“He’s got cold feet,” decided Tompkins, with the mild wonder of one to whom the game had never brought anything but exhilaration and delight. “They must be mighty good friends for Phelps to help him out like that!”
He sighed a little wistfully. Ranny was letting no chance slip these days to show his disapproval of the newest member of the troop. There were others, too, who followed his example and treated the tenderfoot with marked coldness. Even stout Harry Vedder, though occasionally forgetting himself in the heat of play, lacked the good-natured friendliness of that first day. To be sure, these were far from being a majority. They included practically only the members of Ranny Phelps’s own patrol; the others had apparently accepted Tompkins as one of the bunch and continued to treat him as such. But Dale’s was a friendly nature, and it troubled him a little, when he had time to think about it, to be the object of even a passive hostility.
These moments, however, were few and far between. What with football every afternoon, with lessons and occasional studying for the second-class tests, to say nothing of his paper-route and some extra delivery-work he had undertaken to add to his “suit” money, his days were pretty full. Besides, that doubt as to the entire efficiency of the team continued to worry him much more than any small personal trouble.
On Saturday they played Troop Six, and Dale sat among the substitutes on the side-lines. It was an admirable chance for sizing up the playing of the team as a whole, and before the end of the second quarter his freckled forehead was puckered with worried lines. He had no fear of their losing the game. Their opponents had notoriously the weakest team in the entire scout league, and already two goals had been scored against it. The tenderfoot was thinking of next Saturday, and wondering more and more what sort of a showing the fellows would make then.
Earlier in the season, Dale had watched Troop One throughout an entire game, and even then he had noted their clever team-work. As individuals, perhaps, they might not match up to his own organization. There was no one quite to equal the brilliant Ranny Phelps, the clever quick-witted Ward, or the dependable Wesley Becker at full. But the boy knew football well enough to realize that in the long run it isn’t the individual that counts. Freak plays, snatching at chance and the unexpected, may sometimes win a game, but as a rule they avail little against the spirit of cohesion when each fellow works shoulder to shoulder with his neighbor, supporting, backing up, subordinating himself and the thought of individual glory to the needs of the team. During the past week Dale had felt vaguely that it was just this quality Troop Five lacked. Now the certainty was vividly brought home, with all the advantages of a sharp perspective. The center, alone, seemed fairly strong and united, with Bob Gibson in the middle “Turk” Gardner at right guard, and Frank Sanson at left. But Sanson got no help at all from Wilks, who, in his turn, took everything from Ranny Phelps. Court Parker made an admirable quarter-back, and Ward and Becker played the game as it should be played. But Slater at right tackle and Torrance behind him made another pair who seemed to think more of each other and of their individual success than of the unity of the team. They were great chums, Dale reflected thoughtfully, and in Ranny Phelps’s patrol. He wondered if that had anything to do with it. He wondered, too, whether Sherman realized the situation.
“But of course he does!” he muttered an instant later. “Isn’t he always after them to get together, though sometimes it seems as if he might go for them a little harder? I–I hope they do–before it’s too late.”
But somehow he could not bring himself to be very confident. To pull together a team that has been playing “every man for himself” is one of the hardest things in the world. Defeat will often do it more thoroughly than anything, but, in their case, defeat would mean the loss of all they had been striving for. It would have been better had they been up against any other team to-day. Pushed hard and forced to fight for a slender victory, they might have realized something of their weakness. But the very ease with which goal after goal was scored brought self-confidence and cock-sureness instead of wisdom.
“I guess we’ll grab that little old pennant, all right,” Dale heard more than one declare in the dressing-room. “Why, those dubs actually scored a goal on Troop One!”
The boy wanted to remind them that this was at the very beginning of the season, and since then two of their best men had left Troop Six for boarding-school. But from a raw tenderfoot and inconsidered member of the scrub any such comment would savor of cheekiness, so he kept silent.
On Monday the practice started out in such a casual, perfunctory manner that Sherman suddenly stopped the play and lashed out, sparing nobody. He was white-hot, and not hesitating to mention names, he told them just what he thought of their smug complaisance, their careless, unfounded confidence.