“I can’t afford to let him alone,” protested Joe impatiently. “Why, gosh, if that fellow can play full-back the way he can talk it he’d be a wonder! Look here, Brand, you see what you can do. I talked my head off and it didn’t have any effect on the poor fish. You—you have a go at him, will you? And do it today. Honest, that fellow ought to show whether he’s any good or not. It’s his duty! Of course we can’t make him play, but you’d think he’d want to!”
“All right,” agreed Willard, “I’ll see what I can do, Joe, but I haven’t much hope. If your diplomacy failed, why, I’m not likely to succeed.”
Joe looked at Willard suspiciously. “Hang it, I was diplomatic,” he protested. “I was as sweet as sugar to him until he shut his mouth tight and said he wouldn’t do it.”
“If he had his mouth shut,” said Willard, “I don’t see how he could say anything, Joe. Maybe he hummed it, though?”
“Oh, go to the dickens!” growled the other.
There was an unusually hard and protracted practice game that afternoon, and Willard played at left half through fifteen strenuous minutes during which the second, given the ball over and over to test the first team’s defense, hammered and banged until she finally got across the line for a score. Willard, like most of the others, got some hard knocks and when he was released he felt very little ambition for the task that Joe had set him. But supper helped a lot, and at half-past seven he set out for McNatt’s room. Even when he knocked at the door of Number 49 he hadn’t decided what he was to say.
Not only McNatt was in this evening, but his roommate, Winfred Fuller. Fuller was a sophomore, a smallish, anemic-appearing youth who, or so Willard fancied, wore a harried, apprehensive look, as though life with McNatt’s toads and beetles and strange messes was gradually affecting his mind. Fuller sat, straightly uncompromising, on the edge of a chair and gazed at Willard with owlish fixity during the first ten minutes of the latter’s visit, and Willard was heartily glad when, muttering some excuse, the boy took himself off. McNatt was most hospitable and offered to cook a few choice mushrooms that he had picked that afternoon under someone’s stable if Willard fancied them. But Willard explained that, being on a diet, mushrooms were a forbidden luxury, and McNatt was not offended. After that the talk turned to the subject of football “situations” and McNatt was reminded that he had found the memorandum of which he had spoken on the occasion of Willard’s last visit, and stretched a hand toward the littered table. But unfortunately the paper had again disappeared, and although McNatt searched long and determinedly, making the confusion more confused, it refused to be discovered. Finally, giving up the quest, McNatt sat down again, stretching his long legs across the floor and thrusting a pair of large, very chapped hands into his pockets.
“Myers came to see me this morning,” he remarked placidly. “He’s captain of the football team this year. But you know him, of course. I forgot you were on the team, Harmon. Queer fellow, Myers: awfully obstinate and opinionated, don’t you think?”
“Well, he’s likely to have rather pronounced views on any subject that he’s very much interested in,” replied Willard cautiously. “Football for instance.”