“Anyway,” said Hicks, with a lugubrious
effort to grin, “Thor’s announcement shocked
the squad so much that I was not forced to explain
my Billion-Dollar Mystery!”
HICKS MAKES A DECISION
“In the famous words of Mr. Somebody-Or-Other,”
quoth T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., “something has
got to be did, and immediately to once!”
Big Butch Brewster nodded assent. So did Head
Coach Patrick Henry Corridan, Beef McNaughton, Team
Manager Socks Fitzpatrick, Monty Merriweather, Dad
Pendleton, President of the Athletic Association, and
Deacon Radford, quarter-back, also Shad Fishpaw, who,
being Freshman Class-Chairman, maintained a discreet
silence. Instead of the usual sky-larking, care-free
crowd that infested the cozy quarters of the happy-go-lucky
Hicks, every collegian present, except the ever-cheerful
youth, seemed to have lost his best friend and his
last dollar at one fell swoop!
“Oh, yes, something has got to be did!”
fleered Beef McNaughton, the davenport creaking under
the combined tonnage of himself and Butch Brewster,
“But who will do it? Where’s all that
Oh-just-leave-it-to-Hicks stuff you have pulled for
the past three years, you pestiferous insect? </i>Bah</i>!
You did a lot; you dragged a Prodigious Prodigy to
old Bannister, enshrouded him in darkest mystery,
and now, when he pushed the ’Varsity off the
field and promised to corral the Championship, single-handed,
he puts his foot down, and says, ‘</i>No</i>—I
will not play football!’ Get busy, Little Mr.
Fix-It.”
“Oh, just leave it to Hicks!” accommodated
that blithesome Senior, with a cheeriness he was far
from feeling. “You all do know why Thor
won’t play football; it is not like last season,
when Deke Radford, a star quarter-back, refused either
to play, or to explain his refusal. Let me get
an inspiration, and then Thor will once again gently
but firmly thrust entire football elevens down the
field before him!”
As evidence of how intensely serious was the situation,
let it be chronicled that, for the first time in his
scatter-brained campus career, T. Haviland Hicks,
Jr., did not dare strum his banjo and roar out ballads
to torture his long-suffering colleagues. Popular
and beloved as he was, the gladsome youth hesitated
to shatter the quietude of the campus with his saengerfest,
knowing as he did what a terrible blow Thor’s
utterly astounding announcement had been to the college.
It was nine o’clock, one night two weeks after
the day when John Thorwald, better known as Thor,
the Prodigious Prodigy, so mysteriously produced by
Hicks, had stolidly paralyzed old Bannister by unemotionally
stating his decision to play no more football.
Since then, to quote the Phillyloo Bird, “Bannister
has staggered around the ring like a prizefighter with
the Referee counting off ten seconds and trying to
fight again before he takes the count.”
