Coach Cade made much the same sort of a speech as coaches generally make on such occasions, and promised a successful season in return for cheerful obedience and hard work; and looked unutterably relieved when the more or less attentive audience dispersed. Mr. Cade was a short, thick-set man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, with black hair that stood up on his head much like the bristles of a blacking brush, a square face that looked at least one size too large for the rest of him, small features which included two very piercing dark eyes, a button nose and a broad mouth and, to cap the climax, a very gentle voice. Not a handsome chap, Willard thought, but certainly a very capable looking one. Later, he learned from Martin that John Cade had played with Alton Academy for three years and then for as many more on the Lafayette teams, making a remarkable reputation, first as a school quarter-back and then as a college guard. Willard found it difficult to imagine Coach Cade as a quarter. Probably, he concluded, in those days the coach lacked the breadth and heaviness he showed now, a conclusion proved to be correct when Willard came across an old photograph of an Alton eleven in the gymnasium some weeks later. In the picture John Cade was a short, not over-heavy and very alert boy of seventeen, his dark eyes darting defiance and his black hair bristling a challenge. He was familiarly known among the fellows of present-day Alton as Johnny, but none had ever been heard to address him so! Practice this first afternoon wasn’t a serious ordeal, for much time was given to verbal instruction, and at half-past four the squads were dismissed. Willard, walking back to the gymnasium with Martin and Bob, said that it ought to be easy to get a good team with such a raft of candidates to choose from, and Bob snorted derisively. “You’re wrong, Brand,” he said. “If we had half as many we’d get on better. It takes three weeks, nearly, to find out who’s good and to weed out the others, and that’s just so much time lost. Johnny’s dippy on the subject of having every fellow who ever heard of football come out, and it’s a sad mess for the first fortnight. Of course it sometimes happens that he finds a player that way who mightn’t show up if he wasn’t urged to, but, gee, I think it’s piffle! Give me last year’s first and second teams, or what’s left of ’em, and a dozen chaps who have made names where they come from and I’ll turn out as good a team as any. Must have been a hundred fellows out there this afternoon, and I’ll bet you fifty of them never played a game of football in their lives!” “Sure,” agreed Martin, “but some of them are capable of playing, you poor fish, and it’s just those that Johnny wants to find. If they don’t make good this year, he’s got them started for next. Your plan might work all right this year, Bob, but you’d run short of material next year. You’ve got to plan ahead, old son, and that’s what Johnny does.”