Laughlin’s heavy jaws came together. “No, we lost, and deserved to lose. But it mustn’t happen twice. It won’t, if we take hold of it right and get every man out ready to do his best and help the school on, whether he makes the team or not. If you don’t make the first, you can play on the second and learn football all the time and help a lot. A good second goes far toward making a good first. Take hold with us and try, try as Nowell did, and Melvin did, and big Curtis and all those fellows who used to be here. It doesn’t so much matter whether you make the team or not; if you don’t make it, a better man than you will, and the better you are the better he’ll have to be to beat you out.”
Lindsay’s was one of those temperaments which kindle slowly from within; the internal fire must burn fiercely before the blaze appears. The captain’s words appealed to him and stirred him; and yet as his eye rested on the gray flannel shirt, neat and fresh though it looked with the harmonious black tie, and eminently appropriate as it really was to the work that Laughlin was on his way to do, Marchmont’s sneers at the “coal-heaver captain,” and sweeping condemnation of all attempts to tie up socially “such fellows and fellows of our class,” came instantly to his mind. Theoretically he had not accepted Marchmont’s sentiments; practically they were already affecting the atmosphere of his ideas. The thought of the cynic’s scornful laugh smothered his enthusiasm like a wet blanket.
“I’ll think it over,” he said indifferently. “There really won’t be much of anything to do until next fall.”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” replied Laughlin, earnestly. “What you can do next fall depends on what you do now. Ask Doane, if you don’t believe me. Every time you do your gymnasium work you want to think: this work is for the eleven and the school. And when you’re tempted to do things outside that you’d better not do, you want to think: this is the place where the ‘no’ counts three times, for myself and the eleven and the school. That’s the way Melvin did when he learned to kick, and he made the Harvard Varsity in his freshman year just on his punting. That’s the way we’ve got to do here. Football players don’t grow wild like huckleberries in a pasture. They’re made, and made with hard work.”