“Someone,” said “Sparrow,” “has been monkeying with this panel. Looks to me like it had been out. That’s funny!”
Jonesie yawned. “Maybe the heat’s loosened it,” he suggested.
A few days later “Sparrow” observed: “Hello, I didn’t know you had one of these electric torches.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, son,” said Jonesie; adding to himself: “You don’t know what can be done with a fishing rod with a piece of wire on the end of it, for one thing!”
THE QUITTER
They were revising the line-up for the final game of the season, that with Fairfield, when Jack Groom entered: Coach Thornton, Payson Walsh, manager; Larry Logan, quarterback; and Jim Walsh, left guard. Had Tinker, the trainer, been on hand too, the Board of Football Strategy of Staunton School would have been, with Jack’s advent, complete. “Tink’s” absence, however, had been discounted: and the same was true of Jack, for none of those in the coach’s study had expected the captain to hobble all that half-mile between campus and village. There were four simultaneous exclamations of surprise when he appeared in the doorway.
“Oh, Doc says I’m out of it for good,” defended Jack. He lowered himself into a chair, leaned his crutches alongside and scowled malignantly at the bulky swathings of his right foot.
“Maybe, son, but you don’t want to have trouble with that ankle, even if you can’t play,” said Mr. Thornton.
“I’ve got all winter to coddle it,” Jack growled. “Shove that footstool over, Larry, will you? Well, what have you decided?”