“Slacker? What rot! He’s as keen as anything.”
“Anyhow, his keenness isn’t enough to make him turn out for house-fielding. If you really want to know, that’s why you’ve got your first instead of him. You sweated away, and improved your fielding twenty per cent.; and I happened to be talking to Firby-Smith and found that young Mike had been shirking his, so out he went. A bad field’s bad enough, but a slack field wants skinning.”
“Smith oughtn’t to have told you.”
“Well, he did tell me. So you see how it is. There won’t be any changes from the team I’ve put up on the board.”
“Oh, all right,” said Bob. “I was afraid you mightn’t be able to do anything. So long.”
“Mind the step,” said Burgess.
At about the time when this conversation was in progress, Wyatt, crossing the cricket-field towards the school shop in search of something fizzy that might correct a burning thirst acquired at the nets, espied on the horizon a suit of cricket flannels surmounted by a huge, expansive grin. As the distance between them lessened, he discovered that inside the flannels was Neville-Smith’s body and behind the grin the rest of Neville-Smith’s face. Their visit to the nets not having coincided in point of time, as the Greek exercise books say, Wyatt had not seen his friend since the list of the team had been posted on the board, so he proceeded to congratulate him on his colours.
“Thanks,” said Neville-Smith, with a brilliant display of front teeth.
“Feeling good?”