"Oh, shut up! I know a mule that plays golf better than you do."

"Well, I sha'n't attempt to compete with your friends, Bart."

"There you both go, quarreling again," cried Clausen. "If you don't shut
up, I'll have to whip the pair of you."

Wallace Clausen was about two thirds the size of Cloud, and lacked both
the height and breadth of shoulder that made West's popular nickname of
"Out" West seem so appropriate. Clausen's threat was so absurd that
Cloud came back to good humor with a laugh, and even West grinned.

"Come on, Wall--there's Blair," said Cloud. "You'd better come too, Out,
and learn something about a decent game." West shook his head, and the
other two arose and hurried away to where the captain of the school
eleven was standing beneath the west goal, surrounded by a crowd of
variously attired football aspirants. West, left to himself, sighed
lazily and fell to digging holes in the turf with his brassie. Tiring of
this amusement in a trice, he arose and sauntered over to the side-line
and watched the operations. Some sixty boys, varying in age from fifteen
to nineteen, some clothed in full football rig, some wearing the
ordinary dress in which they had stepped from the school rooms an hour
before, all laughing or talking with the high spirits produced upon
healthy youth by the tonic breezes of late September, were standing
about the gridiron. I have said that all were laughing or talking. This
is not true; one among them was silent.

For standing near by was the youth who had aroused the merriment of
Cloud and Clausen, and who West had shortly before dubbed "rural." And
rural he looked. His gray and rather wrinkled trousers and his black