Joe looked back unemotionally. “That so?” he asked. “Mean that I’m a Vigilante now?”
“In good standing? All my dues paid in full?”
“Well, then,” interrupted Joe, spurning the curb with his left foot and settling in the saddle, “you tell ’em I’ve resigned.”
Joe nodded as he rolled away. “Yes, you tell ’em I’ve got me a society of my own, Sam. It’s called the――the Go Get ’Em Society. So long!”
In August Hal wrote persuasively from the north, renewing his invitation to Joe. Joe was to come up and spend the last fortnight before school began again, insisted Hal. With that hundred dollars in the bank, Joe might, he reflected, allowably treat himself to that trip; but he didn’t. It would have cost him all of twenty dollars, to say nothing of two weeks’ pay at Donaldson and Burns’! Instead, Joe and Philip spent a whole five days at Camp Peejay. That is, they went out there every evening after Joe was through at the store and stayed until the next morning. Then, after an early and simple breakfast, they hurried back to town awheel, Philip on a borrowed bicycle scarcely more presentable than Joe’s. But they had all of Thursday out there and spent the day fishing, later supping on their catch of four perch and a wicked-looking hornpout.
The last of September saw Joe back at Holman’s School. He and Hal had secured 14 Routledge again and there didn’t seem to Joe much more to ask for. Unless, of course, it was a place on the football team. But that was probably unattainable. Last fall he had striven hard for some sort of recognition from the gridiron rulers and had failed. But this year he returned with unfaltering courage, reporting on the field the first day of practice and never quite losing heart. As a result of perseverance――and one or two other factors――he lasted the season through. One of the factors was Gus Billings, and, since the story is really Gus’s, suppose we let Gus tell it in his own way.
It has always seemed to me that the fellow who wrote the story of that game for the Warrensburg paper missed a fine chance to spring something new. It was a pretty good story and had only about a dozen rotten mistakes, like where it said I missed a tackle the time their quarter got around our right in the first period. I wasn’t in that play at all, on account of their making the play look like it was coming at center and me piling in behind Babe Linder. The fellow who missed that tackle was Pete Swanson, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t me. Maybe I did miss one or two, but not that one, and that time they got nearly fifteen yards on us, and a fellow doesn’t like to be blamed for slipping up on a play like that.