There is so much to tell you, old pal, that I scarcely know where to
start, but you want to know about the football eleven, so I'll write about
T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., and his 'Billion-Dollar Mystery,' as he calls it;
about Thor, the Prodigious Prodigy. You well know what a scatter-brained
wretch Hicks is, and how he dearly loves to plot dramatic climaxes--to
mystify old Bannister. Just now Hicks has the campus as wrathful as it is
possible to be with that lovable youth; he has originated a great mystery,
and achieved a seemingly impossible feat, and instead of explaining it, he
swaggers around like a Hindoo mystic enshrouded in mystery and the fellows
are wild enough to tar and feather the incorrigible villain!

To get off to a sprint-start, up in Camp Bannister, before college opened,
when the squad was in training camp, Butch Brewster says that Coach
Corridan one day, before Hicks, expressed a fervid ambition to find a huge,
irresistible fullback--


Here the chronicle must hang fire, while T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., grinning
at the wrath his mysterious behavior aroused, peruses those sections of
Scoop Sawyer's epistle telling of two scenes already described; first,
the one in the Camp Bannister grub-shack, where Head Coach Corridan
blue-printed the Gargantuan athlete he desired, and the blithesome Hicks
confidently requested that the Herculean task be left to him; second, the
scene of intense excitement on the campus the night that the missing Hicks
returned personally conducting that mountain of muscle, the blond-haired
Thor.

Having grinned at these descriptions, the pestiferous Hicks scanned a
picturesque description by Scoop of the events that transpired between that