he ponderous brain trust that sat on this
case didn't decide it until the day before the big game with
Muggledorfer; then they practically ruled that he would have to go back
to last spring and take his chapel all over again. It took us all night
to sidestep that outrage, but we did it. The next morning an indignation
committee of fifty students met the Faculty and presented alibis that
were invincible. It was demonstrated by a cloud of witnesses that Miller
had been absent nine times hand-running because he had been sitting up
nights with a sick chum. The Faculty was inexperienced that year and let
him play; but, when it found out the next day by consulting the records
that the chum had attended chapel every one of those nine mornings, it
got more particular than ever and its heart seemed to harden.

On the day before the Thanksgiving game that year the Faculty held a
long meeting and decided that our two guards were ineligible. There
wasn't a word of truth in it. They weighed two hundred and twenty pounds
apiece and were eligible to the All-American team, but you couldn't make
the human lexicons look at it that way. They found them deficient in
trigonometry and canned them off the team. It was an outrage, because
the two chaps didn't know what trigonometry meant even and couldn't take
an examination. We had to call the trig. professor out of town by a
telegram that morning and then have the suspended men demand an
immediate examination. That worked, too; but every time we managed to
preserve a glory of old Siwash, the Faculty seemed to get a little more
crabby and unreasonable and diabolically persisted in its determination
to regulate athletics.

The next fall it was well understood when football practice began that
there was going to be war to the knife between the Faculty and the
football team. We were meek and resigned to trouble, but you can bet we
were not going to sit around and embrace it. The longest heads in the
school made themselves into a sort of an unofficial sidestepping
committee; and we decided that if the Faculty succeeded in massacring
our football team they would have to outpoint, outfoot, outflank and
outscheme the whole school. Just to draw their fire, we advertised the
first practice game as a deadly combat, in which the honor of Old Siwash
was at stake. It was just a little romp with the State Normal, which had
a team that would have had to use aeroplanes to get past our ends; but
the Faculty