“You say he plays football?”
“That’s what dad says; says he was captain of his team last year. I can just see the team, can’t you? And I dare say he’ll expect me to get him a place on the eleven here; maybe he expects to be captain again!”
“Oh, well,” said Harry, smiling at his friend’s woe-begone countenance, “perhaps it won’t be as bad as that. And if he’s played football at all we ought to be glad to get him. We haven’t so much new material in sight this fall that we can afford to be particular. I really think, though, you ought to have gone to the station to meet him, Bert.”
“I was busy putting up pictures,” answered Bert grumpily. “If he can’t find his way from the station up here he’d better go back where he came from.”
“I can see where little—say, what the dickens is his name, anyway?”
“Hansel.”
“Where’d he get it? Well, I can see where he’s going to have the time of his young life when he gets here; you’re so sweet-tempered, old man!” And Harry Folsom leaned back among the pillows of the window seat and laughed. Bert, sprawling in a dilapidated Morris chair, observed him gloomily.
What he saw was a rather plain-looking lad of seventeen, of medium height and weight, with light hair and gray eyes and an expression of good nature that was seldom absent. Bert had never seen Harry angry; in fact, his good nature was proverbial throughout Beechcroft Academy. He was manager of the football team, and was just the fellow for the office. He possessed a good deal of executive ability, a fair share of common sense, and a faculty for keeping his head and his temper under the greatest provocation.
He differed widely in that respect from his host. Bert Middleton had a temper, and anyone who was with him for any length of time was pretty certain to find it out. Unfortunately, with the temper went a stubbornness that made matters worse.
Except with a few fellows who, in spite of these failings, had stuck to him long enough to discover his better qualities, he was not very popular. His election the preceding year to the captaincy of the football team had come to him as a tribute to his playing ability and not his popularity. He was strikingly good looking, with very black hair and snapping black eyes, and in spite of the fact that he was but eighteen years old, he tipped the gymnasium scales at 170 and stood six feet all but an inch. He was generally acknowledged to have won a place on the All-Preparatory Football Team of the year before, and was without doubt the best full back Beechcroft Academy had ever had. Just at present his expression was not particularly attractive, his forehead being wrinkled into a network of frowns and his mouth drawn down with discontent. Both boys were in their senior year members of what at Beechcroft is called the Fourth Class.