Bert laughed, not amusedly but with slight irritation. “You may mean well, Tommy,” he said, “but I rather wish you wouldn’t make crazy remarks like that, if you don’t mind. It makes me look rather an ass, you know.”
Tommy’s slightly protuberant eyes expressed perplexity. “How do you mean, ass?” he inquired. “How do you mean, crazy remarks? How do you mean—”
“I mean that fellows might think that I agreed with you, of course,” answered Bert, grinning in spite of himself. “I don’t want to look like a conceited fool, Tommy.”
“Mean you don’t agree with me? Mean you don’t know you’re a cracking good player? Pouf, you’re stringing me! Why, I sized you up a long time ago, Bert. ‘There,’ I said to myself, ‘is a lad that’s going to show ’em some football before very long!’ Yes, sir, I generally manage to pick the winners. I don’t play the game myself; I tried it once but I wasn’t built just according to specifications; but that doesn’t keep me from seeing what’s going on and what’s coming off. I sized you up for a clever running back the first time I saw you in action. That was last fall when you were on the Scrub Team, Bert. Why, I haven’t missed a practice session since I came here, hardly! Fellows say I’m fresh and shoot off my mouth.” Tommy shrugged, looked regretfully at the rumpled sack he still held and tossed it in the general direction of the rubbish barrel at the corner of Upton. “Maybe I do, but some one’s got to tell the truth! Take Johnny Cade now. He’s too easy. Say, know something? Well, if I was coach of this team, or any other team, for that matter, I’d see that fellows jumped when I spoke to ’em. Yes, sir, when I said ‘Hep!’ they’d hep! Johnny’s too—too soft. Oh, I know he can be rough if he wants to, but that isn’t the trick. Fellows are naturally lazy, Bert. You’ve got to prod ’em all the time if you’re going to get ’em to pull. Johnny doesn’t prod. He just says ‘Gee’ or ‘Haw’ and the whole crowd move about as fast as a yoke of oxes—oxen, I mean. That’s where I come in and do my little stunt, see? When I catch a fellow soldiering I get after him, you bet. They don’t like it, of course. Let ’em not!” Tommy smiled comfortably. “It’s for their own good. They offer to punch my nose and knock my block off and all that, but I notice they don’t do it. They know mighty well that when I say they’re rotten they are rotten!”
Bert paused on the steps of Upton and stared at Tommy with a new interest. Tommy, feeling unsuccessfully about his pockets for further provender, gazed complacently across the twilit campus. Yielding to an impulse, Bert asked: “Doing anything, Tommy?”
“No, I guess not. I did think of going to the movie, but it’s one of those vamp pictures, and they make me sick.”
“Come on up to the room then and tell me more about it,” invited the other.
“About what? Got anything good up there?”
“Great Scott, you’re not still hungry!”
Tommy grinned. “Pouf, I’m never really hungry, I guess, but I can generally eat.”