CHAPTER VIII
HA! HA! BIG JOKE!
The game on the following Saturday was strange. Johnny, who journeyed with the team to Chehalis, where the game was to be played, had never seen anything like it. Something quite mysterious and startling happened at the beginning of the second quarter. The score stood at 7-7. It was Hillcrest’s ball on their opponent’s twenty yard line, second down, and ten yards to go.
At that moment, while it was being returned from an unsuccessful attempt at a forward pass, in some strange manner, the ball came into contact with a Chehalis player’s toe and went bouncing into the bleachers. Johnny saw this but thought little of it. He was to think a great deal more of it later.
The ball was slow in getting back onto the field. This was not strange however, it was a cold day. Many blankets tended to hamper the spectator’s movements.
When the ball came back it was Rabbit Jones, Hillcrest right half, who received it. The ball, he thought, seemed queer, yet he said nothing. Twenty seconds later the ball was in play. Rabbit had it and was preparing to throw a forward pass to Dave Powers, who had run around left end to receive it.
Then Rabbit did a strange thing. To the vast surprise of all his team mates, instead of carrying out the play, he allowed his arm to drop to shoot the ball at last far and high, curving away toward a spot where no one was.
“Don’t touch that ball!” These words were on Rabbit’s lips. He did not say them. Nor was there any need, for as it reached the highest spot in its long, broad curve, with a boom like a cannon shot, the ball burst.
A sudden cry of surprise rose from the bleachers. But from one pair of lips—Rabbit heard it distinctly—there came, “Ha! Ha! Big joke!”
Who had said it? Rabbit’s gaze from face to face of the opposing team came to rest upon the big right tackle. “Yes,” he assured himself, “he said that. And it was his toe that pushed the ball into the crowd a moment ago. Something queer there.”
Though the boy thought all this, not one word, for the moment, did he say to his team mates. The whole affair puzzled him greatly. Why had he changed his mind so quickly? Why had he thrown the ball for that long forward pass into the great nowhere? Had he known the ball would burst? Well, scarcely that. It had all been very strange. The ball had been cold like ice. He had imagined that he felt it swelling. He had acted, perhaps, on instinct. Who knows?