Even Annie smiled, and just then my cousin Teddy came up.
"What are you lookin' so red an' savage about?" says Teddy.
"Achin' to jump into that Normal team," says I.
Under the big oak Rob Mackenzie and Tom Powell, with the big fellows around them, were settling the last preliminaries. The referee pitched the coin.
"Heads it is," called Tom quietly. "We'll take the north goal." The wind by this time was stiff out of the north, and the Normals had won the toss.
Now, too, we saw the meaning of the mysterious practice in Normal Hall. Along the lower edge of the pasture, and forming the eastern side-line, there ran a "tight board" fence, and next it, the entire length of the pasture, the shallow ditch I have already spoken of. In that ditch we used to fight half of our scrimmages, and in that ditch the Normals concentrated their strategy and strength. In massive formation, the ball in the midst, protected by the fence on one side and by a moving stockade of stout legs and sturdy shoulders on the other, down the ditch they would drive, sweeping away our lighter fellows like leaves as they went, on and on, to what seemed an inevitable goal.
But right there the weakness of the play developed. The goal posts stood, as in the modern game, midway the ends of the field. No "touch-downs" counted, only goals; and to make a goal they must leave their ditch and protecting fence and come out into the open. And there Rob Mackenzie gathered his heavy men for the defense. With Whitty, and Nic, and Jim Greening, and the others, he would ram the Normal formation until it broke; then unless someone had done it before him, he would go in himself, capture the ball, and with Whitty, his team-mate, rush away with it toward the Normal goal.
The second half began, and the Normal pace grew faster. Those endurin' muscles, "hardened on the old farm," that "had cradled two acres of oats a day, day in day out, under the July sun," were beginning to tell. Like a sledge-hammer at a shaking door the Normal formation pounded at our defence. When the door should fall seemed but a matter of time. The Normalite roar along the side-line grew louder. Again and again, while the scrimmage thickened, with John Hicks and Scott and Simpson hurling into it, would burst out their thundering refrain: