After this little talk with Brock, Larry played all the harder in the practice games—which was the way he was built. Back in the old life, which now seemed so far away, he had wiped engines in a locomotive roundhouse; and because it was a disagreeable, dirty job, he always did it just a little more than thoroughly. Here was another engine-wiping job, he told himself; and, since he had undertaken it, he would go through with it.
Matters and things ran along this way until the foot-ball season was well started. There were class games on the home field, in one of which the Freshmen, clinching their success in the bridge scrap, literally wiped the earth with the Sophomores in a score of 47 to nothing, and public acclaim—what there was of it—gave the credit, or a good share of it, to a certain red-headed, big-boned half-back, whom nothing seemed to be able to stop.
Meanwhile the ’Varsity was playing around the circle, and having hard luck. Not once, as yet, had there been occasion to call out the “snake dance” and “night-shirt parade” with which Sheddon victories were celebrated. Through all this, Larry seemed to be the only member of the student body who remained unmoved. Day after day he plugged along, religiously giving his afternoons when his team was called out; but that was all.
“Larry, you’re a fright—simply a fright!” Dick stormed, one evening when the news had come of another defeat for the “Blacksmiths.” “How you can go on, just as if nothing was happening, when——”
“Might say nothing is happening—to me,” put in the offish one grumpily.
“Of course it’s happening to you!” Dick yelped. “Aren’t you a part of Old Sheddon, I’d like to know? Haven’t you any heart at all?”
Larry jumped up and tramped across to the window which, in daylight, looked out upon Engineering Lab., and gave a cornerwise glimpse at the athletic field. When he turned back to face Dick his lip was shaking.
“It does get me, Dick! I’ve fought it—fought it just as hard as I could. I know the fellows don’t like me, and a lot of ’em are calling me a ‘worm.’ Just the same, it’s breaking my heart to see Sheddon losing this way! I——” and he turned to the window again, quickly, this time, as if to hide something that he was ashamed to let Dick see.
In a second Dick was beside him.