The Coach and Captain Hop MacLean and Danny Lord, who was first-string quarterback, and Slim Porter went off to Hawleyville early Saturday morning to see Munson play Kernwood and maybe get a line on her. Before he went Rusty told me I was to captain the team that afternoon. “The manager will look after things off the field, Gus,” he said, “and Thompson will play quarter. He knows what plays to use, so you’d better let him run things as much as possible. Munson will have some scouts here and we can’t afford to show our hand much. We’ll win if we can, but I’d rather we took a licking than show too much of our game. Do the best you can, Gus, and make your tackles good.”
Joe’s folks arrived just after dinner in a shiny new car. Babe and I saw them from our window. That is, Babe saw them and I got a couple of peeks over his shoulder. He’d been sitting at the window for half an hour. The car stopped almost underneath and he nearly fell out, rubbering. Joe had[105] made me promise to meet them, and so I went down. Babe wouldn’t, of course. You can’t steer him against a girl to save your life. Well, I haven’t much use for them either, but a chap’s got to be courteous. Joe introduced me all around and we set out to see the buildings, me walking with Aunt Emily and the girl. She was a right pretty girl, but sort of shy, and didn’t have much to say. Sort of small-town, you know. Wore her hair old-fashioned so you could see her ears plain. The aunt was a pleasant old dame and she and I got on swimming. Once she said:
“Joseph tells me that you play on the football team, too, Mr. Billings,” and I said, “Yes’m, I get to play now and then.” “Well,” she said, smiling pleasantly, “we shall expect great things from you both to-day.”
We steered them up to Joe’s room in Routledge after a bit, and pretty soon Joe’s roommate, Hal Norwin, came in and I beat it. Mr. Morris seemed to think that Joe ought to go and get ready to play, too, but I explained that he didn’t have to hurry because he wouldn’t get in until the second half. “You see,” I said, “we’re sort of saving him, Mr. Morris. If anything happened to Joe to-day we’d be in a pretty bad way next Saturday, wouldn’t we?” Then I winked at Hal, who was looking sort of surprised, and pulled my freight.
[106]
It didn’t take us long to find that Munson wasn’t losing any tricks. Tom Meadows pointed out three of her fellows in the visitors’ stand just before the game started. “That biggest guy is Townsend, their left guard, and—”
“You don’t have to tell me,” said I. “I’ve played against him. And the little fellow in the striped shirt is Quinn, the quarter, and the other goof is Taylor, the only back that made any gains against us last year. Well, I guess they won’t learn much here to-day, Tom.”
We don’t charge for any of the games except the big game with Munson, and so we usually draw pretty fair-sized crowds. Warrensburg folks are mighty keen for anything they don’t have to pay for. So we had the stands pretty well filled that afternoon by the time Mills kicked off, and the other fellows had fetched along maybe a hundred and fifty rooters who made an awful lot of noise when young Thompson juggled the ball almost under our goal and gave me heart failure for a moment. He managed to hold on to it finally, though, and we soon kicked out of there, and the old game settled down to a see-saw that didn’t get either team anything but hard knocks.
We weren’t looking for a very good game, even with three of our first-string players out of the line-up, for Mills wasn’t very heavy and had lost[107] more than half her games that year, but I’m here to say that she sprung a surprise on us for fair that afternoon. For one thing, she was so blamed quick that she found us napping time and again; and she had a new variation of a fake forward pass that fooled us finely until we got on to it. By the time we were hep to it she had thrown a full-sized scare into us and worked the ball down into our twenty-five yard line. But that was in the second quarter. The first quarter didn’t show either team up much. We both punted a good bit and tried the other fellow out and looked for a lucky break that didn’t come. It wasn’t until that second period began that Mills got down to work and had us worried for a while. She got two short runs away around our left end, where Slim Porter’s absence was sorely felt, as they say, and then pulled a lucky forward that made it first down on our thirty-four. Then she stabbed at Babe and lost a yard. Then that bean-pole of a full-back of hers worked that fake forward for the second time, and made it go for ten yards, coming right through between me and Conly when we weren’t looking for anything of the sort. I got a nice wallop in the face in that play and had to call for time and get patched up.
After that, Mills got a yard outside Means, who was playing in Slim’s place at left tackle, and made it first down on our twenty-five. I read the riot[108] act then, though not being able to talk very well on account of having one side of my mouth pasted up with plaster, and we held her for two downs. I guess she might have scored if she had tried a field goal, but she was set on a touchdown and went after it with a short heave over the center of the line that Thompson couldn’t have missed if he had tried. I felt a lot better after that, and in two plays we had the old pigskin back near the middle of the field. Then Pete Swanson gummed things up by falling over his big feet and we had to punt. Just before half-time we worked down to Mills’ twenty-seven and after Brill had been stopped on a skin tackle play Pete went back and tried a drop kick. He missed the goal by not less than six yards, the big Swede! That about ended the half, and when we got over to the locker room in the gymnasium we knew we’d been playing football! We were a sore crowd, and Newt Lewis didn’t make us feel any better by telling us how rotten we’d been. He kept it up until Babe told him to shut up or he’d bust him and I said “Hear! Hear!” out of one side of my mouth. Everybody was sore at everybody else. Thompson had the nerve to tell me I’d interfered with his business of running the team and I told him where he got off. Brill was mad because Thompson hadn’t let him try that goal instead of Pete Swanson, and Pete was sore because[109] he had failed. I guess about the only fellows there who weren’t nursing grouches were the subs who hadn’t got in, and amongst them was Joe in nice clean togs, looking anxious and making signs to me and Babe.
Well, we’d fixed it all right for him before the game. Babe was so blamed stubborn and insistent that I had to agree to his frame-up in self-defense and so I told Newt about Joe’s folks being there and how he wanted to bask in the spot-light on account of them and that girl and how it was my opinion that he hadn’t ever been given a fair chance and was every bit as good as Hearn or Sawyer. It seemed that Rusty had instructed Newt to use all the subs he could in the last half and so Newt didn’t put up any holler about Joe. And when we went back again there was our young hero at left half, in place of Torrey, looking nervous but determined. I could see his folks in the school stand, the girl in a blue dress, and his Uncle Preston’s black mustaches standing out six inches on each side of his face.
We had six second- or third-string fellows in our line-up when the th............