“Cease your idle chatter,” answered his room-mate with dignity. “I’m not thinking of myself. I’m thinking of Sandy Halden. Sandy is out of a job again. They let him go from the Track Team today. Billy Goode thinks the school can worry along through the year without him as a jumper or half-miler or shot-putter. Of course, Billy’s probably mistaken, but there it is.”
“Just what was Sandy? A shot-putter or one of the other things you mentioned?” Sid laid down his pencil and tipped back squeakingly in his chair. It was study hour in Number 27 Goss, but Blash wasn’t in a studious mood.
“George Keene says he was broad-jumping the last thing. He’d tried running, and maybe everything else for all I know, and had got Billy to let him try jumping. This afternoon, Keene says, Sandy managed a perfectly marvellous jump of eighteen feet or something and then claimed that Hollaway, who had the tape, didn’t measure it right. Claimed he’d done twenty-one even and pointed to his foot-prints—only they happened to be someone else’s—and was very nasty until Hollaway offered to beat him to a pulp and Billy gave him his time. So now Sandy is nursing a new grouch and looking for new worlds to conquer.” Blash yawned widely. “That’s why I want a new sport. You see, Sid, Sandy has tried everything now.”
“He might try canoeing and tip over,” suggested Sid.
“Don’t be heartless. Besides, he can probably swim!” Blash drummed his fingers on the edge of the table until Sid, who had returned to work, exclaimed protestingly. “Look here, what am I going to do about Dick Bates?” asked Blash, thrusting his hands into his pockets to make them behave.
Sid pushed his book away and sighed in resignation. “All right, hang you,” he said. “Go ahead and talk yourself out, and when you’re quite through I’ll finish this math. What about Dick?”
“Why,” laughed Blash, “I owe him something. You haven’t forgotten that hoax he worked on me in the movie house, have you?”
“Not by a long shot!” Sid grinned. “That was corking, Blash.”
“Hm. Well, yes, I acknowledge that it was. And being corking, it demands a corking come-back. But I can’t seem to see one. My powers of—of invention——”