“Yes. The baseball men are worried to death, and there is a general air of suspense and dread over the place.”
Frank laughed. “I fear you are making it too strong, Starbright. Yale got along all right before I came, and I am sure she will continue to do so when I’m gone.”
“But you know what happened when you were away—you know how she slumped the year you were out of college.”
“The same thing might have happened had I been there.”
“Nobody believes it. All point to the fact that you straightened things out in a hurry when you came back.”
“That is giving me too much credit.”
“Nobody thinks so. Yale never in her history had such a football-team as she did last season. Not once was she defeated. Harvard had the best team she ever put onto the field, yet Yale beat her. I say Yale, but I mean Merriwell, for it is certain Harvard would have won that game had you not risen from a sickbed and appeared on the field at the critical moment in the last half. You won the game for us, Merriwell, by the most remarkable play ever seen on a football-field, jumping clean over the head of a tackler. What other man could have done that?”
Starbright was beginning to forget Inza, and life and animation were coming back to him.
“It was a very lucky trick,” said Merry, with no show of false modesty.
“Lucky! It was astounding, and the strange thing is that not a single newspaper report described it. All reports say you dodged Fulton, the Harvard tackler, when in truth you dodged him by jumping over him as he flung himself forward to grasp you about the body. I think that was a clean case of robbing you of the credit that was your due.”