Another week went by, and the new player’s ambition began to wane. He didn’t mind the hard knocks and the hard words; he was willing to work and wait and play with all his might; but it did seem an unfair handicap to pit him against a veteran player, a stronger and better-trained line, the head coach and the captain, and still expect him to distinguish himself. Laughlin had paid him but little attention during the last week. The captain still made occasional suggestions, mostly in the form of frank and unadorned condemnation of methods that were wrong, with now and then a word of praise as a relish; but the old intimate relation in which they had discussed the football campaign as a thing in which the two had a similar interest, no longer existed. Was Laughlin too much absorbed to notice him? Or had he already made up his mind that Lindsay was of no use?
“Why didn’t you try for tackle, Lindsay?” asked Jackson, the quarter-back, that afternoon, as the two stood briskly rubbing themselves in the corner of the shower-bath drying room. “There isn’t much show at guard against a man like Butler.”
“Because Dave wanted me to play guard,” answered Wolcott, sharply. He had been puzzling over that very question himself.
“Did he?” answered Jackson, in a tone of surprise. “I wonder why.” And then, after considering a few seconds, he added: “I guess he thought ’twould be better to have a good solid centre on the second to buck against than another green tackle for the first. I guess he’s right, too. It’s rather hard on you, though, isn’t it?”
Wolcott forced a laugh. “It makes no difference to me where I play. I never expect to get beyond the second, anyway.”
Wolcott’s attention wandered in the recitation that afternoon, and he went to his room after dinner in distinctly low spirits. He had dreamed of making the eleven. Indifferently as he had spoken to Jackson, he could not deny that the hope had been in his heart daily for the last six months. All the labor and training of the summer had been undergone with this prize before his eyes. If Dave was disappointed in him, he was still more disappointed in himself; but in any case he must bear his fate like a man, not whine over it like a child. After all, if he did his best, his absolute best, and did not compass his ambition, he had nothing to be ashamed of. He certainly wanted the best team put into the field, and if his greatest service to the team lay in his furnishing a “good, solid centre on the second for the first to buck against,” why should he hesitate?