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 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 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.