Читать книгу Dick Merriwell's Fighting Chance; Or, The Split in the Varsity онлайн

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“If you could only work it, Dick!” Hollister said eagerly. “Of course, I’m not trying to blame him for what’s happened. That’s all up to me. But I do know that he did his best to have me dropped, and if he got my place in the line I couldn’t stand it.”

“Don’t worry,” Merriwell said quickly. “I don’t think he will.”

He paused and looked Hollister keenly in the eyes.

“Well,” he said slowly, “have you made up your mind?”

Still Bob wavered, unwilling to take the step which, deep down in his heart, he knew would have to come.

Merriwell showed no signs of impatience. With rare sympathy, he realized what a struggle must be going on in the man’s mind. The thought of all it would mean to him if, for any reason, he were forced to give up football was appalling, and he knew that Hollister was even more devoted to the game.

“I know how hard it is, Bobby,” he said quietly. “But after a little you’ll come to see that it’s the only thing for you to do. Football—any game, in fact—is a splendid thing when it keeps its proper proportions as something incidental to the college course. But the minute it begins to dominate a man, as it has done you to the exclusion of everything else, it’s time to cut it out. You didn’t come to Yale to play football, but to get your degree and the other benefits which a college course gives a man. Think how you’d feel if you were dropped at the very beginning of your senior year. Think of the humiliation of being thrown out with such a record as you have made this fall.”