“I will—not! I love Guy like a brother, but——”
“Oh, you fellows make me weary!” sighed Nick. “No sporting blood at all! No——”
“Is that your idea of sporting?” jeered Ted. “Get on a hot, stuffy little one-horse train and dawdle down to Needham Junction, four miles away, in something like half an hour? I’ve made that trip once this fall and, Fortune aiding me, I shan’t make it again!”
“Come on to supper,” said Bert. “It’s almost a quarter of. It will be cooler over there on the steps than it is here, too.”
“Just when I was beginning to get comfortable,” mourned Nick. “Say, Ted, did you do this last year?”
“Sure! Do what?”
“Come up for early practice.”
“I did. And we had ten days of it last fall instead of only a week. You fellows needn’t kick!”
“I do kick, though, Teddy, old scout! Look here, you! I gave up a whole week of the best sort of fun at Deal Beach to come up here and frizzle and fry in my juices and chase a contemptible football over a sun-smitten cow-pasture! Needn’t kick, eh? Why, man, back there there’s a nice cool breeze off the ocean and a band playing moosics and piles of eats and—and nothing to do but play around! And just because I’m—I’m patriotic enough and unselfish enough to leave all that you lie there like a ton of bricks and tell me I needn’t kick! I do kick! I’m kicking!”