To escape unscathed without having prepared a lesson was, of course, a piece of good fortune which a boy could not expect to experience often. Before the week was out, Dunn had been pretty well gauged by his teachers, and one of the most conscientious had already begun in the simple old-fashioned way—which Dunn reviled as antiquated—to detain him after school to make up neglected work. But what he lost in prestige by classroom deficiencies—boys never charge such failures up against a good comrade—he made ample amends for by marked success on the football field, where he was generally regarded as the most promising addition to the available material which the new season had brought. Here Dunn’s own lively tongue had prepared for him a favorable reception. While he did not actually declare himself a great player, his ready vocabulary of football terms, his anecdotes of games which he had seen or taken part in, the air of familiarity with styles of play which he showed—all marked him as a veteran. Besides this, he was an end, and the eleven lacked an end. With Harrison, the captain, at one extremity of the line and Dunn at the other, the two important wings of the fighting force would be well equipped. The idea pleased the school fancy and produced a strong prejudice in Dunn’s favor. The boys believed in him because they needed him, and it was more agreeable to believe than to doubt. The first week’s work on the football field, as every one knows, is largely concerned with the individual elements of the game,—tackling, dropping on the ball, running down under punts, charging. Through these Dunn’s self-confidence and previous experience carried him with flying colors. He threw himself on the ball with admirable spirit; and the way in which he scampered down the field after punts, getting the direction of the kick by a single, quick, accurate glance over his shoulder, and fairly hugging the waiting receiver, was a joy to the beholder. In open work he was not quite so successful. He missed a few hard tackles, but he made some good ones, and the balance remained in his favor. Talbot was so malevolent as to remark that Dunn got the smaller fellows and let the big ones by, but Talbot was from aye a surly growler. The opinion which Dunn himself delivered in the dressing rooms after the first tackling practice found by far the wider acceptance. “Nobody can tackle in the open in cold blood,” he averred. “A fellow might get his man every time in a game when he feels the excitement and forgets everything but the play, and yet miss every tackle when you put him out to show what he can do. There was a half-back we had in school who afterwards made the Dartmouth eleven; he couldn’t make one out of a dozen of those practice tackles. They’re dangerous, too. If I was a coach, I’d cut ’em out altogether.”