“Well, hanged if I’ll ever acknowledge that, even to myself! He is athletic, I know; but he is no wonder. I won’t believe he is a wonder!”
“That will not make him any less so, Defarge. He has a great amount of reserve force. By that I mean that he seldom calls into play the full amount of his will-power and strength. When he does so, the result is something astonishing.”
“Tell me when he has ever done it and accomplished anything astonishing.”
"Do you remember the football-game with Harvard? Of course you do! No Yale or Harvard man will ever forget that game. Well, you must remember that, on the very morning of the day of that game, Frank Merriwell was ill in bed. He had been delirious, and in his delirium he had fancied he was playing the game against Harvard. He kept giving signals and calling on the team to take the ball over the Harvard line, to block the Harvard rush, to hold Harvard or die. A fellow who was at his bedside a few minutes told me all about it. He writhed and strained, and sweat poured off him in streams.
“He was fighting that game there in bed, and the terrible exertion, according to what the doctors said, was enough to kill any man—that is, any ordinary man. The doctors thought the fever must turn against him on account of that. But it turned in his favor, and he grew better so fast that everybody was amazed. If he had not been an athlete with perfect development, marvelous strength, and almost perfect natural health, he must have been left weak and limp for a week or more after that fever turned—he could not have got onto the football-field for a month or more.”
“Go on,” laughed Defarge, with curling lip. “I rather enjoy hearing you crack up Merriwell.”
Packard frowned and looked displeased.
“I am not cracking up Merriwell; I am simply telling you the actual facts. On the morning of the day of that game Merriwell was in bed, kept there by the doctors, who fancied it might prove fatal for him to get up. But he would get up, and he did so. Then he called the men of the team to his room and talked to them there. As he talked, so those men say, his eyes began to shine, a healthy glow came into his face, he stood erect amid them, and when he grasped their hands as they were about to leave the room, his grip was strong and firm, as usual. In fact, it hardly seemed that anything ailed him at all. That was the reserve force of the man asserting itself. I have studied enough to understand the meaning of it. Every athlete has to a certain extent the same reserve force, though it may not be fully developed, or may be impaired by some organic weakness. In Merriwell it is at its full meridian.”
“By heavens!” cried Defarge, smiting the fist of one hand into the open palm of the other. “You are becoming an admirer of Frank Merriwell, Packard!”
“Nothing of the sort. I have been studying the fellow, to discover the secret of his marvelous power, and I believe I have discovered it. That’s all. He is a man worth studying, and I’m not going to let his personal friends be the only ones to do so.”