“'Mebby,' says he, very amiable, 'mebby you do. And if you do, I've got a job for you.'
“He was so nice about it that he made me ashamed of my grouch...
“'No offence meant,' says I. 'I only weigh 230 pounds now. But when I'm getting the eats regular I soon muscles up to 250 stripped.'
“'I guess you'll do,' says he, 'judging by the fight you put up. We need strength and carelessness in the line.'
“'What line is that?' says I, suspicious.
“'From now on,' says he, 'you're right tackle on the Kingstown Football Team. I'm going to get you a job with a friend of mine that runs a livery stable, but your main duty will be playing football. Are you on?'
“'Lead me to the training table,”' says I. And he paid me loose and done it.
“This fellow was Jimmy Dolan, and he had once played an end on Yale, and couldn't forget it. He and a couple of others that had been off to colleges had started the Kingstown Team. One was an old Michigan star, and the other had been a half-back at Cornell. The rest of us wasn't college men at all, but as I remarked before, we were there with the punch.
“There was Tom Sharp, for instance. Tom was thought out and planned and preforedestinated for a centre rush by Nature long before mankind ever discovered football. Tom was about seventeen hands high, and his style of architecture was mostly round about. I've seen many taller men, but none more circumferous as to width and thickness. Tom's chest was the size and shape of a barrel of railroad spikes, but a good deal harder. You couldn't knock him off his feet, but if you could have, it wouldn't have done you any good, for he was just as high one way as he was another—and none of it idle fat. Tom was a blacksmith during his leisure hours, and every horse and mule for miles around knowed him and trembled at his name. He had never got hold of nothing yet that was solid enough to show him how strong he was.
“But the best player was a big teamster by the name of Jerry Coakley. Jerry was between six and eight feet high, and to the naked eye he was seemingly all bone. He weighed in at 260 pounds ad valorem, and he was the only long bony man like that I ever seen who could get himself together and start quick. Tom Sharp would roll down the field calm and thoughtful and philosophic, with the enemy clinging to him and dripping off of him and crumpling up under him, with no haste and no temper, like an absent-minded battleship coming up the bay; but this here Jerry Coakley was sudden and nefarious and red-headed like a train-wreck. And the more nefarious he was, the more he grinned and chuckled to himself. 'For two years that team had been making a reputation for itself, and all the pride and affection and patriotism in the town was centred on to it. I joined on early in the season, but already the talk was about the Thanksgiving game with Lincoln College. This Lincoln College was a right sizable school. Kingstown had licked it the year before, and there were many complaints of rough play on both sides. But this year Lincoln had a corking team. They had beat the state university, and early in the season they had played Chicago off her feet, and they were simply yearning to wipe out the last year's disgrace by devastating the Kingstown Athletic Association, which is what we called ourselves. And in the meantime both sides goes along feeding themselves on small-sized colleges and athletic associations, hearing more and more about each other, and getting hungrier and hungrier.