Secret practice began the following day and Clearfield was set the task of learning a new formation and a number of plays from it. Dick now considered that the team was well enough versed in the fundamentals, although more than once in the ensuing two weeks of practice fellows were sent back to the dummy or drilled in other rudimentary branches when they showed signs of forgetting their a, b, c’s. Dick had not yet attempted to develop the attack beyond what might be required of it from week to week. He had spent the first six weeks of the season in grounding the players in elementary football, in developing what he called the wits of the fellows――by which he meant the ability to think quickly in all sorts of situations and act accordingly――and in securing coherence. There had been a period when every fellow played for himself, a later period when the line and the backfield played as though they were in no way related, and now there had come a third stage of development in which the entire team of eleven men played together. Absolute perfection of team-play was still lacking, and Dick was satisfied that it should be, for he was convinced that no football team ever reached the top-notch of excellence and stayed there twenty-four hours. Dick believed that the team which attained the height of its season’s form to-day began to go back to-morrow, and his biggest fear was that Clearfield High School would reach the zenith of development too early. His ambition, in short, was to trot the Purple on to the field on the eighteenth of November ready to play as it had not played all the Fall and as it could not play the day after. How nearly he would succeed in realizing that ambition remained to be seen. While he had not yet paid much attention to offense, an offense had developed naturally on the groundwork he had prepared, an offense which, found wanting in several contests, had come into its own in the Benton game. With the defense, however, Dick had started early, since, when all is said, a good defense is harder to construct than a good attack. Consequently the team’s offense was a full fortnight behind its defense, and offensively and defensively both it was far more backward than Springdale. Dick, though, was not worrying about that. It was his theory that Springdale had been developed too early and was likely to reach its top form at least a week before its principal game.