“Well, that may be all very well,” said the coach severely, “but it doesn’t put you into very good trim for football, strikes me. Now you beat it to your room, and I’ll see that you get a good diet and rest, and there _may_ still be a chance to put you in for the San Dinero game. But you can’t play day after to-morrow—Saturday—Fresno game, at Fresno.” A week before the Thanksgiving game—a week during which he was treated as a baby. Hike protested, but he was overruled by a council of the coach, Bill McDever, and Poodle. He would have had the Lieutenant persuade them that he never did such good work as when he was tired. He thought of his ride to Anarcon and the battle, coming after a sleepless night of siege. But the Lieutenant had gone back to Mexico for a short time. Hike had to submit to going to bed at eight-thirty, and to eating nothing more exciting than beefsteak and oatmeal. He had to avoid all “nervousness”—by which the coach meant hard practise, horseback riding, fierce boxing, and everything else that was interesting. In their place, he had foolish bendings and twistings, nice easy exercises which bored him excessively. Though Hike was fairly obedient, the coach’s gloom did not get less. Hike had, one evening, the sudden terrible thought that he really and truly might not be allowed to play. There was another danger, as well. Hike’s Latin was the poorest of his studies, and on the Monday before the game (which came on Thursday), “Old Grouch,” the Latin and Greek teacher, was going to have an important test for the Sophomores. A flunk in it would disqualify from playing. Poodle took him in charge, in Latin—at which the cheerful poet was a shark. Every evening, just when Hike was planning a new sort of elevating plane or rotary valve, spoiling perfectly good pieces of paper with criss-cross lines, Poodle would slam the table three times, to get attention, open a grammar of Latin, or the travels of Julius Cæsar (who was so good at Latin that he wrote in it), and then make poor Hike listen to rules, which he pronounced idiotic, or battles of Cæsar, which Hike called, “prett’ slow fighting.” “Well, maybe you think I like doing this better’n you do,” Poodle would protest, whereupon Hike would get very sorry and fairly good and have some more Latin poured into him. As a result, he passed the test. But, at the last moment, would the coach think that he was “rested up” enough to be in condition to play? Though the coach had been a good player himself, he was something of a crank. He seemed to believe that the best way to make a bunch of eleven men feel like Sandows was to find out what each of them most wanted to do, and then prevent each from doing it.