------------------------------------------------------------------------ ILLUSTRATIONS Phil did not walk in from the Frontispiece field The Western contingent were 26 established among the pines on the right A Corner in Sands’s Room 70 He heard voices,—at first 150 indistinct, then somewhat clearer The Academy through the Trees 190 In the Campus Woods 242 He suddenly turned and pulled 292 the ball down The Main Street of Seaton 324 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MAKING THE NINE ------- CHAPTER I AN UNWELCOME PROPOSITION “HOW they do yell! Where’s your patriotism, Phil, to be hanging round in this gloomy crowd when all your friends are howling their heads off outside? Don’t you know Yale won the game? Why aren’t you out there with the rest?” Philip Poole looked up with a smile, but did not reply. “He’s comforting the afflicted,” said Dick Melvin, who shared with Poole the ownership of the room. “You don’t want to gloat over us poor Harvardites, do you, Phil? Thank you much for your sympathy.” “That isn’t the reason,” said the lad, after a pause, with the sober look in his big, wide-open eyes that made him seem serious even when his feelings inclined in the opposite direction. “I just don’t see any cause for such a racket. A Yale football victory over Harvard is too ordinary an occurrence to get wild over.” The chorus of hoots and groans that greeted this explanation brought a smile of satisfaction to the boy’s face. He was the youngest of the company, only in his second year at Seaton; the others were mostly seniors. As Melvin’s room-mate, however, and in a measure still under the senior’s care, Poole was thrown as much with the older students as with his own classmates; and the intimacy thus developed had served both to sharpen his wits and to give him practice in self-defence.