“I don’t know,” replied Dick. “I can guess, and that’s all.”
“The fellows say Curtis and Sands were at the bottom of it. It seems rather silly business for such big fellows, doesn’t it?”
Dick laughed. Two seasons of rubbing against the varieties of Seaton life had not shaken Poole’s respect for proprieties or affected his natural dignity.
“What a venerable person you are! Sometimes you seem the oldest of us all. How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m fifteen and a half,” replied Poole. “I wish I seemed old to Sands,” he added mournfully. “Perhaps he’d give me a little better show if I did. He always acts as if I were a child.”
“Never mind how he acts,” said Melvin. “Make him take you whether he wants to or not. Study your game, and hang on till the last gun is fired.”
“I can’t very well hang on after he’s kicked me off,” said Phil, with a melancholy smile.
“Has he done that?”
“Not yet; it may be coming, though, when practice begins after vacation. The Coach will be here then.”
The senior leaned back in his desk chair with hands clasped behind his head, and gazed long and vacantly out of the window at the bare limbs and solid gray-brown trunks that lined the distant street. “You’ll make it sometime, I’m sure, Phil, for I think you have it in you; and if you want it hard enough, you’ll put it through. The only question in my mind is whether it will come this year or later. You have to get a start, and the start often depends on luck. I got on the football team the first year through a lucky chance.”