Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/222

 fancy he was the last defender between the goal line and a rushing Yale back.…!

Not the faintest hint of any of this appeared on the surface. At home he preserved his normal appetite which was his mother's gauge for his health and spirits, and although he told them, not unwillingly, about the Flag Rush, he preserved the sacred secret of his summons from Andrews, as though it had been his first sentimental rendezvous. The next day dragged endlessly, filled with the paper-like silhouettes of talking professors. But three o'clock was finally there, and he was at the Gym., silent, his face composed, his heart given to sudden swelling bulges, which made it hard for him to hear what was being said.

They gave him a suit. He trotted with the squad, with the Squad over to South Field!

"Ever played?" asked the scrub quarter.

"Yes," said Neale. He did not feel obliged to tell how little. "What position?"

"Half-back," he lied brazenly, having made up his mind that he hadn't the weight to aspire to the Varsity line.

They ran through signals. Then a scrimmage started but Neale was not in the line-up. A scrub back had his wind knocked out and didn't get up quickly enough for the coach. "Put in that Freshman bean-pole. Jump in, what's your name?"

Neale jumped and floundered for five minutes, then the peppery scrub quarter consigned him profanely to the sidelines. For two days after that he moped without a job, although still in a suit, out in the field. Then he had another trial.

Gradually he made sure of his place as right-half on the scrub—not that he was any good, as they told him plainly: but because in those days the whole squad, including hopeless dubs, seldom numbered over thirty men, and thanks to the work in the mill at West Adams, Neale was physically fit.

With this place, minor though it was, came the great privilege of dinner, after practice, at the foot-ball house. There he picked up a little of the theory of the game from the