But wait. Who was this boy? A mountain boy to be sure. Was he through high school? Probably not. Few mountain boys are. His hopes dropped.
“But who is he?” he asked himself. “Who can he be?”
To this question, for the time, he found no answer. The boy wore a long vizored cap, pulled low. The shadows hid his face. Yet there was, Johnny assured himself, something familiar about that slender form, those drooping shoulders.
For a full quarter of an hour, awed, inspired, entranced, Johnny witnessed this moonlight duel between a boy and the champion of all butting rams. Then, with a suddenness that was startling, the affair came to an end. The boy tried a new feature of the game. A dozen swift steps backward spelled disaster. He tripped over something behind him, recovered, then straightened up just in time to receive the full impact of the irate ram’s headlong plunge.
The boy shot backward like an empty sack. At the same time there was an explosion like the bang of a shotgun.
“Good grief!” Johnny exclaimed, starting to the rescue.
But there was no need. The boy, still able to travel under his own steam, made his way across the field, to climb atop the fence and to cling there panting.
He was now not twenty feet from Johnny. But as yet he appeared unconscious of Johnny’s presence. In the final scrimmage, his cap had been knocked from his head. Johnny recognized him on the instant. It was Ballard Ball, the boy from the mystery mill.
“Well,” Johnny spoke before he thought, “he got you. But—”
He broke off as he caught the gleam of the other boy’s deep-set, dark eyes.
“I—I’m sorry,” Johnny apologized instantly. “I didn’t mean to spy on you. I saw you and Nicodemus, thought you might be that bear.”
“That bear,” Ballard laughed—his good humor having suddenly returned. “No bear’d ever have a chance with old Nicodemus. He’d be knocked out cold in the first round.”
“I believe it,” Johnny began sliding along the fence. “But say!” he exclaimed. “Where did you play football?”
“I never did, not very much, you see,” Ballard laughed. “We tried it over at the Gap. It went fine until Squirrel-Head Blevins called Blackie Madden a name he didn’t like. Blackie went home and got a gun. If the teacher hadn’t caught Blackie with it, Squirrel-Head wouldn’t be living now. So that’s all the football there was.”