This was the third reading for Peter but he could not resist the pleasure of standing in front of the board in the City Room and looking over it again slowly:
"Ferdinand Foch, field marshal, was outranked this afternoon by Malcolm Aldrich, captain. The Field Marshal was received enthusiastically by the 80,000 spectators but he found he could not hold the attention of the throng once the whistle had blown. He became then just a spectator at one of the greatest football games ever played between Yale and Princeton. Come to think of it he was rather less a part of the proceedings than the young men in the cheering section behind him. Foch did not have a blue feather, or a girl, or a bet on the game. The greatest military leader in the world was assigned today to the humble job of being just a neutral. He must have known that momentous things were happening when 40,000 roared defiance and another 40,000 roared back. Undoubtedly he was stirred when huge sections of the Bowl turned into fluttering banks of orange and black, or of blue, but probably there was much of it which he could not understand. It would be hard, for instance, to explain to a man who had been at Verdun the justice of penalizing anybody for holding, nor did the rival teams pay any respect to the slogan 'They shall not pass!' They did it all the time.
"The young American officer detailed to help the distinguished visitor did his best. 'You see, Marshal,' he would explain, 'it's this way. Yale has la balle on Princeton's 35-yard line and it's premier bas with dix yards to go.' Just at that point Aldrich or O'Hearn would tear through the Tigers for a run and the American officer grew so excited that he would lose the thread of his explanations. Foch never did catch up."
"It's just the way I would have written it myself," thought Peter.
Pat was grinning when he found him. "How did you like my parody?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Didn't you see yourself in that story about Foch. That business about 'They shall not pass' ought've tipped you off. I thought that was a regular Peter Neale touch."
"Oh," said Peter, "you were just fooling."
"But here's the best of it," added Pat. He held out a letter from Rufus Twice which read:
"Dear Pat, I want to congratulate you on the story you wrote about Foch at the football game. It was excellent. All the facts were there and you handled them with a fresh and original touch of your own. When I saw the Marshal at luncheon today he said he was very much amused by our story—Twice."