The train crept cautiously in. Mr. Lindsay said good-by, and, jostled by other passengers eager for seats, climbed the steps of the platform. The circle of boys at his back cried good-by again and waved their hands. Behind them still others roguishly took up the shout, and violently swung their arms, until the whole platform seemed to be waving salutes and shouting adieus. And Mr. Lindsay, squeezed by the crowd and deafened by the shouts, dropped into a seat exhausted, thankful for the comparative quiet of the rumbling train. After all it seemed hardly as dangerous for a boy to play football as for his father to attend the game.
The happy throng left behind by the departing train waited, patient though by no means silent, for its own long line of cars.
“I say, Wolcott,” said Tompkins, sidling up for the fifth time with congratulations; “this isn’t much like our funeral here last June, is it? That was a terribly sour-looking bunch! There wasn’t a man in it who didn’t look like a yaller dog born with a tin can tied to his tail.”
Wolcott laughed, not at Tompkins, but from pure joy of heart. At the moment there flashed into his recollection the words Laughlin had uttered when the possibilities of football had first presented themselves to the new boy. “It’s a great thing to win a Hillbury game; it’s fine just to play in one, but to win,—win fairly and squarely, because you’re a better team and know more football,—why, it’s like winning a great battle.” He understood it now, understood it all; and his face sobered as he contrasted the joy of an accomplished victory with the uncertainty and discouragement of the heavy task which Phil was facing, as captain of the nine, with but a scanty nucleus of a beaten team to support him.
Some such thought must also have entered Tompkins’s ecstatic brain, for he turned toward Phil, who was staring in solemn vacancy out across the tracks, and dropped his hand affectionately on the ball player’s shoulder.
“It won’t happen again, will it, Philly? You’re going to give us a winning nine!”
“I’m going to try to,” replied Phil, quietly.
How he tried, and what came of the trying, will be told among other things, in the next volume of the series, “With Mask and Mit.”