Alf made a choking sound that indicated suppressed laughter.
“Don’t take any more chicken,” advised Gerald. “There’s a salad yet and then some dandy ice cream. And I know you like ice cream, Tom.”
“It’s one of the few things I can relish,” answered Tom with a grin. “I have a very delicate stomach.”
“So has an ostrich,” jeered Alf.
“Another chap and I fed an ostrich on celluloid campaign buttons once,” said Tom reminiscently. “It was at the Zoo. We had our pockets full of Bryan buttons and the ostrich seemed to like them tremendously. I guess he ate about forty of ’em.”
“What happened to him?” asked Dan, laughingly.
“I never heard. I guess he became a Bryanite, though.”
After dinner there was a comfortable hour in the big library in front of the fire, for the evenings were getting chilly those days, and then the four boys said good night and piled themselves into the automobile and were taken humming back to school.
Yardley had little difficulty with the Nordham Academy team on the following Saturday, sending it down in defeat to the tune of 17 to 0 and thereby earning consolation for what had happened last year when Nordham, with a spry and tricky team, had played her to a tie. Football was in the air now. In fact, Yardley was obsessed with athletics, for not only was the gridiron contest with her hated rival imminent but there was also the question of cross-country supremacy to settle.
On Wednesday morning Andy Ryan sent his charges over the full course for the first time and, although he never gave out the time, he was well pleased. In that run Gerald, who had been doing better at every trial, finished seventh among the twelve who ran. (Garson was out of the team for good with a torn leg muscle sustained in a class football game.) Word filtered into Yardley that Broadwood expected to make a clean sweep next Saturday by winning both in the morning and afternoon. But Yardley laughed scornfully and held three football mass meetings and whooped things up until the enthusiasm was deafening. Cheers and songs were practiced and Dan’s contribution made a great success. (Alf’s verse, by the way, was not added.) Studies suffered a good deal that last week and the faculty almost called a mass meeting of its own to protest against the students’ neglect of lessons. “Kilts,” whose real name was Mr. McIntyre and who taught mathematics, shook his head a lot those days and predicted dire things when examination time arrived. But sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, and just now the one thing in life was to witness the double humiliation of the Green.