"That's no surprise, seeing that you and I have to hold our caps on in the breeze."
"Granted, Cayton. Still, I wouldn't leave all the donkey-work to Ennis and Lyon if I were captain. I'd fall back and help."
"If you were captain, yes. But Forge has different ideas. Let's give him credit for knowing more about football than a spectator can."
There was a sting in this comment, which Luke Harwood did not fail to observe. As editor of the Foxonian he was unapproachably the school's best pupil, and so obviously the Head's favourite boy that he was known throughout both houses as "Old Wykeham's Pet Fox". But as a footballer he was "only middling", and to-day the selection committee had quietly passed him over. The pill was a bitter one, and Roger's comment made it still harder to swallow, but all he did was to whistle softly and smile.
"I'd like to know the name of the artist who decked Fluffy Jim, the village idiot, in those stripes of coloured paper," continued Roger Cayton. "Club colours, of course, blue and white stripes. Still, football enthusiasm may be carried too far, and such tomfoolery makes me sick. What goats the St. Cuthbert's fellows will think us!"
"Pray don't take our little joke too seriously, Cayton," said Luke, with a pleasant laugh. "Where's the big league club that doesn't cart its mascot around with it on cup days? Fluffy Jim may bring us luck and some second-half goals."
"Oh, yes, to be sure," snapped Roger. "Particularly as St. Cuthbert's have come through to the final with a clean goal-sheet. They're the sort of chaps who would be scared out of their form by a guy in coloured paper, no doubt."
Harwood gave a resigned shrug of his shoulders.
"Funny, isn't it, how the best-laid schemes 'gang aft agley'?" he commented. "Some of us thought that the sight of a mascot in gala garb would serve to keep the footballing Foxes in good-humour throughout the game."
"It's cheap and nasty," said Roger Cayton, not without pluck, considering that Luke Harwood could have made a broken reed of him in physical combat. "Weakness of intellect is a sorry enough thing in itself. A coloured advertisement of it is worse."