"Well, it isn’t true, and no one has a right to say so. He plays the game to win, as anybody should, and if it happens that he gets a few more chances than other fellows——"
"Why, it’s all luck. That’s what I’ve said before now, but I find any amount of fellows who rise up and howl at me and declare him a marvel. I confess that he’s fairly good. I wouldn’t try to rob him of any credit due him; but there are others, and it’s tiresome to hear the rabble howling for him continually."
"Good gracious!" said Smart. "How utterly lacking in envy and jealousy you are! It’s astonishing! Permit me to congratulate you! You deserve a reward of merit in this great, envious, selfish world. I’d like to give it to you—if I were big enough."
Jabez Lynch had been standing near, and now, with a sneer on his unprepossessing face, he observed:
"You’re wasting your breath, Darrell. They’ll continue to howl for Merriwell just the same."
Hal frowned at Jabez, turning his back on the fellow.
"I’m going to get into practise to-day, Captain Nunn," he said, "if I am permitted to do so."
"It’s too late," declared Steve, who had been nettled by the words of the other. "I wanted you out at first. Now the team is made up and you can’t get a chance."
"Who ever heard of such a thing?" demanded Hal warmly. "No college team is made up so a fellow can’t get a chance if he can play better than some other man and he proves it. Why should this team be made up to the exclusion of better outsiders? Why, when you say that, it’s the same as telling the scrub that no man on it has any show of making the eleven. That’s encouraging to the scrub! That will be likely to make the scrub turn out and be battered up in practise—I hardly think! Wait a minute, Captain Nunn. I’m pretty sure you don’t mean to say that there is no show for me to make the eleven now in case I show that I am superior in a certain position to some man now playing with the regular team, and in case there is no other candidate who is superior to me? You don’t mean that, do you?"
"Of course not," said Steve; "but——"