Boarding schools -- Juvenile fiction; Football stories; School sports -- Juvenile fiction; Teenage boys -- Juvenile fiction
Billy laughed. “You’re going to be a lot of fun for me this year, Tom,”
he said. “You’ve got quite a lot of new stuff, son.”
“Huh!” Tom regarded his roommate doubtfully. Then he grinned. “It’s
going to be fifty-fifty, I guess. I’m not the only funny one in this
room.”
“Good lad,” approved Billy.
They talked football for a while and Billy told about last year and how
Wolcott had turned the tables in the last quarter of the big game and
turned a Wyndham victory into a devastating defeat. “We had them all
the way until the tag end of that period. We’d scored in the first and
second, and booted a goal each time. It was all over but the shouting,
you might have thought, for 14 to 3――they’d snitched a field-goal in
the third――was good enough for any one, and all we had to do was hold
them for the rest of the game. Then they put this chap Grosfawk in at
end. No one had ever heard of him before around here. Our scouts didn’t
even remember his name. They had the ball down on their thirty, and
there was less than five minutes of the game left. Their inside half,
Cummins, faked a kick and tossed to this Grosfawk chap, who had managed
to sneak pretty well across the field. It wasn’t an awfully long throw,
and he made it slow and sure. Grosfawk was just about even with the
scrimmage line when he caught and when we’d nailed him he was three
yards from our goal-line. He’d run about sixty-five yards, and there
wasn’t a fellow on our team who could lay claim to having touched him!
Dodge? That boy invented it! And he can run like a jack rabbit. He’s
a wonder, and why Wolcott didn’t find it out before that game is more
than I know!”
“Did they make the touchdown?” asked Tom.
“Yes, it took them four downs, but they finally got the ball over, and
that put the score 14 to 10. We still thought we had the game, and
we played for time and stalled all they’d let us. But, shucks, that
Grosfawk didn’t know he was licked. Of course we laid for him and he
got used sort of hard, but with only a couple of minutes left we didn’t
pay so much attention to him as we should have. So what does he do but
pull the same stunt? This time he only had about fifty yards to go,
and we made him earn them by chasing him back and forth across the
field two or three times. I nearly had him once myself. So did most of
the others. He got tired of reversing the field after a while. Maybe
he was afraid the whistle might go off by accident before he got the
touchdown. Anyway, he streaked it through our whole bunch just when it
seemed we had him, with two or three of his team interfering by then,
and dodged our quarter and went over right between the posts. Well,
that spilled the beans good and plenty. Why, we had that old game in
our pocket five minutes before! We――we’d even spent it! I guess we were
just about the sorriest, saddest, most disgustedest bunch you ever saw
that evening!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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