Bert got back to light practice the next afternoon but not into the game with the scrubs. Siedhof and Zanetti were the halves that day, with Hugh substituting for Zanetti toward the end of the last period. If the truth must be told, Hugh did not cover himself with glory, for he fumbled once at a critical moment and lost his team a chance to score and never made a gain worth recording. But it was perhaps more due to stage fright than anything else, and Coach Bonner realized the fact and dealt out no criticism. Oddly enough, it was the released Hanser who performed the only spectacular feat of a slow and listless game when he squirmed through the left of the first team’s line, threw off Siedhof’s tackle and romped straight down the field for twenty-five or -six yards before Nick stopped him. That incident spelled the end of Kinley as regular left guard. Yetter succeeded him before the next play and held the position the balance of the season. Kinley had been a troublesome problem all the fall and with his retirement the left side of the line stiffened considerably. Mr. Crowley had his joke with Coach Bonner on the performances of the exchanged half-backs, but the latter only smiled and said “Wait.”
There was only signal work on Friday for the first-team members and most of the school attended the final class game over on the practice gridiron and saw lower middle triumph over upper middle by the score of 7 to 0.
Lawrence Textile School presented a strong team the next afternoon and started the proceedings by dropping a kick over Grafton’s goal six minutes after play began. Grafton put on her strongest line-up, Vail, whose injury had proved more stubborn than expected, being the only regular member absent. Bert showed the results of his idleness and was off his game. Hugh did not get in.
Grafton’s only score came in the second period when two forward passes took the ball from her forty yards to Textile’s eighteen and Zanetti gained around the left end and Keyes gathered enough to make it first down by a plunge on the Textile right guard. From the seven-yard line the ball went over in three plays, one a delayed pass to full-back, who got three yards through center, another a skin-tackle play by Bert that put the pigskin on the two yards, and the third a straight plunge by Keyes with the whole team behind him. Keyes kicked an easy goal.
But that was the only time Grafton was dangerous. In the last half it was all Textile, and the visitors secured a touchdown in each period and kicked a goal each time. The final score was 17 to 7.
The game proved one thing long suspected, which was that the Scarlet-and-Gray line was far from a perfect machine on defence. Time and again Textile opened holes wide enough to drive a wagon through. The power was there and the knowledge, but the fellows didn’t work together. It was the secondary defence alone that kept the opponent’s score down to anything like what it was. On the left, Yetter, while showing up superior to Kinley, was constantly fooled on plays inside his position. He worked at odds with his center and was, besides, slow at getting into plays. On his left, Franklin was another weak defender, although a brilliant tackle on offence. Pop Driver was steady and dependable, a trifle slow, perhaps, but a hard man to fool. He and Musgrave, at center, and Ted Trafford at his other shoulder, made that side of the line fairly impregnable, although Ted, like the other tackle, was a better offensive than defensive player. The ends had showed up satisfactorily, with the honors, if any, belonging to Roy Dresser. As to the back-field, it was hard to judge, since it was a patched-up affair, with Bert playing only a part of the game and Vail not getting in at all. Neither Siedhof nor Zanetti were better than average backs. Nick, at quarter, had played as he always did, hard and cleverly, handling punts in the back-field faultlessly, running back well and choosing his plays wisely. Keyes had gained as consistently as usual with the ball, had been a tower of strength on defence and had punted excellently. Leddy had proved himself a good substitute for Keyes. On the whole, there was no fault to be found with the material. Grafton possessed eleven good players and was well off for second-string men. The team simply hadn’t developed as it should have.
The Lawrence Textile School game was played just a fortnight before the date of the Mount Morris contest, and there were those a-plenty who declared that two weeks was all too short a time in which to bring the Grafton team to championship form. What Coach Bonner thought, no one knew, but on Monday it was evident that the first team was in for strenuous work and that if it was humanly possible to lick it into shape Mr. Bonner meant to do it. The second team was given the ball at the start of the scrimmage and told to put it over by line-plays. When she lost it, as she frequently did, it was promptly handed back to her. Both coaches were on the field and the playing was often stopped while they corrected and explained, scolded or commended. The second, driven to a sort of berserker rage, hammered every position in the opposing line desperately, Mr. Crowley barking and growling and urging them on.
Hugh got into it in the second ten-minute period and played through that and most of the third, until a blow on the head turned him so dizzy that Davy Richards, hovering about the scene like an anxious mother hen, called him out. He did good work on the defence, too, considering his lack of weight. He seemed gifted with the faculty of anticipating the play and getting into it almost before it reached the line, although it was really less a gift than it appeared. What Hugh did was to watch the ball, instead of the players, and more than once Nick’s shouted warning proved wrong and Hugh’s diagnosis correct. He was pretty roughly used, for the second was in no mood to deal gently with objects in its way, and frequently he fumed in secret at his lack of weight.
In the final period—the second had so far failed to cross the defender’s line—the second was given the ball four times in succession on the first team’s ten yards and urged to take it over. But it was not until they had been allowed an extra down, with the ball on the two yards, that Manson piled through between Musgrave and Yetter and scored the single tally. It was in that mix-up that Hugh got his knock-out and Vail went in to finish the game.
Monday’s practice was a fair example of every day’s proceedings until Thursday. On Thursday the lower middle team, champions of the school, trotted over and faced the first. They proved an easy prey, and the first had little difficulty in running up twenty-seven points while the lower middlers were earning a scant six by the air route. Coach Bonner tried out two new plays which the first had been learning, and was able to gain with each several times. The best for all-round purposes was a split play in which an end shifted to the other side of the line and played some two yards back. The backs arranged themselves in oblique tandem, the ball went to full-back, quarter and the back-field end swung around one wing, the two half-backs around the other and the full-back plunged straight ahead, usually finding his passage clear. It was rather a difficult play for the opponent to diagnose, for it had all the earmarks of a forward-pass to either side of the field. The lower middlers never did solve it, although that by no means guaranteed that it would succeed more than once against Mount Morris.
The other new play, although he didn’t know it, was designed to make use of Hugh’s running ability. It was a tackle-over shift, with the back-field in square formation and the ball going to right half—in this case Hugh—on a direct pass. The attack was faked at the long side, and right half, with left interfering, went around the short side, the runner turning in sharply when the way was clear. The same formation was used for a variation in which left half ran wide beyond the short side and took a forward pass from full-back. The variation proved less certain of success, however, and was abandoned after a few subsequent try-outs against the second. But the play in which Hugh figured was tried four times in that Thursday game and gained each time. Once Hugh got clean away and covered half the field before he met his Nemesis in the shape of the opposing quarter, who, in spite of Hugh’s attempt to elude him, stopped further progress with a neat and decisive tackle. Another time Hugh gained twelve yards before he was brought down from behind, again he almost got clear and reeled off the better part of twenty, and, on the last attempt, with the ball under the shadow of the enemy’s goal near the eighteen yards, he dodged his way through at least a half-dozen opponents and scored the first’s fourth touchdown.
All that sounds as though Hugh played most of the game himself, but it is needless to say that he didn’t or that his part was only a small part after all. He held his own well on defence and several times made short gains on the wings, but lack of weight told against him. One thing he did not do, however, was fumble. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of either Bert or Vail. Bert played three periods at left half and Vail one period at right, going out in favor of Hugh. Vail’s fumble was not costly, but Bert’s was, for he dropped the ball when tackled in the line and a lower middler fell on it and three minutes later the pigskin was floating over the cross-bar for lower middle’s first field goal. The whole truth is that Bert played poorly that day. His sins were not only of commission, like that fumble on the twenty-yard line, but of omission, as when, time after time, he was stopped short in his tracks before he had penetrated the enemy’s first line of defense. Siedhof, who replaced him, while not especially effective, at least gained occasionally through a not very strong line.
Bert was ill-tempered and depressed that evening, and when Hugh, feeling very happy over his showing, tried to cheer him up, Bert sneered at him. “You think you know a whole lot, don’t you?” he asked. “Think you’re a regular fellow now, I guess. You’ve got a whole lot to learn yet about playing half, let me tell you. When George Vail gets back you’ll last about ten seconds and then you’ll find yourself ‘chewing the blanket’ again.”
“I dare say,” responded Hugh good-naturedly. “Don’t know just why Mr. Bonner has been so decent to me, anyway. Of course, I know I can’t play like you and Vail, old chap. Never thought so for a minute.”
“You act so,” growled Bert. “Coming around and patting my head! I’ll be playing half when you’re shouting ‘Rah! Rah!’ on the stand.”
“Right-o! Sorry I spoke.”
“You kids,” continued Bert, “have a lucky day and make a couple of runs and then think you’re the whole shooting match! You make me tired!”
Hugh made no reply, and presently went off down the corridor to visit Cathcart, who was nowadays voicing regret that the other had gone over, apparently body and soul, to what Cathcart called “the muscle-worshippers.” But Cathcart was entertaining three professed “grinds,” and the conversation soon bored Hugh and he left. On the way over to Trow he wondered whether football was as Cathcart predicted, really lessening his interest in what that same youth would probably have termed, “more vital matters.” Certainly, a month ago the conversation he had listened to almost in silence would have engrossed him far more. He confided his doubts to Pop, whom he found quite alone for once, and Pop replied that he thought it didn’t much matter.
“Of course, a fellow gets his mind pretty well filled with football about this time of year. It’s natural, Duke. But I don’t see that it does him any harm. After the Mount Morris game he comes back to earth, sometimes with a bit of a thump, and has time to think of other things. Cathcart’s an awful high-brow, anyway. He will have brain fever some day or go to the funny-house. If I did all the worrying over the whichness of the what that he does I’d be food for the squirrels. Forget it.”
Being in an unusually confidential frame of mind this evening, Hugh told of Bert’s ill-temper, and Pop smiled. “You really mean,” he asked, “that you don’t know what’s troubling Bert?”
“No, I don’t, really. Should I?”
“Well, you would if you stopped to think a minute. Look here. George Vail’s not fit to play much yet, and won’t be, I guess, before next Saturday. Siedhof and Jack Zanetti aren’t first-team caliber yet, although Billy may be by next year. That leaves Bonner in a hole, doesn’t it? He knows that he’s got to make up his backs from Bert and George and, if you keep on coming, you. Well, Vail isn’t in shape yet, and Bert isn’t doing much either, and there you are.”
“Yes, but—where am I?”
“Why, Bonner is looking to start the Mount Morris game with two of you three fellows, don’t you savvy? Now the question is, which two? Bert and George? Bert and you? George and you? He can’t tell yet, and you can see that he’s doing a lot of thinking. Well, Bert sees that and he’s thinking too. Just at present you and he are about an even choice. Vail will probably come around all right and be sure of his position, but you and Bert will have to fight it out for the other place. That’s the way it looks to me, Duke. And that, I guess, is what’s worrying Bert. When the season began he was the only possibility for left half. Then he got up in the air about something, played like the dickens, got a busted rib because he was thinking of something else instead of playing the game, went off on his work—natural enough after a week or ten days’ lay-off—and now doesn’t seem able to come back. It’s got on his nerves, I suppose. And he’s taking it out on you. He has a punk temper, anyway. And then, too, you’ve suddenly sprung up as a rival. And Bert resents it. Hasn’t any right to, but I guess he does, because I know Bert pretty well.”
“I wish I’d never gone in for football,” sighed Hugh after a moment’s silence. “I never thought for a minute, you know, that—that anything like this would come up. What’s to be done?”
“Done? Nothing’s to be done. Don’t be a chump. Bert will get over his grouch tomorrow and then you and he will fight it out, just as lots of other fellows have, and the best man will win. Or, anyway, the one who promises to be the more useful a week from Saturday will win. It’s up to Bonner, you know.”
“But I thought that Bert was absolutely certain,” faltered Hugh.
Pop shrugged his big shoulders. “So he was until a while back. He started off finely. There isn’t a better half-back on a prep school team today than Bert Winslow when he’s playing right. But he hasn’t been playing right for nearly a month. Well, three weeks, anyway. What a fellow has done doesn’t count much. It’s what he’s doing and can do. Frankly, Duke, if you keep on getting a little better every day, as you’ve been doing, you’ll play against Mount Morris as sure as I’m a foot high; perhaps not all through, but half the game, anyway. You take my advice and quit worrying about things. Just put everything out of your mind but playing half and try like the dickens!”
“I don’t know that I want to do that, though, if I’m crowding Bert out and——”
“Piffle! If you don’t crowd him out Jack Zanetti will, or Billy Siedhof, unless he gets a move on and fights for his place. Nick and I were talking about it last night and Nick wanted me to give Bert a hint. But what’s the use? He knows it as well as I do. He’d only tell me to mind my own business. Quite right, too. So I’m going to.”
“Then you think I ought to keep on?”
“Of course. What else? We’re here to lick Mount Morris, aren’t we? If you can help, it’s up to you to do it. Be as sorry for Bert as you like, but don’t let it interfere with your game, Hugh. It’s up to him.”
The entrance of Roy Dresser put an end to the topic, and presently Hugh went back to Lothrop. Bert was not there, for which Hugh was glad. He got ready for bed, found a magazine to read and crawled in. But the magazine lay face-down on the spread, for the talk with Pop Driver had provided him with material for much perplexed meditation.