CHAPTER I
AN UNWELCOME PROPOSITION
“How they do yell! Where’s your patriotism, Phil, to be hanging round in this gloomy crowd when all your friends are howling their heads off outside? Don’t you know Yale won the game? Why aren’t you out there with the rest?”
Philip Poole looked up with a smile, but did not reply.
“He’s comforting the afflicted,” said Dick Melvin, who shared with Poole the ownership of the room. “You don’t want to gloat over us poor Harvardites, do you, Phil? Thank you much for your sympathy.”
“That isn’t the reason,” said the lad, after a pause, with the sober look in his big, wide-open eyes that made him seem serious even when his feelings inclined in the opposite direction. “I just don’t see any cause for such a racket. A Yale football victory over Harvard is too ordinary an occurrence to get wild over.”
The chorus of hoots and groans that greeted this explanation brought a smile of satisfaction to the boy’s face. He was the youngest of the company, only in his second year at Seaton; the others were mostly seniors. As Melvin’s room-mate, however, and in a measure still under the senior’s care, Poole was thrown as much with the older students as with his own classmates; and the intimacy thus developed had served both to sharpen his wits and to give him practice in self-defence.
Melvin himself had not been at Seaton much longer than Phil. He had entered at the beginning of the Middle year, an unknown boy, green, sanguine, eager to win a scholarship and so relieve his father of some of the expense of his schooling. Soon, however, fascinated by football and the glamour of the school athletic world, he had failed to subordinate his sport to the real objects of school life. How he made the school eleven and went down with it to defeat; how he lost his scholarship; how the care of young Phil, suddenly offered him by the lad’s uncle, sobered and steadied him and enabled him to stay in school; how he and John Curtis fought the long uphill fight to develop a strong team, and finally defeated the rival school,—all this has already been told in another book, and can only be referred to very briefly here. The great game which marked the climax of the struggle was still a recent event.
“You didn’t take it so calmly when Seaton won the victory two weeks ago, and your beloved Dick spent the afternoon kicking the ball over the Hillbury goal-posts,” said Varrell, a tall, quiet boy, with keen, restless eyes that followed the conversation from face to face.
“That’s different,” replied Poole. “I’m first for Seaton and afterwards for Yale. The college can wait until I get there—and that will be a long time yet,” he added ruefully, “if what I was told in the algebra class to-day holds true.”