“For the love of Mike, Amy, shut up!” pleaded Clint.  “You talk so much you don’t say anything!  Besides, you told me once you used to play yourself when you first came here.”

“So I did,” agreed Amy calmly.  “But I saw the error of my ways and quit.  In me you see a brand snatched from the burning.  Why, gosh, if I’d kept on I’d be a popular hero now!  First Formers would copy my socks and neckties and say ‘Good morning, Mister Byrd,’ and the Review would refer to me as ‘that sterling player, Full-back Byrd.’  And Harvard and Yale and Princeton scouts would be camping on my trail and offering me valuable presents and taking me to lunch at clubs.  Oh, I had a narrow escape, I can tell you!  When I think how narrow I shudder.”  He proved it by having a sort of convulsion on the window-seat.  “Clint, when it’s all said and done, a fellow’s a perfect, A-plus fool to play football when he can enlist in the German army and die in a trench!”

“I got away for twenty yards this afternoon and made a touchdown,” proclaimed Clint from between swollen lips, trying to keep the pride from his voice.

Amy threw up his hands in despair.

“I’ll say no more,” he declared.  “You’re past help, Clint.  You’ve tasted blood.  Go on, you poor mistaken hero, and maim yourself for life.  I wash my hands of you.”

“You’d better wash them of some of that dirt I see and come to supper,” Clint mumbled.  “Gee, if I’d talked half as much as you have in the last ten minutes I’d be starved!”

CHAPTER IV

CLINT CUTS PRACTICE

Brimfield played the first game on her schedule a few days later, winning without difficulty from Miter Hill School in ten-minute periods by a score of 17 to 0.  There was much ragged football on each side; but Brimfield showed herself far more advanced than her opponent and had, besides, the advantage of a heavier team.  Clint looked on from the bench, with some forty others, and grew more hopeless than ever of making good this year.  His present status was that of substitute tackle on the third squad, and it didn’t look as though he’d get beyond that point.  If he had expected his introduction to Jack Innes to help his advancement he must have been disappointed, for the Captain, while he invariably spoke when he saw him, and once inquired in the locker-room how Clint was getting along, paid little attention to him.  So far as Clint could see, nobody cared whether he reported for practice or not.  Toward the end of an afternoon, when the third was fortunate enough to get into a few minutes of scrimmage with the second, Clint usually finished up at right or left tackle.  But he couldn’t help thinking that were he not there his absence would go unremarked.  Even on the to him memorable occasion when he broke through the second’s line on a fumble and, seizing the ball, romped almost unchallenged over the last four white lines for a touchdown the incident went apparently unnoticed.  One or two of his team-mates patted him approvingly on the back, but that was all.  Clint was beginning to have moments of discouragement.