nap it. Great Scott! Say, Hogboom, come
here. When you get that ball, don't think we gave it to you to nurse.
You're supposed to start the same day with the line. We give you that
ball to take forward. Have you got to get a legal permit to start those
legs of yours? You'd make a good vault to store footballs in, but you're
too stationary for a fullback. Now I'll give you one more chance--"

And maybe Hogboom wouldn't go some with that chance!

In a month we had a team that wouldn't have used past Siwash teams to
hold its sweaters. It was mad all the time, and it played the game
carnivorously. Siwash was delirious with joy. The whole school turned
out for practice, and to see those eleven men snapping through signals
up and down the field as fast as an ordinary man could run just
congested us with happiness. You've no idea what a lovely time of the
year autumn is when you can go out after classes and sit on a pine seat
in the soft dusk and watch your college team pulling off end runs in as
pretty formation as if they were chorus girls, while you discuss lazily
with your friends just how many points it is going to run up on the
neighboring schools. I never expect to be a Captain of Industry, but it
couldn't make me feel any more contented or powerful or complacent than
to be a busted-up scrub in Siwash, with a team like that to watch. I'm
pretty sure of that.

But, happy as we were, Bost wasn't nearly content. He had ideals. I
believe one of them must have been to run that team through a couple of
brick flats without spoiling the formation. Nothing satisfied him. He
was particularly distressed about the fullback. Hogboom was a good
fellow and took signal practice perfectly, but he was no fiend. He
lacked the vivacity of a real, first-class Bengal tiger. He wouldn't
eat any one alive. He'd run until he was pulled down, but you never
expected him to explode in the midst of seven hostiles and ricochet down
the field for forty yards. He never jumped over two men and on to
another, and he never dodged two ways at once and laid out three men
with stiff arms on his way to the goal. It wasn't his style. He was good
for two and a half yards every time, but that didn't suit Bost. He was
after statistics, and what does a three-yard buck amount to when you
want 70 to 0 scores?

The result of this dissatisfaction was Ole Skjarsen. Late in September
Bost disappeared for three days and came back leading Ole by a rope--at
least, he w