“I guess it wouldn’t. Well, it’s his funeral and he will have to make his own arrangements. Still, I hate to see him making such a mess of things without any reason that anyone can see. What the dickens _is_ the matter, Duke? Has he hinted anything to you?” “No, he hasn’t. All I know is――――” Hugh hesitated a moment. “I don’t _know_ anything, but this morning when I got the mail and took it up there was a letter for Bert from his father――I know the postmark and the writing, you see――and one from Needham, and he didn’t like either of them.” “That isn’t much of a clue. He doesn’t like anything just at present. He doesn’t even like his fodder; doesn’t eat enough to keep alive. Oh, well, it will blow over, I guess. And I’ve got enough to worry about as it is, with a left side of the line that’s letting everything pile through it. Saturday’s game is going to be a slaughter of the innocents, Duke, you take it from me.” Hugh, like Nick, had his own troubles during the next few days, for Coach Crowley tried him out at right end on the second, and as an end Hugh had much to learn. Just why, after the first ten-minute fiasco, Mr. Crowley sent him back again Hugh couldn’t understand. Hugh was boxed time after time, while the first team backs romped past, allowed himself to be drawn out of the play by the cunning Dresser until that youth laughed when he caught Hugh’s anxious regard, and twice overran the ball on kicks and felt like forty kinds of a fool. But Crowley yanked him hither and thither, bellowed things that he couldn’t more than half understand, threatened him with the bench regularly every second play――and kept him at it. Hugh told himself Thursday afternoon, as he made his way tiredly out of the field house and back to Lothrop, that he had forever settled his chances with the second and that he was not half sorry. But later, when he had eaten ravenously and rested, he decided that he was sorry, awfully sorry, and he neglected his next day’s Greek and mathematics while he frowningly studied a chapter entitled “How to Play the End Positions” in a book on football. After a half-hour of it he sighed and closed the volume. “The chap who wrote that may know all about it, but he doesn’t play Dinny’s kind of football,” he reflected. “What I want is a book that will tell me how to keep Roy and Franklin from making me look like a guy! Still, I fancy Crowley won’t try me there again unless both Forbes and Bellows and that other chap get killed.”