stopped and shook his head. "Oh, he put the harpoon into me good and hard, and turned it around a couple of times. Well, I'm done for this season."
"But, great Scott, isn't he going to let you make up—or something?" demanded Clif. "He can't keep you from playing all the rest of the season, can he? Why, there's more than two weeks yet!"
"Oh, sure, I can make up," laughed Tom grimly. "All I've got to do is get eighty or better from now on, write a nice little theme of five hundred words on Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'—five hundred, mind you!—and make up some stuff in paragraph structure that I fell down on Monday. Oh, sure, I can make up all right!"
"Well, but how long have you got to—to—"
"Friday afternoon for the theme. Heck, what's the use of talking about it? I couldn't write a hundred words about that blamed old mariner, let alone five hundred! And then getting eighty! Why, hang it, I've never got better than sixty-five in English, and I never expect to! It's rotten stuff, and I hate it. Composition and rhetoric, and the whole blamed business! No, sir, I'm plumb through!"
"How do you mean, through?" asked Clif sharply.
Tom's gaze dropped to the floor, and for a moment he made no answer. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "Well, what do you think?" he asked bitterly. "Wouldn't you call it through?" Then, after a pause. "I dare say you fellows will make Johnny Thayer captain."
