ay, demanding that he be like Blake, who had died. He
breathed more easily in the quiet air of the mountains where the team
had secret practice. People stopped urging him to be like Blake; only
Diemann went over the thing again and again, explaining, reminding. Now
Thanksgiving had come, and the substitute fullback had never felt better
in his life. He would do his best, and they could not say he had not
tried.

The manager was radiant over Ashley's condition, and the other men
slapped Tom's big shoulders and said that he would put up a good game
for the College. Diemann alone seemed sour-balled. The rest of them knew
how Blake's death had broken him up, but that was no reason, Lyman said,
why he need keep nagging the new fullback about Fred. The College
realized that the two men were hopelessly different, and they were
fairly reconciled by this time. If the boy played the best that was in
him, the team might make it in spite of the odds. It was too bad to take
the spirit out of him by constantly suggesting that he play like Blake.
The manager said this to Diemann, but the coach only shook his head and
answered:

"It won't do any harm, Frank, and it may possibly work him up to
something like Fred's game."

But a week's watching at the Springs had made Diemann despondent. The
phenomenon he had witnessed the evening of the last practice had not
appeared again. He had allowed his theories to lead him away into
impossible hopes. The man on the bed was Ashley, slow, normal, in
perfect condition, hopeless, and Ashley he would remain. The chance for
a psychic manifestation ceased when Ashley's football worry was over.
Opportunity had come and gone, unfruitfully.

That afternoon, the athletic grounds were banked with great flower-beds
of people, where red and blue and yellow blossomed and faded and burst
out again as the teams swayed back and forward on the white-lined
gridiron between. The wild noise of the college yells greeting the
teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands,
the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the
hoarse bellow of the brown paper megaphones,--all this tumult had hushed
suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board
seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other
for the kick-off.

The uproar boomed forth again, and presently the Stanford bleachers
became silent from breathless watching. The first