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Though he said this—meaning it at the moment—Dick didn’t let up on the athletic urgencies; and faithfully, in season and out of season, he labored with Larry. As sometimes happens, even in an engineering college, a Freshman class had entered with rather scanty material in it for the class teams. And, since the ’Varsity teams have to grow up out of incoming material, the athletic “scouts” were digging hard for Freshman candidates. Unhappily, however, the fellows who approached Larry always seemed to rub him the wrong way of the grain; or he thought they did, which amounted to the same thing.

After all, it was less Dick’s urgings than a word spoken by Mr. Waddell, the pattern-shop instructor, that turned the tide. It was on an afternoon while the try-outs were still going on, and Larry was doing a little extra work in the shop. Passing through, the instructor stopped at Larry’s lathe, and there was a little talk turning upon Larry’s absence from the athletic field when everybody else was there.