dgley team, for in the days that followed,
rumors like the fables of old began to reach the school on the hill. It
was said that tacklers found it almost impossible to stop Norris, the
Jefferson full-back. Half a dozen colleges were begging him to bestow
honors upon them by making them his Alma Mater. He could run a hundred
yards in ten and one fifth seconds and he weighed one hundred and
seventy pounds stripped. In the Goodrich game time and again he had made
ten yards with two or more of the Goodrich players clinging to him as
unavailingly as Lilliputians clinging to a giant. No less fearsome tales
were told of Whipple, the Jefferson punter, and of Phillips and Burton,
the two ends.

The punter could send a wickedly twisting spiral sixty yards, and the
ends had an uncanny way of catching forward passes. Through the
newspapers, through word of mouth and by letters the news arrived,--and
it became increasingly disconcerting. Unless Ridgley wished to be
disgraced before the eyes of the world something must be done--and done
soon--to bolster up the team.

CHAPTER IV

TWO VISITS AND A THEFT

True to his word, old Daniel Holbrook drove his sorrel horse up to the
school at noon on Sunday and brought Neil Durant and Teeny-bits down to
the little white house that had been his home for thirty years. "Ma"
Holbrook was a motherly person, plump, gray-haired and smiling.

"I do hope you two are good and hungry," she said, after Teeny-bits had
introduced Neil. "We'll sit right down and keep sittin' till we're
full."

It came over Teeny-bits suddenly as he sat down at the oval table and
faced the familiar array of thick china, glassware and inexpensive
cutlery what a different life he had been leading for the past few
weeks, and he glanced at Neil to see what effect this homely air of
simplicity would have on the son of a major-general. But the football
captain showed by neither word nor sign that he noticed anything crude
or unfamiliar. Dad Holbrook whetted the carving knife briskly on a steel
sharpener and stood up to attack the two roosters. He heaped a bounteous
supply of white and dark meat and "stuffing" on each plate and passed it
to "Ma", who put on brown corn fritters and sweet potatoes baked with
sirup.

"I never saw anything look so good in my life," said Neil, and a moment
later he added: "Or taste so good, either."

Ma Holbrook beamed with pleasure, and said to herself that Teeny-bits'
friend was "real