“I don’t know. The same, I guess. I tried to make believe that the whole thing depended on me and that I was the main squeeze, but it didn’t seem to work. Say, do the rest of those fellows really want to win, or—or what?”
“Why, yes, they do, of course,” said I. “But—maybe they don’t know it!”
Joe sighed. “Something’s wrong with them. I had the impression all the time that I was taking a lot of trouble for nothing, that no one cared what happened, and it balled me all up. I’m going to quit football, I guess. Anyhow, I ain’t got time for it.”
I said something polite and beat it back to the stand. It didn’t seem to me to make much difference whether he quit or not.
Things ambled along toward the second Gloversville game. I noticed that Joe was still playing on the second, and gathered from something Tom said that he had wanted to quit and had been overruled by the coaches.
We licked Gloversville thirteen to six, in a glorified practice game in which every substitute had a chance to show his gait. And after that we settled down for the final humiliation of being whipped to a froth by Enwright the following Saturday. Honestly, you couldn’t find ten fellows in school who would say that Hollins was going to win, and you couldn’t have found one who believed it! I didn’t. I’ll say that frankly.
Three of the second team were taken over to the first, and Joe was one of them. Maybe Morgan thought he might need a third center if Enwright played the sort of game she was expected to. Anyway, Joe was huddled up on the bench with the rest of the subs when the game started.
It was a cloudy, still November day, with a touch of frost in the air, and there was no choice between goals. We won the toss and gave the ball to Enwright. The visitors were a husky lot, all right. They’d won six out of nine games and hadn’t any doubt about winning another to-day. They were a rangy, powerful bunch, and looked fast and keen. As to weight they had it over us by a few pounds in the average, but not enough to worry about. We weren’t worrying about anything, for that matter. We had made up our minds to fight hard and die fighting. Only, we expected to die. And anybody knows that that’s no way to go into a football game. We believed that Fate had everything all doped out for us, so what was the use of worrying? I heard afterwards that Morgan fairly insulted them in the dressing room before the game, but he didn’t get any reaction. They refused to be insulted. They were dogged, but there wasn’t enough vanity in the whole bunch to fit out a Pomeranian lap dog. Then they went out and trotted onto the gridiron, while we waved and cheered them nobly, prepared to die like heroes.
They had an awful surprise in the first ten minutes of that period. Enwright absolutely refused to play football. Whether she was a bit stale or what the trouble was I don’t know, but she fumbled and ran wild and misjudged punts and acted like a bunch of grammar school kids. You could have heard their quarter raving at them as far away as the laboratory, I guess. The first thing anyone knew Hollins had pushed White over for a touchdown and Tru had kicked a pretty goal!