Walsh stayed in only some four minutes and then yielded to Keys. Walsh was plainly proving rather a disappointment to the coach. He had weight and was a hard fellow to stop when he got well started, but he was almost phenomenally slow and, to-day at least, mixed signals badly. Bert wasn’t afraid of Walsh nowadays, but he was afraid of Keys. It seemed to Bert that Keys was bound to have the call for right half-back position by Saturday; and it was a fair assumption that whoever played on the first-string against Alton High would start the game against Kenly. Of course Keys wouldn’t play the big game through, and sooner or later, Bert assured himself, he, Bert, would get in. But sometimes a back had the good fortune to stick it out right to the end, or to within a few minutes of it, and Bert wasn’t going to be satisfied with merely saying, “How do you do? Good-by!” to the referee. He watched rather glumly while Keys performed the duties of a half-back and credited Larry with doing considerably better than he really did. Chick played a full period and showed himself superior to Fitz Savell as a defensive end. Unfortunately, though, he erased whatever good impression he may have made on the coaches when he failed miserably just at the end of the scrimmage to get into position for Galvin’s long throw down the field. Chick confessed later that he mistook the signal. Neither side scored that afternoon and the battle ended with honors fairly even when it was almost too dark to see the ball ten yards away. Jake fussed and grumbled a good deal during the succeeding half hour, for it seemed that about every other man on the two teams had managed to get himself hurt in some fashion. The injuries were only casual and to be expected, but Jake, swashing iodine around and snipping tape, was a growling pessimist. At this rate, he confided to his grinning patients, there wouldn’t be a whole team left by a week from Saturday! The evening sessions for the First Team interfered badly with Chick’s pool program. Mr. Cade generally dismissed them by eight-thirty, although you couldn’t count on it, but that left Chick only an hour in which to subjugate Mr. Devore and retrieve his losses, and an hour wasn’t nearly enough. So Chick, by Wednesday of that week, was tiptoeing into Number 21 around eleven o’clock, which was a very risky proceeding and one not calculated to sending him leaping out of bed, bright-eyed and refreshed, at seven o’clock the next morning. But getting even with Lester Devore had become almost an obsession with Chick, and school laws and training rules were forgotten. Bert was always fast asleep long before the truant returned, although he sometimes awoke enough to realize that his room-mate was moving about and to wonder what time it was.