Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/252

 He looked around sharply at Neale, "If you could use your head like that, you'd be worth something to the team."

Neale stared at him, his young face candid with the astonishment of feeling a brand-new idea inserting itself into his mind. Maybe that was what was the matter with his game.

He reached up, as he would have said, to the upper story, and turned back to watch the game with new eyes, eyes sharpened by intelligence. He concentrated on the back-field defense and began for the first time to understand the inwardness of it. He couldn't attain Atkins' hawk-like vision of the play and what every man in the back field had done; but he made out a great deal more than he ever had before.

Next Monday at practice Atkins came and stood behind Neale (the bond-selling business never seemed to exist for Atkins during football season). To Neale, as he played on the scrub, Atkins poured out his accumulated tactical lore, the wisdom that choked and strangled him because he was no longer allowed to put it into action. Seizing on Neale, whom he did not know personally at all, he forced his way into Neale's attention and held it fiercely on the business of playing football intelligently.

"Have a look! Have a look! Secondary defense finds the play before it stirs out of its tracks! No, you shouldn't have tried a tackle that time," he yanked Neale to his feet, "they were too bunched. I made just that break in the Princeton game in '99 and I've never forgiven myself. If you'd spilled the interference, your end would have got the runner. Watch the ball! don't run in till you know where it is—and then go to it! Sometimes you can tell by the back's eyes, give themselves away by looking where they're going to go, but an old hand will cross you on purpose. The knees are safer, mostly they lean a little just before the ball goes back. Got to use old head! Bill Morley himself couldn't stop a play if he didn't know where it was. Ah! that's the stuff! That was just right—not too soon or too late—and see how easy it was!"

Day after day the Wall Street bond-broker wrestled with