"I do," replied Owen, promptly. CHAPTER XXV AS WALLY SAW IT Proud as a king, and happy as a king rarely is, Wally sat on the players' bench and stared at the throngs pouring in through the entrances and flooding the seats. On the fence over by the woods, like sparrows crowded close on a telegraph wire, was strung a line of twittering and jostling youngsters, let in by a wise manager who preferred to have them safely quiet inside rather than uproariously disorderly without. And every one of the shrill flock sooner or later fastened his eyes on Wally and demanded the reason for their comrade's elevation to the company of the gods. Such a question must, of course, be answered. Whether the answer is correct or not is of minor consequence. Some said Wally was a mascot; others that Poole was sweet on his sister; while still others were able to give melodramatic accounts of Wally's rescue of the captain from the desperate gang of upper middlers who had "pinched" him. While the argument on these points was going forward, the advance scouts of the fence brigade discovered signs of the arrival of the nines, and Skinny Flick, waving his tattered cap, led a high-pitched imitation of the long Seaton cheer, weirdly shrill and yet true and even and united. "How can those little boys do it so well?" asked Margaret Sedgwick, amused at the unexpected prelude. "Practised it, I suppose," replied Mr. Sedgwick, indifferently. And Wally not being on hand to set forth the true relations of things, Miss Margaret accepted her father's explanation, and gave the soprano cheerers full credit for patriotic forethought. As a matter of fact their facility had been as unconsciously acquired as the street ragtime which a dignified adult is shocked to find himself whistling. The Seaton urchin begins to hear the school cheers as soon as his legs are strong enough to take him where students gather or heroes battle. Classes pass before him as the generations of men before the aged Nestor. There were boys on that fence who could already have repeated the Seaton battle cries when fellows who were now leaders of elevens and nines in Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Dartmouth had just set foot in the Seaton streets. The gamin's term of instruction is long; so the cheer from the fence had the true ring. It was likewise well timed. A minute later the four cheer-leaders on the Seaton side were swinging their arms and swaying their bodies in a convulsion of energy, as they led in the first great welcome to their team; while at the heels of the Seaton players came the Hillbury nine, waking into enthusiasm the whole solid phalanx of blue. And here unquestionably was the first evil omen for Seaton hopes. Every Hillbury student produced a megaphone and turned it toward the Seaton side; the volume of Hillbury's cheer was multiplied by three. What a handicap! What a depressing evidence of Hillbury superiority!