“The schedule is as follows. Unless otherwise specified the game will be played here.

Dan would have been less—or more—than human had he not read the few lines relating to himself several times. In the end, but this was not until Tubby had wandered away in search of a new book to read, he cut that part of the article out and stowed it away in a corner of his pocketbook. And next day he bought an extra copy of the Scholiast, marked the place modestly and mailed the paper home.

The game with Greenburg was played with the thermometer well up toward seventy degrees and was a slow and stupid performance. Yardley put in twenty-six men before the game was over. Dan, who saw it from the side-line, believed ruefully that he was the only player who didn’t get in. A blocked kick gave Greenburg a safety in the first few minutes of play, but after that the high school was never dangerous. In one fifteen and one twelve-minute half Yardley managed to pile up twenty points. In each case Kapenhysen missed goal. The playing was very ragged and slow, and the warmth of the day was undoubtedly responsible for much of this. Greenburg, having repeated her last year’s feat and scored, went away as happy as larks, and the Yardley players trailed tiredly back to the gymnasium unable to think of anything to be proud of. Payson had little to say, but he looked unusually sober and seemed to be doing a good deal of thinking. One of the things he was thinking was this: If Greenburg had been clever at forward passing and a little shiftier all around what would the score have been? As it was the high school had tried the forward pass but once in each half. The first time she had recovered the ball almost without opposition only to lose it on a fumble the next instant. The second time the throw had been poor and the ball had struck the ground without being touched. Payson couldn’t deny the fact that the outlook for the game with Forest Hill School next Saturday was depressing. Forest Hill always gave Yardley a hard struggle and always knew a lot of football. This year she would probably come to Wissining with a whole pack of new tricks to try out. Of course defeat at the hands of Forest Hill would be a small matter enough, and something that had happened before, though not often. But Payson feared that a defeat coming now at the beginning of the season, and especially a defeat encompassed by this “new football” of which Yardley knew little, would prove a discouragement to his charges. He decided that before next Saturday the team should be drilled to some extent in a defense to meet the forward pass.

After supper that evening Payson settled himself in front of the table in his little sitting-room in the village and did some studying. At his elbow lay a thick scrap-book of newspaper and magazine clippings and a number of small memorandum books, while in front of him was a small blackboard, some thirty inches long and correspondingly wide, ruled with white painted lines into the likeness of a miniature football field. On it were placed twenty-two little disks of wood, eleven of them blue and eleven green, each lettered on top, “L.E.,” “L.G.,” “R.H.,” “Q.,” and so on, each representing a player. With these imaginary men on his imaginary gridiron Payson figured out most of his plays and solved his problems. To-night he arranged and rearranged his little blue and green disks over and over, traced queer lines on the blackboard with a piece of chalk and made copious notes on a sheet of paper. But when bedtime came he put aside his playthings with a dubious shake of his head and a dissatisfied frown.

There was light work on the field Monday afternoon, but in the trophy room that evening there was a blackboard lecture that filled every minute of the hour at the coach’s disposal. Two kinds of forward passes were illustrated on the blackboard, the “bunch” pass with three backs and one end going down and forming a group to receive the ball, and the “one man” pass in which the backfield fakes to one side and the ball is thrown to an end who has gone through unnoticed at the other side. Next Payson showed how poorly prepared a team would be to cope with either of these plays from ordinary defense formation. In ordinary formation Yardley played her quarter some thirty yards up the field, the rest of the backs reinforcing the line some three yards behind it.

“You can see that this formation,” explained Payson as he sketched it on the board, “won’t work against a forward pass. We’ve got to have a special formation for this play. Here’s one we will try out to-morrow. Left half and quarter split the field, back about thirty yards, as for a punt. Right half and full drop back fifteen yards at each end of the line. To-morrow the second eleven will try the forward pass and the first will see what they can do against it from this formation.”

During the rest of the week the second eleven was drilled in the forward pass and the first was coached in defense during a portion of each practice. By Friday the first team had learned the first principles, at least, of defense on this play, and Payson’s fears of a disastrous overthrow at the hands of Forest Hall had somewhat subsided. He was not yet ready to teach the forward pass to the first; it was to rely on ordinary football for another fortnight.

Forest Hill’s eleven proved to be light, fast and brainy. In the first ten minutes of play it simply swept Yardley off its feet and did about as it wanted to, scoring twice as the result of the new football which Payson so despised. In that first ten minutes Forest Hill tried the forward pass seven times and made it go every time but twice. One of her gains was over fifty yards and several netted from twenty to thirty. The new defense formation was all right, the weakness was with the Yardley players who allowed themselves to be fooled time and again. Forest Hill made her passes from almost every sort of formation and Yardley was kept guessing every instant. Never once did she recover the ball on the opponent’s passes, Forest Hill’s two failures resulting because the ball struck the ground without being touched. Forest Hill obligingly missed both goals, thus leaving the score at 10 to 0.

Loring, realizing that the only way to prevent another score in that half was to keep the ball out of Forest Hill’s hands, went to work with his backs and plugged away at small gains through the opponent’s line, using up all the time possible and finally, after taking the ball the length of the field, was held for downs on the opponent’s eight yards. Forest Hill kicked from behind her goal and Colton nabbed the ball on the enemy’s thirty-five yard line. But before the teams could line up again the whistle sounded. Yardley trotted off the field with sensations of vast relief, while Forest Hill got together on the side line and planned new atrocities to spring in the next half on an apparently helpless opponent. Up in the gymnasium Andy and Paddy, the latter trainer’s assistant and rubber, were busy with witch hazel, arnica and liniment, bandages and surgeon’s plaster. There were no serious injuries; just a strained wrist here, a twisted ankle there, contusions all about. Oliver Colton, stretched at full length on a bench, with Paddy Forbes, the rubber, hard at work on his left knee, spoke to Alf Loring who was seated behind him viewing approvingly a nice clean strip of adhesive plaster about his wrist.