Page:The fighting scrub, (IA fightingscrub00barb).pdf/130

 *times it wasn't the one you had ordered, but it was better than none, and after you had read it you exchanged with some one else for the one you preferred. But on the Sunday morning following the Scrub's glorious victory over Freeburg High School, a victory he had talked over the evening before until his throat had become dry, Clif found only two papers left, one a Boston publication, and the other, boasting not even a colored supplement, a stingy thing from the state capital.

"I might have known I'd get left if I came down this late," mourned Clif. He had tarried upstairs to collect his laundry, and make out the list, a duty generally put off until later in the morning. He picked up the Boston paper tentatively, shook his head, and laid it down again just as its rightful owner appeared, viewing Clif with deep suspicion. There was plenty of time to go to the village if he could get permission, and he ascended the stairs again and sought Number 19. There Mr. McKnight, after politely offering Clif the use of his own New York Times, signed his name to a gray slip of paper and Clif started for the village.

It was quite warm this morning, much warmer than yesterday, and the sun turned the yellowing maples, and birches to pure gold. The elms along the drive were already littering the gravel with their rusty brown leaves. It was a lazy sort of a day, and Clif's steps, once he was in the fuller sunlight of Oak Street, grew slower and slower, until he was fairly dawdling along. He was still dawdling when he crossed Hubbard Street