Bert was mighty proud of his membership, but his satisfaction was dulled by the suspicion that he didn’t really deserve the honor. There were fellows--he could think of half a dozen, perhaps--who played better football than he did and who had not won the coveted A. In short, Bert secretly looked on himself as a Letter Man in name only! But he meant to correct all that. This fall he was going to deserve the prize he had won. He was going to try so blamed hard that success simply wouldn’t be able to escape him! He had added several pounds since last winter and at least an inch of height, and he had handled a football nearly every day during the summer, generously obeying Mr. Cade’s injunction to the members of the squad. If all the milk he had drunk and all the eggs he had eaten could have been mixed together the result would have been an omelet as big as--well, I don’t know how big. But I do know that in August Bert’s mother had to call the family physician in to advise a bilious boy to omit eggs from his diet for the rest of the summer. Perhaps what had kept Bert from attaining the height of Captain Jonas and the rotundity of Lum Patten by the middle of September was the fact that when he wasn’t throwing or kicking a football around he was playing tennis or swimming. No matter how he figured it, Bert couldn’t make himself out better than a third-choice substitute half-back. Storer, Ness, Savell, Keys and Tyron were the mainstays, and then there were at least three other backfield candidates who, in Bert’s estimation at least, were held in higher esteem than he. And goodness only knew who else might suddenly spring into the spot-light before the season was over! Well, if hard work and the most determined efforts would avail he meant to land considerably nearer the head of the list than he was now. What he feared more than all else was a repetition of last fall’s catastrophe. He was light and so subject to rude handling, and last season’s experience had proved how surprisingly easy it was to get hurt. Why, he had merely stumbled over some fellow’s legs and been out of the game for almost a fortnight with a wrenched knee! Even as late as early summer the silly thing had twinged him occasionally, although he had been careful not to mention the fact. He believed it to be as good as ever now, but he was haunted by the fear that it might not be, that he would hurt it again and be laid off. Being laid off was a fatal thing sometimes. Like time and tide, football seasons wait for no one, and more than one poor fellow on the injured list has watched a hale substitute run off with his position under his very eyes. Fear of another injury to that left knee or to some other portion of his anatomy was threatening to become an obsession, although he didn’t realize it.