"Oh, is it?" growled Bartlett Cloud. "I'd just like to have you opposite me in a good stiff game for about five minutes. I'd show you something about the 'kid's game!'"
"Well, I don't say you couldn't knock me down a few times and walk over me, but who wants to play such games--except a lot of bullies like yourself?"
"Plenty of fellows, apparently," answered the third member of the group, Wallace Clausen, hastening to avert the threatening quarrel. "Just look around you. I've never seen more fellows turn out at the beginning of the season than are here to-day. There must be sixty here."
"More like a hundred," grunted "Bart" Cloud, not yet won over to good temper. "Every little freshman thinks he can buy a pair of moleskins and be a football man. Look at that fellow over yonder, the one with the baggy trousers and straw hat. The idea of that fellow coming down here just out of the hayfield and having the cheek to report for football practice! What do you suppose he would do if some one threw a ball at him?"
"Catch it in his hat," suggested Wallace Clausen.
"He does look a bit--er--rural," said Outfield West, eying the youth in question. "I fear he doesn't know a bulger from a baffy," he added sorrowfully.
"What's more to the subject," said Wallace Clausen, "is that he probably doesn't know a touch-down from a referee. There's where the fun will come in."
"Well, I'm no judge of football, thank goodness!" answered West, "but from the length of that chap I'll bet he's a bully kicker."
"Nonsense. That's what a fellow always thinks who doesn't know anything about the game. It takes something more than long legs to make a good punter."
"Perhaps; but there's one thing sure, Bart: that hayseed will be a better player than you at the end of two months--that is, if he gets taken on."