[CHAPTER XIV]
JIMMY’S DAY
True to his word, Steve Gaston used Russell more gingerly on Tuesday, and Russell, who was still aching in many places, was grateful. Just the same, he was not entirely satisfied when, after a twenty-minute practice line-up between the two scrub squads, the second crossed the field to the first team gridiron and he made the discovery that it was Tierney who was to play right end. It takes more than a few pains to reconcile your enthusiastic football player to the bench—or, in this case, the sod. And yesterday’s short taste of the game had reawakened all of Russell’s old ardor. But he wasn’t to be quite neglected, for in the middle of the second twelve-minute period of battle Tierney was laid low, with every bit of breath eliminated from his body, and Gaston sent a quick call across the field for Russell. Back in the game, facing the redoubtable Captain Proctor or warily watching Crocker, at left end on the enemy team, Russell forgot his aches and entered lustily into the fray. Crocker proved a troublesome opponent that afternoon, for the first was trying out a “bunch forward” in which, when the play was made to the left, Crocker and Harmon and Browne participated, or sought to. Russell, aided by Reilly, had an anxious and breathless time of it. It is to their credit, though, that the “bunch” succeeded but twice and then on the other side of the field. First scored but once to-day, and only after a blocked kick on the scrub’s thirty-six yards, when Putney, the first team right tackle, grabbed up the bouncing pigskin and marvelously dashed through half the enemy forces and planted it behind the line. The second had two tries at goal from the field, and Kendall missed both. On the whole, however, the second was fairly well satisfied with the afternoon, and even Gaston looked as though he spied a glint of hope in the clouds of adversity.
That evening Russell’s thoughts turned wistfully toward a nice clean cot in the school infirmary, and every time he moved he groaned either in spirit or very audibly, depending on whether or not he was alone. Yet life held its cheering aspects, for Stick had jubilantly reported three sales during the afternoon, which, combined with Jimmy’s sale of the tennis racket, brought the day’s business up to the colossal sum of thirteen dollars and eighty-three cents, a sum hitherto never even approached. Jimmy came in after supper and the three talked the matter over in detail and with much enthusiasm. Stick forgot to be pessimistic and swung to the other extreme. His sales had been to high school fellows, and he had discovered that there were two hundred and twenty-two of them in this year’s enrollment and proceeded to prove, to his own satisfaction at least, that the high school students were due to enrich the firm of Emerson and Patterson to the tune of one dollar and eighty-seven cents, net, every day until the middle of next June.
“I guess,” said Russell when that fact had been thoroughly demonstrated by the very earnest Stick, “that that advertisement we put in the high school paper fetched those fellows. It might be a good plan to keep it running.”
But Stick didn’t see that. Advertising cost a heap of money, and now that the ball had been started rolling there wasn’t any sense in going on with it. “Those fellows will tell other fellows,” he asserted, “and that’s the best sort of advertising there is.”
“We are advertised by our loving friends,” quoted Jimmy.
Russell agreed to discontinue the high school advertisement, but he was firm for going on with the one in The Doubleay, and Stick dubiously agreed to that wasteful course. Jimmy described once more with great gusto the details concerning the sale of the tennis racket—they laughingly referred to it as “the” racket, since it had been the only one in stock—and predicted that much trade would accrue from Mount Millard School as a result of his brilliant acumen.