"Oh, all right," grumbled Tim. "Anyway, I'm mighty glad. Every fellow on the team is as pleased as Punch. I guess the whole school is, too. It was mighty decent of Robey, wasn't it? Do you know, Don, Robey's got a lot of sense for a football coach?"
Don often wondered what had occurred and been said at the interview between Mr. Robey and Harry Walton. The coach had sworn Don to silence at the termination of their interview. "If Walton asks you whether you told me about the business you can say you did, if you like. Or tell him I wormed it out of you, which is just about what I did do. But don't say anything to anyone else about it; at all events, not as long as Walton's here. I'm going to find him now and have a talk with him. I don't think you need be at all afraid of anything he may do after I get through with him. You fellows clearly did wrong in outstaying leave that night, but you had a fairly good excuse and if you'd had enough sense to go to faculty the next morning and explain you'd have all got off with only a lecture, I guess. Your mistake was in not confessing. However, I don't consider it my place to say anything. It's an old story now, anyhow. Be at the gym at three with your togs, Gilbert, and do your best for us from now on. I'm glad to have you back again. What I said that afternoon you'd better forget. I'll show the school that I've changed my mind about you. I suppose I ought to make some sort of an apology, but——"
"Please don't say anything more about it, sir," begged Don.
"Well, I'll say this, Gilbert: You acted like a white man in taking your medicine and keeping the others out of trouble. You certainly deserve credit for that."
"I don't see it," replied the boy. "I don't see what else I could have done, Mr. Robey!"
The coach pondered a moment. Then he laughed. "I guess you're right, at that! Just the same, you did what was square, Gilbert. All right, then. Three o'clock." He held out his hand and Don put his in it, and the two gripped firmly.
Hurrying back to Main Hall, Don regretted only one thing, which was that he had in a way broken his agreement with Walton to say nothing about their bargain. Coach Robey, though, had pointed out that the agreement had been terminable by either party to it, and that in confessing to him Don had been within his rights. "Walton can now go ahead and take the matter to faculty, as he threatened to do," said the coach. "Only, when I get through talking to him I don't think he will care to!"
And apparently he hadn't, for no dire summons reached Don from the office that day or the next, nor did he ever hear more of the matter. Walton displayed a retiring disposition that was new and novel. On such infrequent occasions as Don ran across him Walton failed to see him. The day of the game the latter was in evidence with his father, mother and younger brother; Don saw him making the rounds of the buildings with them and he wondered in what manner Walton had accounted to his folks for his absence from the football team. Walton stayed on at school, very little in evidence, until Christmas vacation, but when the fellows reassembled after the recess he was not amongst them. Rumour had it that he had been taken ill and would not be back. Rumour was proved partly right, at all events, for Brimfield knew him no more.
The first and second teams held final practice on Thursday. The first only ran through signals for awhile, did some punting and catching and then disappeared, leaving the second to play two fifteen-minute periods with a team composed of their own second-string and the first team's third-string players. After that was over, the second winning without much effort, the audience, which had cheered and sung for the better part of an hour, marched back to the gymnasium and did it some more, and the second team, cheering most enthusiastically for themselves and the first and the school and, last but by no means least, for Mr. Boutelle, joyously disbanded for the season.