the night before the game Uncle Joel called me to one side and said, ‘Boy, I have been watching you every minute of every game you have been in. Now if you would only pretend like there was a hundred dollars lying out there on the ground back of the enemy’s goal line and those other boys was trying to keep you from getting it, you would sure go places with a football!’ ”
Coach Dorman broke into a slow smile. “That did it . . . Not a sports writer in the business gave us an outside chance to win that game—especially with a weak sister like me in there as quarterback.
“Queer thing about that game,” the coach continued in a reminiscent drawl, “I carried the ball only on the first and the last running plays of the game; I didn’t throw a single pass, and I punted only three times. When I faced the team in the first huddle of the game I pointed toward the enemy’s goal line and said, ‘Uncle Joel says there is a hundred dollars lying loose on the ground down there. Let’s go after it . . .’ We went there on that very first play,” added the coach.
“Was there actually a hundred dollars down there?” Andy blurted out.
“There was at least eleven hundred dollars down there,” insisted Coach Dorman solemnly. “One hundred apiece for every man on the team. I mean, in satisfaction, you understand. What’s more, we kept on ‘collecting’ all afternoon.”
Coach Dorman glanced at his strap watch and became all business again. “Sorry that I’ve kept you here gabbing longer than I promised. I’ll see you at practice tonight.”
As the coach was reaching for the door to the athletic department property room, where Ted Hall was sorting football shoes, Andy took his father’s note from his shirt pocket and said, “If you’ve got time, sir, I’d like you to read this.”
“Your pet play that you dreamed up all by yourself, eh?” said Coach Dorman good-naturedly, and took the note. He read it, then glanced up with a puzzled look of inquiry. “Is this note to Mr. McCall, the principal, what you intended to show me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Andy. “That’s why I came to school early today. I mean, I promised my father that I’d talk it over with Mr. Stark before I dropped machine shop and took some one-hour subject in its place.”
Coach Dorman handed back the note—almost as if it were burning his fingers, Andy thought, and said, “Sorry, old man, but it is an unbreakable rule with me as a coach never to discuss a boy’s study schedule unless I am asked to do it by the head of the academic department. If you promised your father to talk this over with Mr. Stark, then keep your promise. But you’ll have to excuse me.”
It was one of the hardest things Andy could remember ever having to force himself to do. He looked squarely at his coach and said, “If I don’t report for football practice with the others at the end of the sixth period, sir, it will be because I will be in the machine shop for the seventh and eighth.”
Coach Dorman shook his head, said, “Sorry, no comment,” and left Andy standing there with his father’s note in his hand.
Chapter 4
Andy walked slowly from Coach Dorman’s office to the shop wing of the main building of Riverford High. He went down the steps to the basement and opened the door of the machine shop.
But the thrill that he had been promising himself ever since he was a freshman, that when he was a senior he would be running all those fine machines and making things of metal himself, just didn’t come.
He walked even more slowly the full length of the room to where Mr. Stark, the machine shop instructor, was working at his personal bench. On the wall over the bench was a row of cabinets with clear glass doors, displaying a sparkling assortment of split bamboo fishing rods and reels—all of which Mr. Stark had made himself by coming an hour early and working sometimes two and three hours after school in the evening.
Arranged on a large white cloth on the bench were the glittering parts of an almost finished fishing reel, and Mr. Stark was putting the finishing touches with a file on the S-shaped crank for it.
Mr. Stark’s hair was snow white; there was a touch of gray in his closely clipped mustache, and he wore a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that had the upper half of the lenses cut away in such a manner that he could look over them when he dropped his chin.
Out of the corner of one eye Mr. Stark saw Andy come to a halt at his elbow. Out of the corner of the other he glanced up at the big clock on the wall. He rapped the edge of his file on a block of wood to clear the chips from it and said, “Mmmm, somebody is walking in his sleep. Otherwise he wouldn’t be caught dead showing up at school twenty-five minutes before the first bell.”
Mr. Stark made one more stroke with his file, then laid it aside and took the fishing-reel crank out of the copper jaws of the vise and held it in the palm of his hand for Andy to see. “Pretty as a spotted pup, isn’t it?” he chuckled, then pretended to peer fiercely over his low-cut eyeglasses at Andy. “This is the kind of work you’ll have to turn in if you want an A plus in machine shop, young fellow. And none of this slicking up your file scratches with a piece of emery cloth.”
As though drawn by a magnet Andy felt his hand reaching out to take the fishing-reel crank from Mr. Stark’s hand.
The little instructor snapped his fingers down over the part in his palm and stabbed Andy with a stern look. “You might just as well start learning now the first rule of a good mechanic—never touch another man’s work or his tools. And remember that when you graduate from college and come strutting into a machine shop with your engineering degree still dripping wet ink. Nothing burns up a self-respecting mechanic like having the boss pawing over his tools and his work.”
Andy got another crusty look, and Mr. Stark said, “Quit standing there as if you had a muskrat trap clamped over your mouth. Open up and tell me what’s on your mind—football, I’ll bet a hat.”
Only freshmen were ever frightened—and then not for long—by the way Mr. Stark glowered and barked. But more than one new teacher, overhearing the old shop instructor “practically eating a boy alive,” had rushed in a high state of indignation to Mr. McCall.
Mr. McCall would listen to the complaint very patiently. Then he would say—without even a faint trace of a smile, “Strange as it may sound, there is no higher distinction a boy of this school can attain than to receive a complete dressing down by Mr. Stark. At the next dinner of the Alumni Association I suggest that you observe how many of the speakers attribute their success in later life to one of Mr. Stark’s person-to-person lectures.”
Which explains why Andy, who had just left Coach Dorman feeling as though the world were coming to an end, was grinning to himself as he took his father’s note from his shirt pocket. But not for anything he could think of would he have allowed that grin to show, because that would have spoiled everything. Mr. Stark had no time to waste on a boy who wasn’t at least smart enough to pretend that he was impressed.
Mr. Stark took the still folded note from Andy and grumbled, “Learn to unfold a document before you ask somebody else to waste his time reading it.” And then he proceeded to read the note.
He handed it back to Andy and said, “This is addressed to Mr. McCall. If you have decided to drop machine shop in order to chase a football all afternoon, it is no concern of mine.”
Andy said, “But I haven’t decided yet that football
