“Not until I run across you! And then I know why blamed well!”
“Irritable, too! Dear, dear! Bob, why don’t you drop in at the doctor’s some day and just let him look you over? Of course there may be nothing serious, nothing that can’t be remedied if taken in time, but I’d feel a lot easier about you if you saw someone, honest I would!”
“You’ll feel easier if I hand you a wallop,” growled Bob. “Say, if you played guard half as hard as you work that silly tongue of yours you might amount to something!”
Martin spent a whole hour in the library one morning and emerged with a fine fund of information regarding the sleeping sickness and the ravages of the tse-tse fly, and after that he became doubly obnoxious to Bob. Martin may or may not have been correct in connecting the bite of the tse-tse with the sleeping sickness, but the way in which he drove the flies away from Bob’s vicinity proved that he meant to take no chances. Strangely, the object of his solicitous care resented this manifestation of it more than any other, and Martin had only to fix a piercing gaze on the tip of Bob’s nose and begin a cautious approach with uplifted hand to throw Bob into a paroxysm of lamentable anger. Martin, repulsed, would explain in hurt tones that never having seen the tse-tse fly he couldn’t be supposed to know it from the common or house-fly, and that he consequently was using only excusable caution. Naturally enough, Willard and Joe enjoyed the nonsense and egged Martin on, but when the latter began flooding Bob’s mail with patent medicine circulars and stories of miraculous cures clipped from the newspapers, Bob’s patience became exhausted and he vowed revenge.
“I’m going to get good and even with you, Mart,” he declared one afternoon when Martin had drawn his attention to an advertisement extolling the merits of a net to be worn over the head to the utter confusion of mosquitoes and flies. “When I get through with you, my humorous young friend, you won’t know there’s such a word as ‘fly’ in the English language. And you’ll be good and sick yourself, believe me!”
Martin, however, professed to believe the threat only the empty ravings of a mind affected by disease, and was quite interested by what he declared was an unusual manifestation of the malady. But Bob looked unusually grim and exhibited such unaccustomed patience that Martin confided to Willard later that he “guessed he had got old Bob’s goat at last.”
“You’d better watch out that he doesn’t get yours,” laughed Willard. “I believe he means to try it.”
“It’s the last stage before the final breakdown,” replied Martin gravely. “He won’t last much longer, I’m afraid!”
That pessimistic prophecy was made on Friday night, and the next afternoon Alton traveled to Warren and played Mt. Millard School. Some eighty or ninety fellows accompanied the team and were present at the Waterloo. Willard watched the game from the bench, dressed for play, and saw his chance of getting into it dwindle into nothingness as Mt. Millard piled up her score. It is the historian’s privilege to avoid such events as he may consider unworthy of inclusion in his narrative, and the present historian gladly avails himself of that privilege. Suffice it to say that Mt. Millard out-rushed, out-punted and out-generaled Alton and won a lopsided contest by a score of 19—0. Joe Myers summed it all up on the way home when he said briefly: “Funeral from the late residence. No flowers.”
Later that game was looked on as extremely good medicine, for it proved one or two things most conclusively; as, for instance, that a backfield wanting the services of a good plunging full-back was a far from complete institution, and that the forward line of a football team, like a chain, was as strong as its weakest unit, and no stronger. At full-back in that Mt. Millard game, Steve Browne had proved himself a failure. Nor had Linthicum, who had taken his place at the beginning of the third period, done any better. The following week saw the search for a likely successor to Browne take on new ardor. The substitute bench was combed carefully without satisfactory results and Greenwood was brought over from the second team and given a try-out. Greenwood did his level best to please, but that he failed was apparent from the fact that he was back on the second three days later. Of course Coach Cade tried the old game of switching, but Bob Newhall, Leroy, who played left tackle none too well, Lake and Mawson all fell down. Even Martin was considered and passed over, and on Thursday the full-back problem was no nearer a solution than at any time that fall.