“Things looked mighty good for us up to about a week before Thanksgiving. Then one day Jerry Coakley turned up missing. We put in 48 hours hunting him, and at the end of that time there was a meeting of the whole chivalry and citizenry of Kingstown in the opery hall to consider ways and means of facing the public calamity. For the whole town was stirred up. The mayor himself makes a speech, which is printed in full in the Kingstown _Record_ the next day along with a piece that says: 'Whither are we drifting?'
“Next day, after practice, Jimmy Dolan is looking pretty blue.
“'Cheer up,' says I, 'Jerry wasn't the whole team.'
“'He was about a fifth of it,' says Captain Dolan, very sober.
“'But the worst was yet to come. The very next day, at practice, a big Swede butcher by the name of Lars Olsen, who played right guard, managed to break his ankle. This here indignity hit the town so hard that it looked for a while like Lars would be mobbed. Some says Lars has sold out to the enemy and broke it on purpose, and the Kingstown _Record_ has another piece headed: 'Have we a serpent in our midst?'
“That night Dolan puts the team in charge of Berty Jones, the Cornell man, with orders to take no risks on anything more injurious than signal practice, and leaves town. He gets back on Wednesday night, and two guys with him. They are hustled from the train to a cab and from the cab to the American House, and into their rooms, so fast no one gets a square look at them.
“But after dinner, which both of the strangers takes in their rooms, Dolan says to come up to Mr. Breittmann's room and get acquainted with him, which the team done. This here Breittmann is a kind of Austro-Hungarian Dutchman looking sort of a great big feller, with a foreign cast of face, like he might be a German baron or a Switzer waiter, and he speaks his language with an accent. Mr. Rooney, which is the other one's name, ain't mentioned at first. But after we talk with the Breittmann person a while Jimmy Dolan says:
“'Boys, Mr. Rooney has asked to be excused from meeting any one to-night, but you'll all have an opportunity to meet him to-morrow--after the game.'
“'But,' says I, 'Cap, won't he go through signal practice with us?'