Jim Phillips flushed slightly with pleasure. Like all other real Yale men, he had the greatest possible respect and liking for the universal coach. Moreover, Merriwell had aided him since he had been in Yale in several affairs that had looked serious, and he thought much of his praise.
CHAPTER II
JEALOUSY AND ITS RESULT.
Naturally, the Yale student body as a whole didn’t have the inside information about the Harvard team that had been obtained by Bill Brady and Dick Merriwell. Most of the undergraduates thought that Harvard would be beaten easily, for the men who had seen Princeton, Cornell, and Michigan humbled by the blue, had little idea that Harvard could be a more formidable opponent than any of the other nines Yale had defeated. Many of them had read of the feat of Briggs in shutting out Amherst without a hit or a run, but had not taken it very seriously. Yale had not used either of her first-string pitchers against a small college, but had depended upon Winston, a substitute, and even so had won very easily. So it was felt that Briggs, fine as his record against the Amherst team had been, had still to prove that he was worthy to be classed with Jim Phillips, who was already hailed by the newspapers as the best college pitcher of the year, and one, who, should he choose to do it, could make a great deal of money by turning professional and playing with some big-league team.
Gurney, a sophomore, voiced the general sentiment as he sat on the famous sophomore fence on the evening of the extra practice which Jim had planned to foil Briggs.
“They can’t touch old Jim,” he said. “I’m going to bet every cent I can raise on the game. This Briggs is all right, but he’ll have to go get a real reputation before he can scare us. Eh, fellows?”
There was only one dissenting voice in the little group that heard the little sophomore’s boast.
“Remember the story of the pitcher that went too often to the well,” said Woeful Watson, known to all Yale as the class pessimist of the sophomores. Watson, no matter how gay the company in which he found himself, always seemed impelled to cast a blanket of gloom over the occasion. “We’ve been depending too much on Jim Phillips. He has to do all the work. It isn’t fair. He’s only human, and some day he’s going to run up against some one he can’t pitch rings around. The rest of the team ought to do more than it does to back him up.”
“Shucks, Woeful!” said Jack Tempest, the sprinter, one of Jim Phillips’ best friends. “Cheer up. The team’s good enough. It isn’t a very hard-hitting team, I’ll admit, but it doesn’t need to get more than one or two runs. If they do that, Jim can attend to the rest of it by himself.”
“All right,” said Watson gloomily. “You fellows have been playing in fool’s luck all spring. Wait until after this series with Harvard is over before you do any crowing, though. You know the darky’s receipt for cooking a rabbit—first catch your rabbit.”