“Dunn didn’t. He loafed round Louis’s room, telling stories, the first two hours, and spent the rest of the evening looking for a trot to Xenophon. He says it’s a waste of time trying to get along without one.”
“Flunked to-day, didn’t he?”
“Don’t know. He’s not in any of my classes.”
By favor of chance, Dunn did not flunk. He was called up in Latin on grammar questions which he happened to know. Hardie did not escape so easily. His lot fell upon a difficult passage which in his preparation he had not fully understood. Confused by the new surroundings and agitated by a nervous eagerness to do well, he floundered along like a pig in the mud, getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing but the amusement of a cruelly grinning class.
To escape unscathed without having prepared a lesson was, of course, a piece of good fortune which a boy could not expect to experience often. Before the week was out, Dunn had been pretty well gauged by his teachers, and one of the most conscientious had already begun in the simple old-fashioned way—which Dunn reviled as antiquated—to detain him after school to make up neglected work. But what he lost in prestige by classroom deficiencies—boys never charge such failures up against a good comrade—he made ample amends for by marked success on the football field, where he was generally regarded as the most promising addition to the available material which the new season had brought.
Here Dunn’s own lively tongue had prepared for him a favorable reception. While he did not actually declare himself a great player, his ready vocabulary of football terms, his anecdotes of games which he had seen or taken part in, the air of familiarity with styles of play which he showed—all marked him as a veteran. Besides this, he was an end, and the eleven lacked an end. With Harrison, the captain, at one extremity of the line and Dunn at the other, the two important wings of the fighting force would be well equipped. The idea pleased the school fancy and produced a strong prejudice in Dunn’s favor. The boys believed in him because they needed him, and it was more agreeable to believe than to doubt.
The first week’s work on the football field, as every one knows, is largely concerned with the individual elements of the game,—tackling, dropping on the ball, running down under punts, charging. Through these Dunn’s self-confidence and previous experience carried him with flying colors. He threw himself on the ball with admirable spirit; and the way in which he scampered down the field after punts, getting the direction of the kick by a single, quick, accurate glance over his shoulder, and fairly hugging the waiting receiver, was a joy to the beholder. In open work he was not quite so successful. He missed a few hard tackles, but he made some good ones, and the balance remained in his favor. Talbot was so malevolent as to remark that Dunn got the smaller fellows and let the big ones by, but Talbot was from aye a surly growler. The opinion which Dunn himself delivered in the dressing rooms after the first tackling practice found by far the wider acceptance.
“Nobody can tackle in the open in cold blood,” he averred. “A fellow might get his man every time in a game when he feels the excitement and forgets everything but the play, and yet miss every tackle when you put him out to show what he can do. There was a half-back we had in school who afterwards made the Dartmouth eleven; he couldn’t make one out of a dozen of those practice tackles. They’re dangerous, too. If I was a coach, I’d cut ’em out altogether.”
After the middle of the week there were short line-ups in which Dunn played left end. Behind him was all the superior weight and prestige of the first backs, and before him as opposing tackle only “Skinny” Fairbanks, who had barely made the third the year before. Dunn’s work here was of the lively, striking kind that sets partial spectators agog with delight. He shoved Fairbanks back for holes as if Fairbanks were a dummy. When the ball by way of variety was given to the second, he lay outside like a keen-eyed bird of prey and fell upon the fearful seconders with a sudden, calamitous swoop. Hardie stood on the side-lines the day before the first real game, and reproached himself for a feeling of envy. Apparently he and Dunn had started fair in school but a few days before, and now Dunn was leagues beyond him. He felt inclined to send word to the dilatory outfitter that he shouldn’t want any football clothes at all.
Then on the first Saturday came the game with the Suffolk school, which Newbury had just soundly beaten. It was a discouraging contest that took the fire out of the hearts of the players and set the school to jesting about the team. Westcott’s won in the last five minutes through a long run by Harrison, who got the ball on a fumble and carried it half the length of the field; but the record of six to nothing looked very small alongside of Newbury’s twenty-six to eight. The plan of the coach had been to push the attack generally through the left side of the line behind Eaton and Dunn; and when Suffolk had the ball to concentrate the secondary defence behind centre and right, leaving the strong wing to make its own resistance. The scheme did not work, and after much waste of time was abandoned. Holes did not develop where they were expected, and Suffolk pounded the left with great success. The fault was not easy to place. Dunn seemed so devoted to playing a safe outside that he rarely got into the path of the Suffolk runner; and the Suffolk right, it was generally conceded, had been greatly strengthened since the Newbury game. Two bad fumbles that lost Westcott the ball at critical moments were charged against Horr, the half-back.