Page:The fighting scrub, (IA fightingscrub00barb).pdf/108

 *ness just then was the lack of a good defense against forward-passes, and although the Scrub had yet to show any startling proficiency in passing, "Cocky" had provided two plays that might benefit his team. These plays, together with a third that didn't rely on tossing the ball into the teeth of an October gale for success, had been hastily and not too thoroughly taught that afternoon, and Sim Jackson's brain was still roiled by his attempt to add this fresh matter to all the other stored there. The Scrub Team to-day was on its toes from the start. Somehow it had become inbued with the notion that it was good! And when a team gets that idea in its head, and is willing to work like the dickens to prove that it is correct, why, that team is hard to stop.

To-day was no sort of day to slow up play for instruction, and so Mr. Otis swallowed many remarks that almost choked him and let the battle surge. And it surely surged. The very appearance of the Scrub players had been an affront, with their cocksure swaggering as they took the field, and now, with the war on, their behavior was preposterously insulting. The poor weaklings, culls from the First Team orchard, so to speak, acted as if they thought themselves real timber! It was well-nigh sickening to First Team sensibilities, and so the First Team set itself to inflict disciplinary punishment. For a while it seemed that the Scrub was due to emerge from the engagement with a chastened spirit, but that was only for a while, and a brief while at that. Having allowed the First