"We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly! We want Squibs Bailly!" George waved his hands, holding the column until the slender figure, urged by the spectators remaining in the stands, came down with difficulty and embarrassment to be caught and lifted tenderly up beside George. Then, with these two aloft in the very front, the wild march was resumed through the Yale goal posts while Squibs' wrinkled face twitched, while in his young eyes burned the unsurpassable light of a hopeless wish miraculously come true. XXVII Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors to work on his head. A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or Stringham? "I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game with a broken head. Lied to the doctors." George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained football clothes, bent over him. "Hello, Planter!" Lambert grasped the black hand. "Hello, George Morton!" That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really said was: "It's only what you've made of yourself that counts." XXVIII At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such devotion came from Betty. "Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the happiest man in Princeton." After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him. "You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said. "If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter for you?" "Squibs says you might have been killed." "He's a great romancer," George exploded. "Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all." She touched the white bandage about his head. "Does it hurt a great deal?" "No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut some dull lectures." He glanced at Betty wistfully. "Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?" She glanced away. "Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him and every man on the field." "That was what you wished?" She turned back with an assumption of impatience. "What do you mean?" He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for Lambert, her attitude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand again.