It was Stringham, really, who came to him as he sat silently and with drooping shoulders in the dressing-room.
"What's wrong here? When you're hurt I want to know it."
George got up.
"I'm not hurt. I'm all right."
Green arrived and helped Stringham poke while George submitted, wishing they'd leave him alone so he could sit down and rest.
"We've got to have him next week," Stringham said, "but this game isn't won by a long shot."
"What's the matter with me?" George asked. "I'll play."
He heard a man near by remark:
"He's got the colour of a Latin Salutatorian."
They let him go back, nevertheless, and at the start he suffered his first serious injury. He knew when he made the tackle that the strap of his headgear snapped. He felt the leather slide from his head, experienced the crushing of many bodies, had a brief conviction that the sun had been smothered. His next impression was of bare, white walls in a shaded room. His brain held no record of the hushing of the multitude when he had remained stretched in his darkness on the trampled grass; of the increasing general fear while substitutes had carried him from the field on a stretcher; or of the desertion of the game by the Baillys, by Betty and her father, by Wandel, the inscrutable, even by the revolutionary Allen, by a score of others, who had crowded the entrance of the dressing room asking hushed questions, and a few moments later had formed behind him a silent and frightened procession as he had been carried to the infirmary. Mrs. Bailly told him about it.