e put up a hard, steady game from one end of the season
to the other; but he had come to college with Blake, and the position
had been out of the question. Besides, there were a couple of star
halves; he was not good at end, either. So he staid on the Scrub eleven,
and worked doggedly for three years.

Diemann lay back in the car seat and aimlessly thought of his work with
the substitute the week of Fred's illness. He had done his best with
Ashley, trying to instill into him something of the other's style and
dash. He had talked with him long and carefully, showing him the subtle
points of Blake's game. During the few practices following the star's
departure he had watched the new man faithfully through every play,
giving him all his time. He was sorry for the sub. A man could be placed
in no more exacting position.

Ordinarily, such a chance would have been a god-send to a scrub player,
for the second-eleven man is the type of the Great Unthanked. Diemann
thought of the three months through which the scrub trains religiously,
sacrificing beloved pipe, or sorority dance, or week's end trip to
Mayfield, or to the Orpheum in town; leaving the "gang" singing in the
moonlit Quad, while he turns in at ten according to pledge; faring day
after day on the same service of rare beef and oatmeal water; getting
pounded and battered about over a hard field every afternoon. Ashley had
had three years of this sort of thing--and all for what? At best, to
squat in football clothes on the side-lines, Thanksgiving day, with
Blake's or Smith's sweater around his neck, waiting for the accident
that may give the game to Berkeley at the same time that it lets him
trot out on the field, while the crowd calls out to him encouragingly,
although they are sick at heart. He goes through each season borne up by
the excitement, working breast to breast with the honored 'Varsity, but
lost in their mighty shadow. When the big day comes he slips back into
the great, wild crowd that lifts the team to its shoulders; worship is
not for him, no, nor remembrance either, in that hour of homage. Such
men, to the bleachers, are but working material for the 'Varsity; the
scrub player is part of an inorganic thing--until his chance comes.

Yet, when fortune gave Ashley his chance he was not to be envied. To be
put suddenly, at the last moment almost, into the shoes of the college
hero, when the hopes of the University had been centered in that one
man, this wa