“All right!” he cried. “There are your togs. Get into them.”
Jim, walled from gaze by a quickly formed ring of substitutes, changed quicker than ever he had in all his life. Out on the field the whistle blew and the two lines formed again. Finally Jim was ready and Johnny seized him by the arm and led him along the side-line.
“Wait till this play is over,” he said. “Then go in for Needham, and play low, Hazard. Get the jump on those fellows and break it up! Understand? Break it up! You can do it; any one with an ounce of ginger can. There you are! Scoot!”
And Jim scooted!
“Left tackle, sir!” he cried to the referee. That official nodded. Needham, panting and weak, yielded his headgear and walked off to receive his meed of cheering. Arnold thumped Jim on the back ecstatically.
“Oh, look who’s here!” he yelled shrilly. “Well, well, well! Now let’s stop ’em, Crofton!”
“Look out for the left half on a cross-buck,” whispered Sargent from between swollen lips. “And get low, Hazard. We’ve got to queer this, you know, we’ve got to do it!”
“All right,” answered Jim quietly, eyeing his antagonist shrewdly. “Here’s where we put ’em out of business.”
“Hello, son,” said the opposing tackle as the lines set again. “How’d they let you in? Watch out now, I’m coming through!”
But he didn’t. Jim beat him by a fraction of a second and had his shoulder against his stomach and was pushing him back before he knew what had happened. Sargent, having no longer to play two positions, braced wonderfully. In three plays Hawthorne discovered that the left of the opponent’s line was no longer a gateway. Learning that fact cost her the possession of the ball, for she missed her distance by a half-foot. Crofton hurled Gil at left guard and piled him through for four yards. Then came a mix-up in the signals in which Smith’s substitute hit Hawthorne’s line without the ball. Arnold kicked, but his leg was getting tired and Gould got the oval twenty yards down the field. On Crofton’s forty-yard mark Gould got off a short forward pass that took the team over two white lines. Then an end run netted nothing and again Gould kicked. Benson got under the ball, caught it, dropped it, tried to recover it and was bowled aside by a Hawthorne forward who snuggled the pigskin beneath him on Crofton’s twelve-yard line. Two plunges netted nothing and Gould fell back for a kick from the twenty-eight-yard line. Although half the Crofton team managed to break through and though Gil absolutely tipped the ball with his fingers, the oval flew fair and square across the bar and Hawthorne had tied the score!