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You’d have to be a college Freshman yourself to know how this hit Larry. It is only about once in an elephant’s age that a raw Freshie is ever singled out as even a remotely possible substitute on the big team. But right there the growing bitterness got in its work. Once more he was being taken up for his brawn, and maybe a little for his brain, but not for anything else.

“I guess I’m not available,” he said, and it came out a lot more bluntly than he had meant to make it.

“All right,” returned the coach. “It’s up to you, of course.” And that ended it.

After this little talk with Brock, Larry played all the harder in the practice games—which was the way he was built. Back in the old life, which now seemed so far away, he had wiped engines in a locomotive roundhouse; and because it was a disagreeable, dirty job, he always did it just a little more than thoroughly. Here was another engine-wiping job, he told himself; and, since he had undertaken it, he would go through with it.

Matters and things ran along this way until the foot-ball season was well started. There were class games on the home field, in one of which the Freshmen, clinching their success in the bridge scrap, literally wiped the earth with the Sophomores in a score of 47 to nothing, and public acclaim—what there was of it—gave the credit, or a good share of it, to a certain red-headed, big-boned half-back, whom nothing seemed to be able to stop.