ted--called off, I
believe you express it--football will cease permanently at Siwash. Young
gentlemen, accept defeat to-morrow as an opportunity and try to
appreciate its great benefits. That is all."

That last was pure sarcasm. Imagine an executioner carving off his
victim's head and murmuring politely, "That is all," to the said victim
when he had finished! There we were, wiped out, utterly
extinguished--legislated into disgrace and defeat--and all by a smiling
villain who said "That is all" when he had read the death sentence!

There wasn't a loophole in the decree. Sillcocks had carved the entire
football talent of the school right out of it with that little list of
his. We would have to play Kiowa with a bunch of rah-rah boys who had
never done anything more violent than break a cane on a grandstand seat
over a touchdown. The chaps who were butchered to make a Roman holiday
didn't have anything at all on us. We were going to be tramped all over
by our deadly rival in order to afford pleasure to a fuzzy-faced old
fossil who had peculiar ideas and had us to try them out on.

I guess, if the students had had a vote on it that day, Professor
Sillcocks would have been elected resident governor of Vesuvius. We
seethed all day and all that night. The board of strategy met, of
course, but it threw up its hands. It didn't have any first aid to the
annihilated in its chest. Besides, Professor Sillcocks hadn't played the
game. He had just grabbed the cards. It was about to pass resolutions
hailing Sillcocks as the modern Nero, when Rearick began to come down
with an idea. Nowadays people pay him five thousand dollars apiece for
ideas, but he used to fork them out to us gratis--and they had twice the
candle-power. As soon as we saw Rearick begin to perspire we just
knocked off and sat around, and it wasn't two minutes before he was
making a speech.

"Fellows," he said, "we're due for a cleaning to-morrow. It's official.
The Faculty has ordered it. If I had a Faculty I'd put kerosene on it
and call the health department; but that's neither here nor there. We've
got to lose. We've got to let Kiowa roll us all over the field; and if
we back out we've got to give up football. Now some of you want to
resign from college and some of you want to burn the chapel, but these
things will not do you any good. Kiowa will beat us just the same.
Therefore I propose that if we have to be beaten we make it so emphatic
that no one will eve