"What's the matter with Merriwell?" asked Lewis Little, speaking to a group of jolly lads who were on the train that bore the Yale football team out of Boston on its way to New Haven. "He's grouchy." "Is he?" cried Paul Pierson. "Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself! Why, he's the hero of the day! All the papers will have his picture to-morrow. I saw at least five persons snapping him with cameras on the field. Grouchy, is he? Well, confound him! He has no right to get a grouch on." "Not a bit of it!" cried Charlie Creighton. "What's the matter with him? Where is he?" "He's sitting back in the end of the car, looking fierce enough to eat anybody." Creighton, Pierson and several others sprang to their feet and looked for Frank. They saw him. He was staring out of the window in a blank manner, although he did not seem to notice anything the train passed. He was paying no attention to the gang of shouting, singing, laughing students, who filled the smoker and were perched on the backs of the seats and crowded into the aisles. "Hey, Merry!" shouted Creighton. "Shake it, old man--shake it! Come up here! Get into the game!" Frank looked around, shook his head, and then looked out of the window again. "Well, hang him!" growled Charlie. "Any one would think he had played with Harvard, instead of winning the game for Yale! What can be the matter with him?" No one seemed to know. Creighton went down and talked to Frank, but could get no satisfaction out of him. As soon as he was let alone again, Merriwell fell to gazing out of the window, seeming quite unaware of the shouts and songs of the jolly lads in the car. When strangers crowded into the car to get a look at the man who had won the game for Yale, having heard he was on the train, he still continued to gaze out of the window, and it was not apparent that he heard any of their remarks. "Tell you what," said Creighton, as he returned to Pierson and the others of the little group, "Merriwell is sore." "Sore?" cried Tom Thornton, "he can't be any sorer than I am! Why, I was jumped on, kicked, rammed into the earth, and annihilated more than twenty times during that game. A little more of it would have made a regular jellyfish out of me. I'll be sore for a month, but I believe in being jolly at the same time." Then he broke forth into a song of victory, in which every one in that car seemed to join, judging by the manner in which the chorus was roared forth. "Boom-to-de-ay, boom-ta-de-ay, Boom-to, de-boom-ta, de-boom-ta-de-ay; We won to-day, we won to-day, We won, oh, we won, oh, we won to-day." Any one who has not heard a great crowd of college lads singing this chorus cannot conceive the volume of sound it seems to produce. When they all "bear down together" on the "boom-ta," the explosive sound is like a staggering blow from the shoulder.