Arnold shook his head. “Guess I oughtn’t to talk about it,” he muttered. “It’s not my business.”
“Right you are! Just remember that. If it’s not your business, don’t worry about it.”
“That’s easy enough to say,” Arnold grumbled. After a moment he said explosively, dropping a shoe to the floor in emphasis: “Why Mr. Lyle doesn’t jump in and fire a couple of those fellows is what gets me! If he hasn’t got the backbone to stand up against Tom he oughtn’t to be coach.”
“Oh, well, the season’s young yet,” answered Toby easily. “Maybe Mr. Lyle is sort of ‘watchful waiting.’ I’m thinking of going to sleep. When you get through holding your foot in your hand and making faces you might put out the light. It works quite easily. You just turn the thingumbob there. Don’t blow it out, please, because——”
“Because it might stop your chatter! All right. Good-night.”
The rumored changes in the First Team line-up didn’t materialize, however; at least not during the following week. Arnold reported that things were going better and gave credit to Mr. Lyle, who, it seemed, had delivered a few well-chosen words on Monday, before practice. “He’s really got some of the loafers at work,” said Arnold. “Even Stone is showing a little animation!”
“Stone being one of the ‘dead-ones’?”
“Well, he hasn’t looked very much alive until this week,” answered Arnold. “I dare say we’ll get our gait by Saturday. They say Brown and Young’s is a tough bunch of scrappers. I hope they are. We need to go up against something that has a wallop!”
“You did that very thing yesterday,” said Toby.
“You’re not far off, at that,” agreed the other. “Your team put up a mighty pretty scrap. If you’d been half as good on defense as you were on attack——”