Bert was in good spirits that evening. He had had a fine time in the game and told Hugh all about it while they sat on the steps of Lothrop after supper and waited until it was time to go over to the mass meeting. But when Hugh suggested that perhaps, because of the good showing he had made, Mr. Bonner might put him into the line-up instead of one Hobo Ordway, Bert shrugged.
“He won’t. I know Bonner pretty well. Anyway, I don’t care so much now. I had a bully time knocking around this afternoon and I’ll get a whack at Mount Morris if only for five minutes or so, I guess, and that’ll do. What time is it? We’ve got to sit on the stage tonight like a lot of wax figures. That’s what I always feel like when I’m on exhibition. Joe Leslie’s going to talk tonight. Have you heard him? Oh, yes, he jawed at Lit one time you were there, didn’t he? Well, he’s a dandy at it and no mistake. Joe always calls the turn, too. Last year he said we’d lose and we did. Year before he said neither team would score more than once, and, by Jove, he was right then, too. We played a nothing-to-nothing tie! Joe knows football from A to Izzard, and he would have been a peach of a player if he could have gone in for it.”
“What was the trouble?”
“Folks didn’t want him to. He—what?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Thought you did. Well, let’s go over.”
Sitting on the stage to be admired was a little uncomfortable, Hugh thought, even though he and Bert secured chairs in the third row and were not much in evidence from the floor. As on previous occasions of the kind, the Mandolin and Banjo Club did its best—and sometimes it sounded like its worst!—speeches were made, cheers were given and songs were sung. To the delight of everyone, the prophetic Joe Leslie, senior class president, predicted a Grafton victory, although he warned his hearers that the team would have to work for it and that its margin of points would be scanty. Joe could talk to the fellows in what Vail, who sat at Hugh’s other side, called “words of one syllabub,” and he was always a big success as a speaker. Tonight he had his audience with him from the first moment and before he was through had worked them up to such a stage of enthusiasm that they threatened to lift the roof off the building.
When the meeting was over the football players disappeared quickly, for tonight and tomorrow night they were supposed to be in bed by ten o’clock, and, lest they be disturbed, all noise in rooms or corridors after that hour was taboo. Hugh, who had been noticeably distrait all the evening save when Joe Leslie’s eloquence had absorbed him, piled promptly into bed, beating the clock by ten minutes. Bert was disposed toward conversation, but found scant encouragement from his chum, and at ten all lights were out in Number 29. Bert was just falling into a delicious state of drowsiness when a sound from the opposite bedroom brought him back to consciousness and he sat up suddenly. It seemed to him that Hugh had said “That’s it!” very loudly. However, as all was silent, he concluded that he had dreamed it, and so sank back again and went to sleep.
The next forenoon, clad in a yellow slicker, since it was drizzling, Hugh inconspicuously let himself out the service door on the basement floor of Lothrop, climbed two fences, cut across a corner of a meadow, and finally, a bit wet as to lower extremities, reached the village road and trudged off into the mist. He was back a half-hour later, in time for French, and, so far as he knew, his absence was passed unnoticed.
It drizzled all day, and toward evening grew colder. The gridiron, covered with a sprinkling of marsh hay, remained deserted. At four o’clock the team met in the gymnasium and had a half-hour’s drill on signals, and then again, at half-past eight, there was a blackboard talk. But the day went slowly to most of the fellows and the weather affected tight-strung nerves, and everyone from Coach Bonner down to the least important third-string substitute was heartily glad when bedtime came. The school held an impromptu celebration—if you can call it a celebration when the thing to be celebrated hasn’t occurred—on the campus and did a good deal of singing and cheering and shouting while it marched around the buildings. But the drizzle soon discouraged it and long before ten o’clock Grafton School was as quiet as the proverbial mouse. Hugh had a good deal of trouble getting to sleep that night. He could hear Bert’s hearty and regular snores from the opposite room and envied him. Probably, he reflected, Bert had a clear conscience, while his own—well, he didn’t quite know whether it was clear or not. He only knew that he had done something that morning which might or might not prove to have been for the best. Sometimes, he concluded, as he thumped his pillow into a new shape, life was most beastly complicated.