Page:The secret play (1915).djvu/144

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Dick's ability to connect player and position was in a way remarkable. His sleight-of-hand trick in making Guy Felker, who had been playing fullback for two years, into a competent end was still marveled at, and his elevation of Partridge from the Scrub to the First Squad had been equally successful. And now the school was watching with almost breathless interest his experiment of molding a finished quarterback from the raw material. In fact, the school found a good deal to wonder at that Fall with regard to Dick. The Norrisville game had proved pretty conclusively, fellows considered, that they had made no mistake in their choice of a coach. Those who had openly scoffed were now either silent or frankly admiring, while those who had hailed Dick's advent from the first were now noisily triumphant. The question one heard on every hand was "How does Lovering know so much football when he has never played it and never had anything to do with it?"

Dick could have told them had he chosen to. All his life he had been forced to sit by and watch other boys do things; play baseball and football and tennis, run races, leap hurdles, skate and enjoy all the other sports from which he was debarred by reason of a