“Al—all right,” Kentucky agreed. “That will be grand!”
Johnny Thompson had somehow felt from the beginning that this was to be a Hillcrest victory. No one in all the world would have given so much to watch it from the sidelines. This had been impossible. There would be, he knew right well, a grand and glorious celebration in the old home town after the game. The team would be back. All their admirers and all the girls of the school would be there and all the old grads. Were they to wander from place to place down town? By no means! The old Blue Moon was the spot for this jollification. And he should be prepared.
Having bought out an entire bakery, he had rented its ovens. Into these ovens on great dripping pans, he thrust two legs of beef, five leg o’ lambs, three hams and a half dozen pork loins.
“We’ll have hot sandwiches for all,” he said to Aunt Mandy, his colored cook. “Hot ones for all. And you, Aunt Mandy, all I ask of you is three hundred little turnover pies, all mince.”
“Lands o’ livin’, child,” Aunt Mandy exclaimed. “Three hundred!”
“Three hundred.”
“All right, son, three hundred comin’ up.” And three hundred it was.
Ah yes, it was a grand and glorious feast Johnny prepared. One thing he forgot, the big room at the Blue Moon could scarcely accommodate sixty people standing up. And a mighty horde in trucks, busses, and private cars, some even on bicycles was pouring toward the Blue Moon at sunset.
“Kentucky,” the coach said with a side-wise glance at the boy as their car glided toward home, “I gave you a chance at being captain of the team. In that last play, you could have called for a goal kick. Punch would have sent it over for that other point. You called for a line-buck. How come?”
“Well you see,” there was a tremor in Kentucky’s voice—he loved the coach and feared his displeasure more than almost anything in the world, “you see, coach, I overheard you tell Dynamite he’d played great ball this season, which he had, and that, if he won that game you’d see that he got the ball for himself for a keepsake. That—that I thought was swell.