“If you get into trouble and get fired you can’t make it, can you? You’re taking a risk that no football man ought to take, and taking it in spite of warning.”
The conspirators were moving. “Good-by, darling,” shouted Reeves. “Always do what Nursey says!” Wolcott muttered an angry something that he would have preferred no one should hear. Laughlin clung to his purpose.
“It’s for your own sake and my sake and the eleven that I ask it, Wolcott,” he pleaded. “Let them go without you.”
The sound of footsteps and voices died away down the street.
“Well, they’re gone!” said Wolcott, in sullen tones, after an interval of silence. “Now you’ve had your way, I hope you’re satisfied.”
“I am,” replied Laughlin, coolly, “and you’ll be to-morrow. Good night.”
Next morning rumor flew that Drown, the night watchman, had waked to find the front of his house unexpectedly decorated. Wolcott came home from church by a roundabout way to see what the conspirators of the night before had accomplished. Above the first-floor windows, across the whole front of the house, had been daubed in red paint the score of the games, and underneath an adjective of personal application to Drown himself.
Wolcott stared and grew suddenly pale. So this was the “fun” that he had been invited to share! But for Laughlin’s interference, he might have been involved in this contemptible act of vandalism. With eyes blazing and cheeks burning he strode away, indignant but humble, toward Laughlin’s room. His first lesson in football discipline was learned.
Two days later Marchmont and Reeves severed their connection with the school. Why these two were punished when Whitely and others escaped was not clearly explained. The strokes of school discipline are not always infallible, though it is safe to say of them as of the judgments of the criminal courts, that few innocent are punished, though many a guilty man goes free. It is possible that Mr. Drown identified one or two of the vandals; or that Mrs. Winter, when in the course of Monday morning’s cleaning, she at last discovered the patched closet ceiling and the trapdoor hidden under the oilcloth, also found fresh spots of paint on Marchmont’s clothes.
It was the only celebration of the year. The nine went to Hillbury, supported by a numerous though half-hearted company praying for a miracle. But the wicked Hillburyites fell on the hopeful Seaton pitcher as the Philistines on Samson shorn of his seven locks. When he put the ball over the plate they hit it; when he kept it out of their reach, they made runs on balls. The defeat was crushing.