Page 45 - The Adventures of a Freshman

CHAPTER IX

A QUESTION OF MONEY

The great Yale-Princeton football game, which took place during the Thanksgiving holidays in New York,
was now a matter of history--and of rejoicing, to one side. But as all those interested in football know which
side won the championship that year, it is not necessary to recount the game and rub it into the losers.

Everyone, almost, had gone to see the great contest and to cheer for the team, and Princeton seemed as
deserted as in mid-summer. The Invincibles secured a huge four-in-hand coach and were half frozen driving
up Fifth Avenue to the game; but they had the privilege, granted to Freshmen on such occasions only, of
wearing the sacred orange and black--yards of it, hung all over their hats, their clothes, the coach, the driver,
and the horses. They cheered themselves voiceless, and had a time they were never to forget.

The Freshman team had played the Columbia University Freshmen in the morning, and had no difficulty in
defeating them by a large score. Right Guard Young put up a very fair, steady game, the critics said, but had
no chance to make any brilliant play, as he had hoped.

But the Deacon felt very big and important when his exultant classmates ran out at the close of the game and
carried him and the rest of the eleven off the field on their shoulders, cheering for each player by name.

He felt less important in the afternoon, when the great contest, the event of the day, took place; he wondered if
many of those flocking in realized that he was Right Guard Young of the Freshman team; again he feared that
he looked like the big green farmer that he did not want people to think he was.

The enormous grand-stands and bleachers, and the coaches and carriages, and even the neighboring houses
were jammed with thousands and thousands of eager human beings, wearing violets or chrysanthemums; and
some of the old grads had come from as far as the Pacific coast to see this manly match, which was to decide
the championship of the two best football teams in the western hemisphere. Young had never before seen so
many people at once--"more than the population of the whole county you're in," he wrote to his brother
Charlie--and never before had he been so thrilled as when long Jack Stehman made his famous tackle after
that Yale half-back had dodged past all the rest of the Princeton team.... But the game and its noise and victory
and defeat were all over now, and the two universities had returned to go on where each had left off before
Thanksgiving.

Big Freshman Young had to go on along very pleasant lines, enviable lines they seemed to many a Freshman
who longed in vain to be prominent and popular, and a member of the dashing Invincibles; but the Deacon
had his worries. It had been very fine at first to be looked up to and admired, but the novelty had worn off by
this time, and he had been hoping and hoping that his table-mates would soon begin to act toward him in the
same easy, familiar, good-fellow way they acted toward each other. Why they had not, he failed to
understand; he knew it wasn't because he was poor and ran the club; he wondered if it was because he had not
prepared for college at a large school, and hence was green and ignorant of the ways of the world. That was
one of the things that had off and on worried him, but that was not the worst; that was not what was making
him stay awake at night thinking. It was that alarming question of money bobbing up again.

He had supposed that with the club to run, which wiped out the largest item of expense, he would have
enough to worry along with until something else turned up. But his account in the Princeton bank was slowly
but surely being drained, and thus far nothing had turned up.