“I must get him to have it cut,” replied Gerald soberly. Then after a moment, he exclaimed triumphantly: “I know what it is!”
“What what is?” asked Dan.
“It’s his mouth, Dan. Ever notice it? It’s always on the point of laughing and it never does it. I want to see him laugh!”
“You’re a queer duffer,” Dan answered with amusement as they entered Oxford. “I believe Curtis, or whatever his name is, has hypnotized you!”
[CHAPTER IX]
NEW ACQUAINTANCES
Probation didn’t weigh as heavily on Kendall as he had thought it was going to. It was hard at first to reconcile himself to giving up the football career he had dreamed of for two years, or, rather, since he meant to try again as soon as he might, to postponing it. But after a week or so the first sting of disappointment passed. At least, he was not barred from watching practice, even if he couldn’t take part in it. As for the Saturday afternoon games, he missed none of them. And when, on the thirteenth of October, St. John’s Academy played Yardley to no score game Kendall was as bitterly disgruntled as anyone. The plain truth of the matter was that Yardley should have won that contest by two scores. That she didn’t was due to two things: Wallace Hammel’s inability to kick a field goal from the twenty-five yard line and Simms’s headless generalship when, in the third period, Yardley had the ball on St. John’s twelve yards on a first down. Dan was not playing. If he had been Simms’s signal for a forward pass would have been countermanded. The quarter-back got the throw off in good style, but Norton, who was to have taken it, ran too far across the field and the ball went into the eager arms of a St. John’s player who romped half the length of the field with it before Simms, striving heroically to avert the consequences of his error of judgment, brought him down from behind. After that Holmes was sent in at quarter with instructions to pound at the opponent’s line for a touchdown. But St. John’s managed to stave off defeat until the final whistle came to her rescue, and went home proud and elated.
Yes, even Kendall, who had had scant opportunity to study the strategy of the game, saw where the trouble lay and groaned impotently more than once as Yardley’s chances of victory were thrown away. What especially surprised him was Hammel’s failure to kick that goal. The pass from Fogg, who played center, was perfect, the dark blue line held like a wall and he had all the time in the world. And yet the ball missed the left upright by a good six feet. Why, Kendall was almost certain that he could have done better than that himself, although he had never tried to drop-kick a goal! He wondered on the way up the hill if anyone would object if he brought his football down there some morning between recitations and tried a few goals. He didn’t believe they would. He made up his mind to do it.
And so on Monday morning, after mathematics, he hurried to his room, got his old stained and frayed pigskin and went down to the gridiron. There was not a soul in sight at that time of day. It had rained in the night and the ground was soft and slippery. Kendall started at the fifteen yards and missed the crossbar by five feet or so. At twenty yards he got over once and missed twice. It wasn’t as easy as it had looked. At twenty-five yards, however, he had less difficulty. Ten tries netted him six goals, which wasn’t so bad considering that Kendall hadn’t kicked a football for a month or more.