“When does the meeting come off?” asked Ray White.
“It isn’t decided. We thought we’d better wait until we’d won a game or two—if we do. I’m glad we’ve got Mapleton and Country Day to start with. They ought to be easy.”
“Another thing,” remarked White, “is that we’ve got a punk schedule this year. We’ve dropped two of our best opponents.”
“They dropped us, didn’t they?” asked Gene. “You mean Harper’s and Poly-Tech?”
“They didn’t exactly drop us,” said Lyons. “They wanted a guarantee bigger than we could promise. We simply had to let them go. Lowell wants to put down the season ticket price to two dollars so as to get more fellows to buy them, but I don’t believe taking off a half dollar would make much difference. What we’ve got to do some way or other is get the school warmed up again. Of course one way to do it is to turn out a winning team, but—well, sometimes I wish someone else had the job. I can play football, after a fashion, but this thing of financing the team and worrying about the money end of it is too much for me!”
“It’s hard luck, Fred,” said Gene sympathetically. “But just you stick it out, old horse.”
“Oh, I’m not going to quit. Don’t worry about that. I’ll still be playing football on the twenty-second of November if I’m playing it all alone. Only it does bother a fellow to have to wonder where the next batch of tickets is coming from and whether there’ll be enough money at the end of the year to pay off the coach. Driscoll, by the way, has been bully about the salary business. We’re supposed to pay him five hundred at the beginning of the season and five hundred at the end, you know, but he says we can let it all go until November. That’ll help some!”
“What gets me,” observed White, “is why Tod Driscoll wants to fuss with a job like this, anyway. He ought to get three thousand dollars any day. He’s good, Driscoll is!”