Butch Brewster, Socks Fitzpatrick, Dad Pendleton, Beef McNaughton, Deacon Radford, Monty Merriweather, and Shad Fishpaw well remembered that night after Thor's tragic decision, when they--part of a Committee formed of the best athletes from all teams, and the most representative collegians of old Bannister, had invaded Thor's room in Creighton Hall, to wrestle with the recalcitrant Hercules. Even as Hicks spoke, they visioned it again.
A cold, cheerless room, bare of carpet or pictures, with just the study-table, bed, and two chairs. At the study-table, his huge bulk sprawling on, and overflowing, a frail chair, they had found the massive John Thorwald laboriously reading aloud the Latin he had translated, literally by the sweat of his brow. The blond Colossus, impatient at the interruption, had shaken his powerful frame angrily, and with no regard for campus tradition, had addressed the upperclassmen in a growl: "Well, what do you want? Hurry up, I've got to study."
And then, to state it briefly, they had worked with (and on) the stolid Thorwald for two hours. They explained how his decision to play no more football would practically kill old Bannister's hopes of the Championship, would assassinate football spirit on the campus, and cause the youths to condemn Thor, and to ostracise him. Waxing eloquent, Butch Brewster had delivered a wonderful speech, pleading with John Thorwald to play the game. He tried to show that obviously uninterested mammoth that, like the Hercules he so resembled, he stood at the parting of the ways.
"You are on the threshold of your college career, old man!" he thundered impressively, though he might as well have tried to shoot holes in a battleship with a pop-gun, "What you do now will make or break you. Do you want the fellows as friends or as enemies; do you want comradeship, or loneliness and ostracism? You have it in your power to do two _big_ things, to win the Championship for your Alma Mater, and to win to yourself the entire student-body, as friends; will you do that, and build a firm foundation for your college years, or betray your Alma Mater, and gain the enmity of old Bannister!"
Followed more fervid periods, with such phrases as, "For your Alma Mater," "Because of your college spirit," "For dear old Bannister," and "For the Gold and Green!" predominating; all of which terms, to the stolid, unimaginative Thorwald being fully as intelligible as Hindustani. They appealed to him not to betray his Alma Mater; they implored him, for his love of old Bannister; they besought him, because of his college spirit; and all the time, for all that the Prodigious Prodigy understood, they might as well have remained silent.