Bosher subsides at this point, and the two friends resume their divided interest in the match, and old Wyndham, and the monkey-nuts.
Presently two familiar forms saunter past, arm-in-arm.
“There go Riddell and Bloomfield,” says Parson. “Awfully chummy they’ve got, haven’t they? Different from what it used to be!”
“So it is,” says Parson. “Not nearly as much chance of a lark. But perhaps it’s no harm; it keeps those Welcher kids quiet.”
“More than it’s doing just now! Look at the way young Cusack is bellowing over there! He’s as mad on this match as if he was in the eleven.”
“So he expects to be, some day. But they’re not going to have it all their own way in Welch’s again. Our club’s going ahead like blazes now, and we’ve challenged them for a return match the day before break-up.”
“There’s Tedbury out,” says Telson. “Twenty runs he’s made—not a bad score. We’d better cheer him, I say.”
And the two grandees suit the action to the word, and rejoice the heart of Tedbury as he retires to the tent, by their lusty applause.
The Willoughbites do not do badly as a whole. A few of them, either through incompetence or terror at the presence of old Wyndham, fail to break their duck’s-eggs, but the others among them put together the respectable score of one hundred and five—the identical figures, by the way, which Wyndham scored off his own bat the other day in the Colts’ match of his county.
During the interval there is a general incursion of spectators into the ground, and a stampede by the more enthusiastic to the tent where the great umpire is known to be “on show” for a short time.