r than
ever.

"Drop it, you Mammoth Cave of ignorance!" yelled Bost. "If I had your
head I'd sell it for cordwood. Drop it!"

Ole dropped the ball placidly. "Das ban fule game," he smiled dazedly.
"Aye ent care for it. Eny faller got a Yewsharp?"

That was the opening chapter of Ole's instruction. The rest were just
like it. You had to tell him to do a thing. You then had to show him how
to do it. You then had to tell him how to stop doing it. After that you
had to explain that he wasn't to refrain forever--just until he had to
do it again. Then you had to persuade him to do it again. He was as
good-natured as a lost puppy, and just as hard to reason with. In three
nights Bost was so hoarse that he couldn't talk. He had called Ole
everything in the dictionary that is fit to print; and the knowledge
that Ole didn't understand more than a hundredth part of it, and didn't
mind that, was wormwood to his soul.

For all that, we could see that if any one could teach Ole the game he
would make a fine player. He was as hard as flint and so fast on his
feet that we couldn't tackle him any more than we could have tackled a
jack-rabbit. He learned to catch the ball in a night, and as for
defense--his one-handed catches of flying players would have made a
National League fielder envious. But with all of it he was perfectly
useless. You had to start him, stop him, back him, speed him up,
throttle him down and run him off the field just as if he had been a
close-coupled, next year's model scootcart. If we could have rigged up a
driver's seat and chauffeured Ole, it would have been all right. But
every other method of trying to get him to understand what he was
expected to do was a failure. He just grinned, took orders, executed
them, and waited for more. When a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man takes
a football, wades through eleven frantic scrubs, shakes them all off,
and then stops dead with a clear field to the goal before him--because
his instructions ran out when he shook the last scrub--you can be
pardoned for feeling hopeless about him.

That was what happened the day before the Muggledorfer game. Bost had
been working Ole at fullback all evening. He and the captain had steered
him up and down the field as carefully as if he had been a sea-going
yacht. It was a wonderful sight. Ole was under perfect control. He
advanced the ball five yards, ten yards, or twenty at command. Nothing
could stop him. The scrubs represented on