For one week, enthusiasm and excitement soared higher and higher,
and then, to use a phrase of fiction, everything fell with a dull,
sickening thud!
In vain did Coach Corridan, the staff of Assistant Coaches, Captain Butch
Brewster, and others strive to resuscitate football spirit; nightly
mass-meetings were held, and enough perfervid oratory hurled to move a
Russian fortress, but to no avail. It was useless to argue that, without
Thor, Bannister had an eleven better than that of last year, which so
nearly missed the Championship. The campus had seen the massive Thor's
prodigies; they knew he could not be stopped, and to attempt to arouse the
college to concert pitch over the eleven, with that mountain of muscle
blotting out vast sections of scenery, but not in football togs, was not
possible.
"One thing is sure," spoke Dad Pendleton seriously, gazing gloomily from
the window, "unless we get Thor in the line-up for the Big Games, our last
hope of the Championship is dead and interred! And I feel sorry for the big
fellow, for already the boys like him just about as much as a German
loves an Englishman; yet, arguments, threats, pleadings, and logic have
absolutely no effect on him. He has said 'No,' and that ends it!"
"He doesn't understand things, fellows," defended T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.,
with surprising earnestness. "Remember how bewildered he seemed at our
appeal to his college spirit, and his love for his Alma Mater.
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