“Good enough!” admitted Red. “We’ll show those Landon counterfeits how to play to-morrow night. Now just a minute.” He gathered the four regulars and the two substitutes about him. “Boys, you all know we’ve had the best season ever, and you all know this mix-up with Landon is going to be our biggest and most important game—and our hardest. We want to win a little worse than we want to go on living.” He turned to Vernon Judd. “But maybe you don’t understand what I mean, Judd. Of course, you’ve only been working here for five months and you——”
“Pretty nearly six,” corrected Vern. He had been marking them off on the calendar in his room.
“Well, anyhow, unless you’ve been through a basket-ball season with the sporting-goods teams, you can’t know how much it means to everybody in this place to beat the Landon bunch. We’ve got to do it, understand? Everybody that works here feels the same as college fellows feel about their team. But that ain’t all. This game gets into every sporting page of every big newspaper in the country. That means big advertising for the winners. And advertising—sport-page stuff in news—means better business, and better business means more money to all of us—oh, not a lot, maybe, but every little bit helps. Get me?”
“I think I understand, Murph.”
“Don’t do no harm to tell you, anyhow. The people we work for want us to win; the people we work with want us to win; we want to win ourselves, the same as all real players do. And, Vern”—he put his hand affectionately upon the young fellow’s jersey—“if you shoot baskets Saturday night the way you did just now, we will win—sure!”
As Vernon Judd left the factory’s model gymnasium, where the team had been holding its final practice, his body tingled from the rough-towel rub that followed the shower; but he also tingled internally from sheer pleasure and the joy of living. He had made good. Coming into the Bloss works practically a nobody, by merit alone he had won friendship and respect, as well as a place on a cracking good basket-ball five. Best of all, for the first time in his life, he was really interested in the business of earning a living.
Life as a whole had changed for him. Hard work in his department had brought him a boost in the pay envelope, and his spare moments were busied with a correspondence course in advertising. He wished his father could see him jump out of bed before the winter sun rose, to hurry to a job that had become a pleasure.
He was so busy patting himself on the back that only chance prevented his colliding with a footfarer bound the other way.
“Hazel Wayne!” he blurted, as his surprised glance showed him the girl from Landon’s whose acquaintance he had made through the rescue of the lace handkerchief.
Her face was pale and troubled. His quick eye noted that she was holding her library book almost ostentatiously.