“That’s the right old stuff!” he exulted; “Gee-gosh! but you make me glad all around the block!”
“Hold up,” Larry amended; “I don’t want any more credit than belongs to me. I’m going in because I guess I owe it to Old Sheddon. But I’m not kidding myself any, whatever. If I get in and play a good game, the bleachers’ll give me the glad hand. But off the field I’ll still be Larry Donovan, mechanic, and the son of a mechanic.”
“Confound your picture!” said Dick, half laughing and half provoked, “you ought to have a licking, and if I were big enough I’d give you one! Why, you poor fish, don’t you know that your good, sane, ‘workingman’ ancestry is the thing you ought to be most thankful for? It is the foundation upon which the real America is built!”
Larry grunted and looked up suspiciously.
“Where’d you get all that flowery stuff?” he demanded.
“I read it in a book,” Dick confessed brazenly. “Just the same, it’s so.”
The next afternoon Larry reported to Brock, the head coach, at the gymnasium, offering himself for the try-outs.
“What have you done?” snapped the square-faced, broad-shouldered man-picker who was filling the Sheddon teams.
“Little High School baseball and foot-ball.”
“What place in foot-ball?”