"Oll right," said Ole patiently. He cornered the ball after a short struggle and stood hugging it faithfully.
"Toss it back, toss it back!" howled Bost, jumping up and down.
"Yu tal me to hold it," said Ole reproachfully, hugging it tighter 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.