“I don’t like it a bit,” said the other. “However—we want to win, and I don’t see any other way to do it. I’ll stick to the agreement. I guess your plan is the safest. I’ve got to have some sort of a receipt, of course, in case there’s any trouble. But that will be the simplest. It won’t attract any attention, and I don’t see how it could get out, anyhow.”
“No,” said Parker. “I don’t see how it can get out unless one of us splits—and I don’t suppose you’re going to do that, are you?”
“I should say not,” exclaimed the other, so fervently that Parker laughed, which made the man who had just handed him a letter start, as he noticed for the first time that Parker, owing to the drinks he had taken, was far from being himself.
CHAPTER IV
A FARCICAL GAME.
The game with the team from Boston was to be played in New Haven on Wednesday, leaving Jim Phillips two full days to rest and get ready for the test against Harvard on Saturday. That game would be played in Cambridge, however, and would involve a railroad journey of nearly four hours for the Yale team. A special car would be provided, and the team, starting early Friday evening from New Haven, would arrive in Boston in time to sleep comfortably in a great hotel, driving to the field on Saturday morning in a flock of taxis.
On the day of the game with the Boston Athletic Association nine, Bill Brady and Jim Phillips drove out together to the country club.
“Wasn’t that Carpenter I saw come downstairs with you?” Brady asked curiously.
“Yes,” said Jim, laughing. “He and Shesgren called on me last night. They’ve been pretty sore at us, Bill, for getting better marks than they’ve had, but they seem to have made up their minds to take it the right way at last. They were very cordial last night, and Carpenter said he had come in to see if I had been able to get up any good outside reading on that course in European history. I gave him the names of a few books he seemed never to have heard of, and he told me some things I’d only guessed at before. So it was an even trade. When we got through, we both knew more about it than we had before.
“I told him that was the way to go to work—that I didn’t care anything about marks, but wanted to learn the subject. He seemed to be surprised at that—guess he’d never thought of it that way before, but he said I seemed to keep on getting good marks, anyhow, and we all laughed. Then he came around this morning to talk about some things he’d forgotten last night, and stayed quite a while. He seemed mighty nervous about something.”