He glanced around him at the other visible members and subs of the school eleven, but they shook their heads and shrank back.

“Well, then, I’ll have to tell you myself,” conceded Thomp, with an air of gloom.  “It’s a fearful thing.  Yet, as I’ve been through with it once, one more time can’t hurt me—–­much.”

Thomp made an eloquent pause.  Then, reaching his right hand aloft, his eyes turned toward the sky, he recited, in a deep bass voice: 

“I have pledged my honor, as a gridiron specialist, that Gridley H.S. shall lug away all the points of the game from Cobber Second.  If we fail, then may everyone who espies me mutter:  ’There goes a dub!’ May the word ‘dub’ haunt me in my waking hours, and pursue me, mounted on the nightmares of slumber!  May my best friends ever afterward refer to me only as a ‘dub.’  For if I fail the school, then am I truly a ‘dub,’ and there is no help for me.  If I fail, then may I never, so long as life lasts, be permitted to lose sight of the patent fact that I am a ‘dub’!  So help me Bob!”

A roar of laughter and approval went up from all who heard.  Coach Morton tried hard to preserve his gravity, but his sides shook, and his face reddened from the effort.  At last he broke loose.  When he could control his voice Mr. Morton demanded: 

“What genius of the first class invented the ’oath of the dub’?”

“It wasn’t a senior, sir,” Thomp confessed.

“What junior, then?”

“Not a junior, either.”

“Who, then?” insisted the submaster.

“Tell him, Sam.”

“That oath, Mr. Morton, required and received the concerted brainpower
of-----”

“Dick & Co.!” shouted the football squad in chorus.

A good-natured riot followed.

“Dick & Co. will soon get the notion that they’re the whole High School,” growled Fred Ripley to Purcell.

“They are a big feature of the school,” laughed Purcell.  “You’re about the only one, Fred, who hasn’t discovered it.  Rub your eyes, man, and take another look.”

“Bah!” muttered Ripley, turning away.  Just then the gong clanged the end of recess.

“Now, that ‘the oath of the dub’ has been given out,” suggested Dick Prescott to his chums, after school, “we ought to find Len Spencer and give it to him.  He’ll print it in tomorrow’s ‘Blade’ and that will send local pride soaring.  That’ll help a whole lot to success with the subscription papers.”

After the papers had been in circulation a week the Athletics Committee held an evening session, in the room of the Superintendent of Schools, in the H.S. building.

By eight o’clock nearly a hundred and fifty of the boys and girls had assembled.  More came in later.

The subscription papers, and the amounts for which they called, were turned in to Coach Morton.  It was soon noticed that many of the subscriptions had been paid by check.