“Yes, please,” said Trevor, to his surprise. He had not expected to be taken literally.
Rand-Brown emptied them, but the bat was not there. Trevor turned to go.
“You’ve not looked inside the legs of the chairs yet,” said Rand-Brown. “They may be hollow. There’s no knowing.”
“It doesn’t matter, thanks,” said Trevor. “Sorry for troubling you. Don’t forget tomorrow afternoon.”
And he went, with the very unpleasant feeling that he had been badly scored off.
XVI
THE RIPTON MATCH
It was a curious thing in connection with the matches between Ripton and Wrykyn, that Ripton always seemed to be the bigger team. They always had a gigantic pack of forwards, who looked capable of shoving a hole through one of the pyramids. Possibly they looked bigger to the Wrykinians than they really were. Strangers always look big on the football field. When you have grown accustomed to a person’s appearance, he does not look nearly so large. Milton, for instance, never struck anybody at Wrykyn as being particularly big for a school forward, and yet today he was the heaviest man on the field by a quarter of a stone. But, taken in the mass, the Ripton pack were far heavier than their rivals. There was a legend current among the lower forms at Wrykyn that fellows were allowed to stop on at Ripton till they were twenty-five, simply to play football. This is scarcely likely to have been based on fact. Few lower form legends are.
Jevons, the Ripton captain, through having played opposite Trevor for three seasons—he was the Ripton left centre-three-quarter—had come to be quite an intimate of his. Trevor had gone down with Milton and Allardyce to meet the team at the station, and conduct them up to the school.
“How have you been getting on since Christmas?” asked Jevons.