the subject got around to the
Ridgley-Jefferson game.

"You know I was there," said the mining engineer, "and I don't think I
ever spent a more interesting two hours. You fellows certainly had the
game developed to a fine point and though of course I, as an old
Jefferson boy, was yelling hard for the purple, I couldn't help handing
you chaps a bit when you came through. And your friend Teeny-bits--now
that I know him--measures up to the idea of what he was like, which I
got from watching him play."

"Yes," said Neil, "he comes through--you can always count on him. Every
one down at school fell for him from the start, partly, I suppose,
because he was different from most of the fellows and then, of course,
because he made good. Certain things about him attracted attention
before he'd been in school very long."

"What things?"

"Well," said Neil, "a lot of things--one is the knife mark on his back."

"The what?" asked Wolcott Norris.

"Why a sort of birthmark that looks like a knife."

The mining engineer had been looking into the embers of the fire rather
dreamily and talking in a low tone to Neil. He now half turned round and
said in a voice that showed more than casual interest, "Tell me about
it. It sounds interesting."

"Well," said Neil, "it's a mark, sort of brick colored, on his shoulder,
that looks exactly like a knife or a dagger. I noticed it one day in the
shower-bath room when Teeny-bits first came out for the football team."

"Has he always had it?"

"Yes, I guess so. I suppose it's just chance--the shape of it, but it is
such an unusual looking thing that the fellows got interested in him and
then of course there was the story about his mother being killed in a
railroad wreck. That got around school some way; Teeny-bits himself told
it, I think; so there isn't any harm in my repeating it. Some mighty
nice people in Hamilton picked him up after a train accident which
killed his mother and took him home. They finally adopted him, and gave
him their name when they weren't able to find any of his relatives, and
of course the mystery of that made the fellows all the more interested
in him."

While the former captain of the Ridgley team had been saying these words
the mining engineer had looked at him with an intentness that Neil had
attributed to the fact that Teeny-bits' story was as interesting to him
as it had been to the sons of Ridgley.

"You said that it was his mother who was killed in the