“We will some day,” replied Chester. “It’s a peach of a stand, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How many do you suppose it holds? Five hundred?”
“Five hundred!” exclaimed Chester. “Nearer a thousand, I’ll bet!”
“It’s all very fine being presented with an athletic field,” said Lanny, “but it’s going to keep us poor. There’s taxes to pay on it, and they’re big, too. That’s the trouble with having your field right in town like ours is. Then we need a new fence all around and a new stand. We ought to have two stands, one back of the plate for baseball and one beyond first base for football. The committee said the reason they didn’t want to pay a coach this Fall was so they could fix the field up, but I haven’t seen them doing anything yet. There’s Weston coming on. What sort of a team have they got, Chester?”
“I guess it’s not much. They look pretty spry, though. Say, that was some punt, wasn’t it?”
The stand was beginning to fill and they had to edge along to make room for a party of boys whose conversation, overheard by the visitors, indicated that they were Springdale High School students. Once Lanny intercepted an inquiring look aimed at him by one of the group and for the first time experienced an uncomfortable realization of his role. After all, when he came to consider it, there was something sort of underhand about what he and Chester were doing, or, at any rate, it seemed so to him at that moment. He glanced at his companion and found Chester staring frowningly at the squad of brown-and-white players who were trotting past in signal practice. Perhaps feeling Lanny’s eyes on him, he turned.
“I’m not crazy about this business,” he growled. “It’s a bit too sneaky.”
“Nonsense,” replied Lanny in low tones, as anxious to persuade himself as Chester, “we’ve got a perfect right to come here and see these chaps play if we want to, same as anyone else has.”
“Just the same,” responded the other stubbornly, “I don’t like it. Next time Dick may send someone else. I don’t like being a spy.”
“You’re not,” returned Lanny half-heartedly, “you’re a scout.”