“So he very carefully reminded me,” said Tom bitterly. “Oh, he didn’t forget anything! Said the Office had had my case under consideration for some time and that only my standing in other studies had kept them from giving me the ax before. Said maybe if my time wasn’t so taken up with football I’d――” Tom stopped and shook his head. “Oh, he put the harpoon into me good and hard, and turned it around a couple of times. Well, I’m done for this season.” “But, great Scott, isn’t he going to let you make up――or something?” demanded Clif. “He can’t keep you from playing all the rest of the season, can he? Why, there’s more than two weeks yet!” “Oh, sure, I can make up,” laughed Tom grimly. “All I’ve got to do is get eighty or better from now on, write a nice little theme of five hundred words on Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’――five hundred, mind you!――and make up some stuff in paragraph structure that I fell down on Monday. Oh, sure, I can make up all right!” “Well, but how long have you got to――to――” “Friday afternoon for the theme. Heck, what’s the use of talking about it? I couldn’t write a hundred words about that blamed old mariner, let alone five hundred! And then getting eighty! Why, hang it, I’ve never got better than sixty-five in English, and I never expect to! It’s rotten stuff, and I hate it. Composition and rhetoric, and the whole blamed business! No, sir, I’m plumb through!” “How do you mean, through?” asked Clif sharply. Tom’s gaze dropped to the floor, and for a moment he made no answer. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what do you think?” he asked bitterly. “Wouldn’t you call it through?” Then, after a pause. “I dare say you fellows will make Johnny Thayer captain.” CHAPTER XVI LORING TAKES COMMAND The chess game was never finished. Ten o’clock arrived with nothing much left to be said, and with scant lessening of the general gloom. Loring insisted that by trying hard Tom could get that theme handed in by the designated time, that he could make up the other stuff easily, and that, if he really set his mind on it, he could keep his English work up to the required standard. But even Loring realized that a little over two weeks was scant time in which to convince a sceptical instructor of one’s reform, and that, with the best of luck, Tom could scarcely hope for reinstatement early enough to be of much further use to the Scrub. Clif’s best suggestion was that Tom see his adviser the first thing in the morning, and ask him to intercede. Tom agreed to do this, but plainly he was not hopeful. Mr. Parks and he had not taken to each other greatly, and Tom’s secret conviction was that “Cheese” wouldn’t be likely to go to much trouble in the matter. Finally they parted, Clif accompanying Tom to the door of Number 34 and leaving him with a lugubrious “Oh, well, cheer up, Tom. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”