“Nothing, except that they’ve got the best team they’ve had in three years and we’ve got a worse one than we had last year. And last year they beat us by seventeen——”
“Sure! I know! You needn’t go into the sickening details. But it’s idiotic to think that you’re bound to be licked, Tru. I’m not much on the psychology stuff, but I do think that there’s a whole lot in believing that you’re going to get what you want. Why not try it?”
“Oh, I do. That is, I try to. I don’t talk this way to the fellows, Zach. You’re different. You don’t talk. And it’s a relief to be gloomy once in awhile. On the field I have to be ‘Little Sunshine’ until my mouth aches from grinning.”
“Well, for the love of lemons don’t quit yet, Tru. Keep a stiff upper lip and maybe you’ll pull off a miracle.”
Whether Joe Talmadge got onto the first or not was no affair of mine, but I sort of liked the chap, what little I’d seen of him, and, besides, it looked to me as if the team ought to go up against Enwright with the best players to be found. Anyway, I munched it over going across the yard, and when I got to the third floor of Hyde I stopped at thirty-seven and knocked. Someone said “Come in,” and I opened the door. Joe was alone. Tom, he said, hadn’t come back from supper, and would I wait? I had meant to ask Tom if there wasn’t some way of getting Joe to put up a fight when they got him on the first, thinking that maybe he could talk it over with his roommate and find out what the trouble was. I certainly hadn’t intended talking to Joe himself about it, but that’s just what I found myself doing a few minutes later. Joe was a nice sort and he kind of made you say what you had on your mind. Maybe he had what they call magnetism. Anyway, there I was pretty soon talking it over with him, he lolling back on the window seat, hugging his long legs and looking thoughtful.
“You’ve got me, Morris,” he said finally. “They’re dead right about it, too. Some way, when they stick me in there on the first I sort o’ lose my pep. I don’t know why. Say, do you believe in—in——”
He stopped and I said “Fairies?”
“No, but atmosphere.”
“Sure, Talmadge! I’m a firm believer in it,” said I earnestly, not knowing what he was driving at.