands with you. You didn’t quite put it over, but you gave ’em a good scare.’
“Well, Dickie broke down then and cried worse than any of us; but the Coach kept right on smilin’.
“ ‘Don’t let it bother you anymore,’ he said. ‘We’ll get ’em next year when we’re not all crippled up.’ Then he turned to the rest of the bunch. ‘Why don’t you get those dirty suits off?’ he said. ‘There’s no use sittin’ there like mourners at a funeral. The beans are spilled, but we gave ’em a mighty good fight. Everybody expected ’em to run all over us, and holdin’ ’em to three points is a credit to you, boys. We can’t help it if they’ve got a good kicker. Without him it would have been 0 to 0.’
“ ‘And if it hadn’t been for me,’ said poor Dickie, ‘we’d have licked ’em 7 to 3.’
“ ‘If it hadn’t been for you,’ said the Coach, ‘they’d have licked us 20 to 0. Hurry up now, boys; get those suits off and quit thinkin’ about it. You can do what you please tonight and tomorrow, and I’ll see you Monday.’ ”
“What do you know about that!” Harris exclaimed.
“It’s got me beat,” replied Dana. “Course, after he got through I didn’t feel like sayin’ what I thought. He went away and left us, and I haven’t seen him since. I stuck in there a while with the boys, but finally it got too painful. You could cut the silence with a knife. So I followed the Coach’s example and left.”
“Do you s’pose Dickie really knew he’d pulled a boner?”
“How could he help knowin’ it? The whole bunch lit into him before we ever left the field. And I could hear some of the crowd hollerin’ ‘Bonehead!’ at him while we were comin’ off. He knew it, all right.”
“If it was me,” said Harris, “I’d buy a cannon and blow out my brains.”
“How could you blow out your brains,” demanded Dana, “if you didn’t have any? If he’d had even half a brain he’d have known better than to pull what he pulled. There was absolutely no excuse on earth, and—”
The gym door opened and the Coach came in.
“Hello, Bert!” he said, and shook Harris’ hand. “How’s my trusty scout? And how did they look to you?”
“Mighty good, Coach!” was the reply. “They’ll give us all we can handle. It’s the best team I’ve looked at in two years.”
“Did you get anything on ’em?” asked the Coach.
“Sure! Enough to write a book. Some of their signals too.”
And Harris drew a notebook from his pocket and handed it to his chief.
“I’ll look it over after a while,” said the Coach. “I want to tell you two boys that we’ve got to go some this week to keep those fellas keyed up. I’m afraid that game Saturday has taken the heart out of ’em. If we’d won that one, Doane would be easy for us. And we could have won it just like that!”
“It was a rotten shame!” said Harris.
“It was a shame,” agreed the Coach. “I s’pose Dana’s told you all about it?”
“He told me enough,” Harris replied. “He told me you let Dickie off mighty easy.”
“I should think you did!” Dana put in. “If I’d been him I’d have been disappointed if you hadn’t knocked my block off.”
The Coach smiled.
“Just between us,” he said, “I felt like killin’ him. I b’lieve I would if I could have got hold of him right after he pulled it. Maybe you noticed that I was a little late gettin’ in here afterward. I didn’t come in till I was cooled off. I wanted to be sure to keep myself in hand when I saw him.”
“You certainly kept yourself in hand,” said Dana. “If you’re askin’ me, you were a whole lot too good to him. You’d have given your right eye to win that game, and he went and lost it for you. If he’d dropped a punt or missed a tackle I wouldn’t think anything about it. Anybody’s li’ble to do those things. But—”
“But he lost his head,” the Coach interrupted. “All he had to do was use common sense and we’d have trimmed ’em. He went out of his way to pull a boner and you fellas think he should have been called for it. You wonder why I didn’t cut loose on him. Well, I’m goin’ to tell you a little story and then maybe you’ll understand why Dickie got the glad hand instead of a lot of abuse.”
The Coach pocketed Harris’ notebook and sat down. His two assistants, who had risen at his entrance, resumed their seats on the rubbing table and were ready to listen.
If you fellas followed the dope you’ll remember Joe Draper. He was quarterback two years ago, my last year at Leighton. You must have read about his track work anyway. He ran the 100 and the 220 and the high hurdles, and was first in both dashes in the intercollegiate of 1911 and 1912. He tied the 220 record twice and could do the 100 in even time whenever he wanted to. Leighton finished second in the meet both those years, and if it hadn’t been for him they’d have dropped out of the bottom. He was their whole track team.
He was an Alpha Delt and the Alpha Delt’s were the real cheese at Leighton. He was as smart as a whip and there never was a bit of danger of the faculty keepin’ him out of athletics; in fact he was just about the best student in college and everybody was predictin’ a whale of a career for him. He was a boy a great deal like Dickie. He was popular with everybody, but he never ran round nights or cut up any, and it wasn’t a particle of trouble to keep him in shape.
His only dissipation was the
