“Well, you should worry,” said Clem cheerfully. “If he comes around here again just you hand him over to me, old son. I’ve got a system with pan-handlers and book agents and their ilk. How’s that for a word? ‘Ilk’! I’ll say that’s cute!”
But Clem couldn’t get Jim to smile. “It wouldn’t do him any good to come to me again,” he said soberly. “I haven’t got any more money. I do wish, though, he’d gone like he said he would. That is, if he ain’t.”
“Probably he has,” replied Clem encouragingly. “I dare say I was just fooled by a resemblance, Jim. After all, there’s quite a bunch of fellows of his style around town since they started the new factory up.” Secretly, though, Clem was convinced that he had not been mistaken, and two days later that conviction was strengthened.
Presently, returning to the original subject of discourse, he said: “About coming into Janus, Jim. Suppose you just let it rest for a while. There’s no great rush in the matter, anyway. I’ll let your name go over the next meeting. That will give you time to think it over. The expense isn’t much anyway. I’d tell you exactly, only it’s against the rules to give out information of any sort. You take a couple of weeks and think it over. I want you to come in if you can possibly do it, old son, so don’t say no now.”
So Jim didn’t say no. He merely shook his head and, so to speak, laid the question on the table. After that, while Clem, propped against his pillow, read in bed, Jim took his football from the closet shelf, snuggled it lovingly in his lap and started all over again on the rules book. When Clem’s book dropped from his hand and he turned over and closed his eyes, his room-mate was still fondling the ball and frowning over the apparent intricacies of the following: “Players of the side which did not put the ball in play may use (1) their hands and arms to push opponents out of the way in order to get at the ball and (2) their bodies or their arms close to the body to obstruct opponents who are going down the field from getting at a player of their own side who is endeavoring to get at the ball.”
Jim rubbed a hand across his eyes and read it again. There were, he thought, too many “get ats.” Maybe, though, he was too sleepy to—yes, to “get at” the sense. He’d try it again to-morrow.
[CHAPTER XII]
AT THE POLICE STATION
If Wednesday’s practice had been stiff Thursday’s was adamantine. With the intention of providing better defense for the drop-kickers the first team was lined up near the goal and the substitutes were set against them. With Steve Whittier and Pep Kinsey alternating at kicking, all the rest of the first team had to do was keep the substitutes from breaking through or otherwise interfering with the kick. Myers was behind the subs and the manner in which he egged them on to atrocities of attack proved him, in the minds of the first team players, a man of singularly cruel disposition. Friendship ceased and no quarter was asked. Loring Cheswick at first, and then Benning, sped the ball to the kicker and simultaneously goaded by Myers’ commands to “Bust it up! Get through! Use your hands!” and “Fight ’em, Subs! Rip ’em up! Block that kick!” the substitutes hurled themselves ferociously forward and committed nearly everything except murder.