[CHAPTER XXXVIII.]
MORE DISCOURAGEMENT.
It seemed as though everything was going wrong for Merriwell. As if the poor showing of the regular eleven, after weeks of practice, was not sufficiently discouraging, this loss of the thirty dollars had to happen by way of heaping up the measure.
While Frank was getting his shower and his rub-down, his thoughts were about equally divided between the ragged work of the players and the mysterious disappearance of the money.
So far as the football team was concerned, two weeks yet remained before the game with Gold Hill, and the young coach grimly resolved that at least ten days of the fourteen should see such driving practice as the squad had never known. He would change the line-up, pound the whole machine into form, and give Ophir a winning team in spite of fate!
Merry knew, from practical experience, just how much could be accomplished in two weeks—provided a fellow went at it hard enough. He would give the eleven a drilling which would make the time spent at Tinaja Wells look like a loafing bee.
Having made up his mind to this, the discouraging afternoon’s work on the grid lost much of its sting. What sting there was left, merely roweled the coach’s determination to give Ophir a winning eleven.
Merry was the son of the best all-round athlete and coach the country had ever known. That fact was universally admitted. The lad, his white skin glowing under the manipulations of the Mexican rubber, felt the old indomitable spirit tingling through his veins. He would show them, by Jove! He would prove that he was a chip off the old block! Down in that out-of-the-way corner of Arizona he would lick that pioneer team into shape—or he’d know the reason why.
Somehow or other, young Merriwell experienced a glow of satisfaction. There was a fascination in overcoming difficulties—in winning success in spite of them. Where’s the credit if a fellow romps to victory without any opposing hardships? It takes the hard knocks, the glowering possibilities of failure, to put us “on our toes” and make us buck the line of fate with a do-or-die determination to “get there.”
Merry had reached that point. Hovering disaster caused him to reach out and lay firm hold of the invincible spirit that every lad, if he is worth his salt, has always at the back of his nature. And this spirit is alive with electric force. Every fellow who falls back upon it feels a thrill in every nerve. This it was that brought Merry his glow of satisfaction.
Having conquered the disturbing features of the practice game, the lad’s thoughts turned to the loss of the money. There was not an avaricious hair in his head, and it was not the mere fact that he was minus thirty dollars that bothered him; it was the ugly suspicion that there might be a thief among some of those Ophir fellows. He hated to think it, and it was because of the fact that, even in thought, he did not want to do the Ophir club an injustice, that he had warned Clancy and Ballard to keep mum on the subject of the lost money.