Forward Pass: A Story of the "New Football"

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“No, sir.”

“I’ll see if I can find where it came from. Perhaps the man who sold it will recall the purchaser. I’ll do what I can, fellows. Meanwhile you had better see if you can’t find out something yourselves.”

Payson learned of the affair at noon and went at once to see the Doctor and Mr. Collins. He pleaded and argued, declared that to suspect Loring was utter nonsense and that under the circumstances to deprive him of playing in the Broadwood game was utterly unjust. But the Doctor was firm and Mr. Collins could only shrug his shoulders and protest his helplessness. Payson became bitter and threatened to throw up his work there and then. Mr. Collins reminded him that he couldn’t do that, since he was under contract, and Payson went to some trouble to explain just how little he cared about that contract. In fact he quite lost his temper, and as there was a good deal of it to lose, Mr. Collins spent an unpleasant half-hour. But in the end Payson had to retire defeated, having said a good many things he was afterward sorry for.

At seven o’clock there was an indignation meeting in the Assembly Hall which was attended by the whole school. Speeches were made and all sorts of resolutions offered. In the end it was decided to draw up an appeal to the Faculty. The drawback was that the Faculty did not hold its next meeting until Thursday evening and that meanwhile the Principal’s word was law. The meeting broke up with cheers for Loring and Dyer, which were called for, and groans for Doctor Hewitt, which were spontaneous. They heard the news at Broadwood the next day and Colton got a telephone message from the Broadwood captain in which the latter politely expressed his regrets. Colton thanked him and courteously declared that Yardley expected to win just the same. Then he hung up the receiver with a bang and strode off muttering unkind things about Broadwood, for no matter how many regrets they expressed Colton knew well enough that they were secretly mighty glad to have Loring off the Yardley team.

Those were hard times for Colton and for Payson. Discouragement threatened to disrupt the season’s work. Everyone was convinced that without Loring at quarter-back to lead the team, defeat was certain. Colton worked like a Trojan, trying to act as though the mishap was a matter of small moment and striving to bring back confidence to his team-mates. Payson worked hard, too, but he was grim and silent; he couldn’t pretend, or didn’t want to. King’s nose was put against the grindstone with a vengeance. He was drilled in signals, drilled in offense, drilled in defense and lectured between-whiles on generalship.

By Wednesday the first despair had worn off and the team was buckling down to work again. Three new plays were learned, among them Dan’s double forward pass. The latter went beautifully against the second and there seemed no reason why it should not work as well against Broadwood. Kapenhysen spent hours practicing goals from placement, the ends were drilled in catching passes and that last week was the busiest of the whole season. Luckily the weather had relented and day after day of ideal football conditions followed each other. A certain degree of cheerfulness returned to the team and its supporters. Without Loring it was idle to look for victory, but they could put up a good game, and if they succeeded in holding Broadwood down to a single score it would be a triumph.

Meanwhile Mr. Collins, assisted enthusiastically by Stevie, ran down all clues without results. Several of the hardware stores kept the brand of paint which had been used to decorate the front of Dudley and almost all of them had sold cans of blue pigment during the last fortnight. But no one could recall having sold to a purchaser who might have been a Yardley student. That appeared to exhaust the clues.

“There’s one thing I regret,” said Mr. Collins. “And that is that we allowed the finger prints on the door to be washed off. We might have been able to discover something through them.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Austin, “you’d have had to have dipped the fingers of half the school in blue paint, and even then you couldn’t have told for certain.”

“But we might have determined that neither Loring nor Dyer were the ones.”