Of course this fervid enthusiasm and hero-worship was all very immature, very foolish, as the general public acknowledged after it had taken time to cool off.  Yet there was something appealing about it, after all.  At any rate, the press deemed the public sufficiently interested in the subject to warrant giving it considerable prominence, and the name of Darwin K. Anthony’s son was published far and wide.

Naturally, the newspapers gave the young man’s story as well as a history of the game.  They told of his disagreement with his father; of the Anthony anti-football bill which the old man in his rage had driven through the legislature and up to the Governor himself.  Some of them even printed a rehash of the railroad man’s famous magazine attack on the modern college, in which he all but cited his own son as an example of the havoc wrought by present-day university methods.  The elder Anthony’s wealth and position made it good copy.  The yellow journals liked it immensely, and, strangely enough, notwithstanding the positiveness with which the newspapers spoke, the facts agreed essentially with their statements.  Darwin K. Anthony and his son had quarrelled, they were estranged; the young man did prefer idleness to industry.  Exactly as the published narratives related, he toiled not at all, he spun nothing but excuses, he arrayed himself in sartorial glory, and drove a yellow racing-car beyond the speed limit.

It was all true, only incomplete.  Kirk Anthony’s father had even better reasons for his disapproval of the young man’s behavior than appeared.  The fact was that Kirk’s associates were of a sort to worry any observant parent, and, moreover, he had acquired a renown in that part of New York lying immediately west of Broadway and north of Twenty-sixth Street which, in his father’s opinion, added not at all to the lustre of the family name.  In particular, Anthony, Sr., was prejudiced against a certain Higgins, who, of course, was his son’s boon companion, aid, and abettor.  This young gentleman was a lean, horse-faced senior, whose unbroken solemnity of manner had more than once led strangers to mistake him for a divinity student, though closer acquaintance proved him wholly unmoral and rattle-brained.  Mr. Higgins possessed a distorted sense of humor and a crooked outlook upon life; while, so far as had been discovered, he owned but two ambitions:  one to whip a policeman, the other to write a musical comedy.  Neither seemed likely of realization.  As for the first, he was narrow-chested and gangling, while a brief, disastrous experience on the college paper had furnished a sad commentary upon the second.

Not to exaggerate, Darwin K. Anthony, the father, saw in the person of Adelbert Higgins a budding criminal of rare precocity, and a menace to his son; while to the object of his solicitude the aforesaid criminal was nothing more than an entertaining companion, whose bizarre disregard of all established rules of right and wrong matched well with his own careless temper.  Higgins, moreover, was an ardent follower of athletics, revolving like a satellite about the football stars, and attaching himself especially to Kirk, who was too good-natured to find fault with an honest admirer.