“How’s football coming?” asked Dan. “Not very well. I gave it up.” “That so? I’m sorry. What was the trouble?” “Nothing much. I――I just thought I’d better.” Dan smiled and nodded and started on, but Gerald, yielding to a sudden impulse, said: “I thought you were coming to see me, Burtis. Drop in some evening. I’m not in much in the afternoon now. Will you?” “Thanks, I――I’d like to.” “Good stuff! Don’t forget, then.” At the doorway Dan turned with a quizzical smile. “Why?” he asked. Gerald looked puzzled and shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s something about him that――interests me. I don’t know――” “Maybe it’s his hair,” chuckled Dan. “There’s plenty of it.” “I must get him to have it cut,” replied Gerald soberly. Then after a moment, he exclaimed triumphantly: “I know what it is!” “What what is?” asked Dan. “It’s his mouth, Dan. Ever notice it? It’s always on the point of laughing and it never does it. I want to see him laugh!” “You’re a queer duffer,” Dan answered with amusement as they entered Oxford. “I believe Curtis, or whatever his name is, has hypnotized you!” CHAPTER IX NEW ACQUAINTANCES Probation didn’t weigh as heavily on Kendall as he had thought it was going to. It was hard at first to reconcile himself to giving up the football career he had dreamed of for two years, or, rather, since he meant to try again as soon as he might, to postponing it. But after a week or so the first sting of disappointment passed. At least, he was not barred from watching practice, even if he couldn’t take part in it. As for the Saturday afternoon games, he missed none of them. And when, on the thirteenth of October, St. John’s Academy played Yardley to no score game Kendall was as bitterly disgruntled as anyone. The plain truth of the matter was that Yardley should have won that contest by two scores. That she didn’t was due to two things: Wallace Hammel’s inability to kick a field goal from the twenty-five yard line and Simms’s headless generalship when, in the third period, Yardley had the ball on St. John’s twelve yards on a first down. Dan was not playing. If he had been Simms’s signal for a forward pass would have been countermanded. The quarter-back got the throw off in good style, but Norton, who was to have taken it, ran too far across the field and the ball went into the eager arms of a St. John’s player who romped half the length of the field with it before Simms, striving heroically to avert the consequences of his error of judgment, brought him down from behind. After that Holmes was sent in at quarter with instructions to pound at the opponent’s line for a touchdown. But St. John’s managed to stave off defeat until the final whistle came to her rescue, and went home proud and elated.