“Collins out of the game?  Great Scott, Harry, that’s awful news.  And a green Freshman going to fill his shoes at the last minute.  I feel like weeping, honest I do.  Who the deuce is this Seeley?  Any kin of yours?  I suppose not or you would have bellowed it at me before this.”

“He is my only boy, Dick,” and the father held up his head with a shadow of his old manner.  “I didn’t know he had the ghost of a show to make the team until I saw this dispatch.”

“Then, of course, you are coming up with me,” roared Mr. Giddings.  “I hope he’s a chip of the old block.  If he has your sand they can’t stop him.  Jumping Jupiter, they couldn’t have stopped you with an axe when you were playing guard in our time, Harry.  I feel better already to know that it is your kid going in at full-back to-day.”

“No, I’m not going up, Dick,” said Seeley slowly.  “For one thing, it is too short notice for me to break away from the office, and I—­I haven’t the nerve to watch the boy go into the game.  I’m not feeling very fit.”

“Stuff and nonsense, you need a brain cure,” vociferated Richard Giddings.  “You, an old Yale guard, with a pup on the team, and he a Freshman at that!  Throw out your chest, man; tell the office to go to the devil—­where all newspapers belong—­and meet me at the station at ten o’clock sharp.  You talk and look like the oldest living grad with one foot in the grave.”

Seeley flushed and bit his lip.  His dulled realization of what Yale had been to him was quickened by this tormenting comrade of the brave days of old, but he could not be shaken from his attitude of morbid self-effacement.

“No, Dick, it’s no use,” he returned with a tremulous smile.  “You can’t budge me.  But give my love to the crowd and tell them to cheer for that youngster of mine until they’re blue in the face.”

Mr. Richard Giddings eyed him quizzically, and surmised that something or other was gravely wrong with his grizzled classmate.  But Seeley offered no more explanations and the vivacious intruder fell to his task of demolishing sauerkraut with great gusto, after which he nimbly vanished into a cruising hansom with a sense of having been rebuffed.

Seeley watched him depart at great speed and then plodded toward his up-town lodgings.  His sleep was distressed with unhappy dreams, and during a wakeful interval he heard a knock at his sitting-room door.

An office boy from the Chronicle editorial rooms gave him a note and waited for an answer.

Seeley recognized the handwriting of the managing editor and was worried, for he was always expecting the worst to happen.  He sighed with relieved surprise as he read: 

“My dear Mr. Seeley: 

“Please go to New Haven as soon as possible and do a couple of columns of descriptive introduction of the Yale-Princeton game.  The sporting department will cover the technical story, but a big steamboat collision has just happened in North River, two or three hundred drowned and so on, and I need every man in the shop.  As an old Yale player I am sure I can depend on you for a good story, and I know you used to do this kind of stuff in fine style.”