And so it went, one rumor crowding on the heels of another until it took a good part of one’s time keeping up with the gossip! Tuesday’s practice was held in secret and so was Wednesday’s. Most of the time was devoted to familiarizing the team with the new signals and smoothing out the plays to be used on Saturday. Those two days were hard ones and everyone was kept on the jump every minute. The actual scrimmage was short and often interrupted. On Wednesday night there was a signal drill in the gymnasium. The doors were closed more as a matter of habit than anything else, since it was a well understood thing that none save the team, the coaches and trainer were to enter. Consequently when, toward the end of the blackboard instruction, Manager Davis suddenly sprinted across the floor and up the stairs to the running track and spent ten minutes poking around in corners for spies he was well laughed at. “But I did see him,” protested Perky excitedly. “I saw his head right up there at the curve of the balcony. Had some sort of a cap on and he was peeking over the railing!” “You imagined it,” said Merriwell. “Anyhow, if you did see someone where the dickens did he get to?” Davis couldn’t answer that, though, and finally he acknowledged that he might have been mistaken; that since the Gibson affair he had had spies on the brain, so to speak. The Duke was in the throes of composition that evening, having at last settled down to the writing of the themes, when Cotton, who had disappeared a half-hour before with a vague mention of the library, returned unostentatiously with a book. The Duke glanced up incuriously, his mind on his work, favored Cotton with a brief and somewhat hostile stare, and was in the act of returning his gaze to the paper before him when a detail of the other’s attire caught his eye. “Did you know you’d torn your coat there at the pocket?” he asked. Cotton pulled his coat quickly around and looked at the rip. “Yes, I――I did that this morning,” he answered carelessly. “I caught it on a door knob.” But The Duke was already immersed again in his labor, scowling at the sheet and muttering as he wrote. The next day the janitor found a small round window in an alcove off the running-track in the gymnasium swinging open. Not having heard of Davis’s hallucination, however, he merely fastened it again and thought nothing of it. The weather turned mild on Thursday, and when in the afternoon the team held open practice and the school lined the ropes and cheered and sang for a full half-hour, the warm sunlight and gentle southerly breeze suggested baseball rather than football. Later the fellows crowded about the front of the gymnasium and cheered some more, cheered every member of the team individually, cheered Coach Payson and Andy Ryan and Manager Davis and the two rubbers, and cheered long and loud and repeatedly for “Yardley! _Yardley!_ YARDLEY!”