“Good! You’ll get inoculated with the real, old, simon-pure college spirit, after a bit, Larry.” “Don’t you believe it for one single minute!” Larry flamed out hotly, in the remembrance of his wrongs. “I’m in, and I’ll stay in because I’m not a quitter. But I haven’t changed my mind a single atom!” And he repeated, for Dick’s benefit, the talk he had overheard in the locker-room; or rather, to be strictly accurate, he repeated McKnight’s part of it. “You see, it’s just as I’ve been telling you,” he wound up in a burst of contemptuous passion. “They’re glad enough to use me as a promising bunch of bone and muscle, and that’s all. I’ll stick, for the sake of what Sheddon’s going to give me. But when it’s over, I’ll still be fighting on my side of the fence――which isn’t Ollie McKnight’s side by a thousand miles!” True to his determination, Larry “stuck,” and after a few days of practice the Freshman team found that it had acquired a prize. Larry played with the same grim resolution that he put into his classroom work. Playing first at end, he was presently given his old High School position at half-back. For this position he was well qualified, having weight enough to buck the opposing line, combined with the speed necessary to circle the ends and slip through tackle. It was in one of the preliminary practice games with the ’Varsity that he made his mark. As usually happens, the big fellows ran away with everything in sight, but after the game, just as Larry was leaving the locker-room, Brock, the head coach, stopped him. “I’ve been watching your play this afternoon, Donovan,” he said brusquely. “You have the makings of a good half-back in you. How do you stand in your classroom work?” “All right, so far, I guess,” Larry replied. “We begin playing the schedule next week,” Brock went on. “How would you like to go along as a sub? Of course, I couldn’t put you in the Conference games, but there’ll be others.” You’d have to be a college Freshman yourself to know how this hit Larry. It is only about once in an elephant’s age that a raw Freshie is ever singled out as even a remotely possible substitute on the big team. But right there the growing bitterness got in its work. Once more he was being taken up for his brawn, and maybe a little for his brain, but not for anything else. “I guess I’m not available,” he said, and it came out a lot more bluntly than he had meant to make it. “All right,” returned the coach. “It’s up to you, of course.” And that ended it. After this little talk with Brock, Larry played all the harder in the practice games――which was the way he was built. Back in the old life, which now seemed so far away, he had wiped engines in a locomotive roundhouse; and because it was a disagreeable, dirty job, he always did it just a little more than thoroughly. Here was another engine-wiping job, he told himself; and, since he had undertaken it, he would go through with it.