Chapter X. Neil Makes the Varsity - Page 2

was favoring Erskine, and Woodby's lighter men were slower and slower in finding their positions after each pile-up. Then, with the pigskin on Woodby's twenty-eight yards, Neil was given the ball for a try outside of right tackle, and by brilliantly leaving his interference, which had become badly tangled up, got safely away and staggered over the line just at the corner. The punt-out was a success and Devoe kicked goal, making the score 12 to 11 in Erskine's favor. For the rest of the half the home team was satisfied to keep Woodby away from its goal, and made no effort to score. Woodby left the field after the fashion of victors, which, practically, they were, while the Erskine players trotted subduedly back to the locker-house with unpleasant anticipations of what was before them--anticipations fully justified by subsequent events. For Mills tore them up very eloquently, and promised them that if they were scored on by the second eleven before the game with Harvard he'd send every man of them to the benches and take the second to Cambridge.

Neil walked back to college beside Sydney Burr, insisting that that youth should take his hands from the levers and be pushed. Paul had got into the habit of always accompanying Cowan on his return from the field, and as Neil liked the big sophomore less and less the more he saw of him, he usually fell back on either Ted Foster or Sydney Burr for company. To-day it was Sydney. On the way that youth surprised Neil by his intelligent discussion and criticism of the game he had just watched.

"How on earth did you get to know so much about football?" asked Neil. "You talk like a varsity coach."

"Do I?" said Sydney, flushing with pleasure. "I--I always liked the game, and I've studied it quite a bit and watched it all I could. Of course, I can never play, but I get a good deal of enjoyment out of it. Sometimes"--his shyness returned momentarily and he hesitated--"sometimes I make believe that I'm playing, you know; put myself, in imagination, in the place of one of the team. To-day I--to-day I was you," he added with a deprecatory laugh.

"You don't say?" cried Neil. Then the pathos of it struck him and he was silent a moment. The cripple's love and longing for sport in which he could never hope to join seemed terribly sad and gave him a choking sensation in his throat.

"If I had been--like other fellows," continued Sydney, quite cheerfully, "I should have played everything--football, baseball, hockey, tennis--everything! I'd give--anything I've got--if I could just run from here to the corner." He was silent a minute, looking before him with eyes from which the usual brightness was gone. Then, "My, it must be good to run and walk and jump around just as you want to," he sighed.

"Yes," muttered Neil, "but--but that was a good little run you