“Well, if you’re certain of that,” answered the coach.  “But any time you change your mind, or the weather’s bad, let me know.  If you can, I’d like you to come around here again this evening.  I’ll have Devoe and the coaches here, and we’ll talk this—­this ‘antidote’ over again.  Well, good-by.”

Sydney swung himself to the door, followed by Mills, and got into his tricycle.

“About eight this evening, if you can make it, Burr,” said Mills.  “Good-by.”  He stood at the door and watched the other as he trundled slowly down the street.

“Poor chap!” he muttered.  And then:  “Still, I’m not so sure that he’s an object of pity.  If he hasn’t any legs worth mentioning, the Almighty made it up to him by giving him a whole lot of brains.  If he can’t get about like the rest of us he’s a great deal more contented, I believe, and if he can’t play football he can show others how to.  And,” he added, as he returned to his desk, “unless I’m mistaken, he’s done it to-day.  Now to mail this list and then for the ’antidote’!”

That night in Mills’s room the assembled coaches and captain talked over Sydney’s play, discussed it from start to finish, objected, explained, argued, tore it to pieces and put it together again, and in the end indorsed it.  And Sydney, silent save when called on for an explanation of some feature of his discovery, sat with his crutches beside his chair and listened to many complimentary remarks; and at ten o’clock went back to Walton and bed, only to lie awake until long after the town-clock had struck midnight, excited and happy.

Had you been at Erskine at any time during the following two weeks and had managed to get behind the fence, you would have witnessed a very busy scene.  Day after day the varsity and the second fought like the bitterest enemies; day after day the little army of coaches shouted and fumed, pleaded and scolded; and day after day a youth on crutches followed the struggling, panting lines, instructing and criticizing, and happier than he had been at any time in his memory.

For the “antidote,” as they had come to call it, had been tried and had vindicated its inventor’s faith in it.  Every afternoon the second team hammered the varsity line with the tackle-tandem, and almost every time the varsity stopped it and piled it up in confusion.  The call for volunteers for the thankless position at the front of the little tandem of two had resulted just as Sydney had predicted.  Every candidate for varsity honors had begged for it, and some half dozen or more had been tried.  But in the end the choice had narrowed down to Neil, Paul, Gillam, and Mason, and these it was that day after day bore the brunt of the attack, emerging from each pile-up beaten, breathless, scarred, but happy and triumphant.  Two weeks is short time in which to teach a new play, but Mills and the others went bravely and confidently to work, and it seemed that success was to justify the attempt; for three days before the Robinson game the varsity had at last attained perfection in the new play, and the coaches dared at last to hope for victory.