In vain did Coach Corridan, the staff of Assistant Coaches, Captain Butch Brewster, and others strive to resuscitate football spirit; nightly mass-meetings were held, and enough perfervid oratory hurled to move a Russian fortress, but to no avail. It was useless to argue that, without Thor, Bannister had an eleven better than that of last year, which so nearly missed the Championship. The campus had seen the massive Thor's prodigies; they knew he could not be stopped, and to attempt to arouse the college to concert pitch over the eleven, with that mountain of muscle blotting out vast sections of scenery, but not in football togs, was not possible. "One thing is sure," spoke Dad Pendleton seriously, gazing gloomily from the window, "unless we get Thor in the line-up for the Big Games, our last hope of the Championship is dead and interred! And I feel sorry for the big fellow, for already the boys like him just about as much as a German loves an Englishman; yet, arguments, threats, pleadings, and logic have absolutely no effect on him. He has said 'No,' and that ends it!" "He doesn't understand things, fellows," defended T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., with surprising earnestness. "Remember how bewildered he seemed at our appeal to his college spirit, and his love for his Alma Mater. We might as well have talked Choctaw to him!" Butch Brewster, Socks Fitzpatrick, Dad Pendleton, Beef McNaughton, Deacon Radford, Monty Merriweather, and Shad Fishpaw well remembered that night after Thor's tragic decision, when they--part of a Committee formed of the best athletes from all teams, and the most representative collegians of old Bannister, had invaded Thor's room in Creighton Hall, to wrestle with the recalcitrant Hercules. Even as Hicks spoke, they visioned it again. A cold, cheerless room, bare of carpet or pictures, with just the study-table, bed, and two chairs. At the study-table, his huge bulk sprawling on, and overflowing, a frail chair, they had found the massive John Thorwald laboriously reading aloud the Latin he had translated, literally by the sweat of his brow. The blond Colossus, impatient at the interruption, had shaken his powerful frame angrily, and with no regard for campus tradition, had addressed the upperclassmen in a growl: "Well, what do you want? Hurry up, I've got to study." And then, to state it briefly, they had worked with (and on) the stolid Thorwald for two hours. They explained how his decision to play no more football would practically kill old Bannister's hopes of the Championship, would assassinate football spirit on the campus, and cause the youths to condemn Thor, and to ostracise him. Waxing eloquent, Butch Brewster had delivered a wonderful speech, pleading with John Thorwald to play the game. He tried to show that obviously uninterested mammoth that, like the Hercules he so resembled, he stood at the parting of the ways.