"He didn't! You didn't get him. He meant——O Lord, what's the use!"
He did not say another word as they hastened to the gymnasium for indoor practice.
He was sure that they who knew of his partisanship would try to make him lose his temper. "Dear Lord, please just let me take out just one bonehead and beat him to a pulp, and then I'll be good and not open my head again," was his perfectly reverent prayer as he stripped before his locker.
Carl and most of the other substitutes had to wait, and most of them gossiped of the lecture. They all greedily discussed Frazer's charge that some member of the corporation owned saloon lots, and tried to decide who it was, but not one of them gave Frazer credit. Twenty times Carl wanted to deny; twenty times speech rose in him so hotly that he drew a breath and opened his mouth; but each time he muttered to himself: "Oh, shut up! You'll only make 'em worse." Students who had attended the lecture declared that Professor Frazer had advocated bomb-throwing and obscenity, and the others believed, marveling, "Well, well, well, well!" with unctuous appreciation of the scandal.
Still Carl sat aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him—slim, wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight football jersey; a clean-carved boy.
The rubber band of his nose-guard snapped harshly as he plucked at it, playing a song of hatred on that hard little harp.
An insignificant thing made him burst out. Tommy La Croix, the French Canuck, a quick, grinning, evil-spoken, tobacco-chewing, rather likeable young thug, stared directly at Carl and said, loudly: "'Nother thing I noticed was that Frazer didn't have his pants pressed. Funny, ain't it, that when even these dudes from Yale get to be cranks they're short on baths and tailors?"
Carl slid from the parallel bars. He walked up to the line of substitutes, glanced sneeringly along them, dramatized himself as a fighting rebel, remarked, "Half of you are too dumm to get Frazer, and the other half are old-woman gossips and ought to be drinking tea," and gloomed away to the dressing-room, while behind him the substitutes laughed, and some one called: "Sorry you don't like us, but we'll try to bear up. Going to lick the whole college, Ericson?"
His ears burned, in the dressing-room. He did not feel that they had been much impressed.