Tug had stood the praise and applause of his fellow-students, and especially the wild flattery of the Dozen, who were almost insanely joyful over his success in captaining the scrub football team and wiping the earth up with the varsity, until he was as sick as a boy that has overfed on candy.  Finally he had slunk away, rather like a guilty man than a hero, and started for his room.  Once he had left the crowd and was alone under the great trees, darkly beautiful with the moonlight, he felt again the delicious pride of his victory against the heavy odds, and the conspiracy of his deadly rival in football.  He planned, in his imagination, the various steps he would take to reorganize the varsity eleven, to which it was evident that he would be elected captain; and he smacked his lips over the prospects of glorious battles and hard-won victories in the games in which he and his team would represent the Kingston Academy against the other academies of the Tri-State Interscholastic League.

His waking dreams came true, in good season, too; for, under his inspiring leadership, the Kingston men took up the game with a new zest, gave up the idea that individual grand-stand plays won games, and learned to sink their ambitions for themselves into a stronger ambition for the success of the whole team.  And they played so brilliantly and so faithfully that academy after academy went down before them, and they were not even scored against until they met the most formidable rivals of all, the Greenville Academy.  Greenville was an old athletic enemy of the Lakerim Club, and Tug looked forward to meeting it with particular delight, especially as the championship of the League football series lay between Greenville and Kingston.  I have only time and room enough to tell you that when the final contest came, Tug sent his men round the ends so scientifically, and led them into the scrimmages so furiously, that they won a glorious victory of 18 to 6.

But this is getting a long way into the future, and away from Tug on his walk to his room that beautiful evening, when all these triumphs were still in the clouds, and he had only one victory to look back upon.

Tug’s responsibility had been great that afternoon, and the strain of coaxing and commanding his scrub players to assault and defeat the heavier eleven opposed to them had worn hard on his muscles and nerves.  When he got to his room he was too tired to remember that he had forgotten to take the usual precautions of locking his door and windows, or even of drawing the curtains.  He did not stop to think that hazing had been flourishing about the Academy grounds for some time, and that threats had been made against any of the Lakerim Dozen if they were ever caught alone.  He could just keep awake long enough to light his student lamp; then he dropped on his divan, and buried his head in a red-white-and-blue cushion his best Lakerim girl had embroidered for him in a fearful and wonderful manner, and was soon dozing away into a dreamland where the whole world was one great football, and he was kicking it along the Milky Way, scoring a touch-down every fifty years.