The Fumbling Phantom

IX

The Monday skull session was omitted, after out-of-town games. Tuesday, Snub only sent them through light signal drills. Wednesday was the first scrimmage. On Wednesday Bill put on a show.

He ran wild against the B’s, with Zomby pitching, — with Hustling Mike hurling ’em, long and short. Bill never missed a single completion.

He scored five times; twice, after the catch, weaving his way through a trio of second-string tacklers for twenty-five or better, to tote into pay territory.

Snub even went so far as to warn him:

“Don’t know how much of that stuff you’ve got, Cady. But don’t burn it all up. We’ll need some of it against Idaho. They have a ram-jet overhead attack themselves.”

Bill said, solemn-faced: “Plenty more where that came from Coach.”

Garret called the shot on Idaho; the Vandals came into the Stallion’s stadium with a dazzling display of lateral-forwards from the double-wing, a brace of very slippery receivers and a passer who looked like Otto Graham when the Clevelander was at his hottest.

The Vandals scored, early in the second period, to take a 7 point lead. But less than two minutes later Bill took a looping thirty-yarder from Hustling Mike at mid-field, outraced the Idaho safety man to the pay stripe.

The stadium began to whoop it up. The cheering section began unison chirping: “Cadydidit!.. Cadydidit!.. Cadydidit!”

He did it twice more in the second half. Once on a cross-over Thirty-two, with Zombie pitching, — once on an impossible interception that he couldn’t ever have made without the freedom of movement allowed him by the absence of those cumbersome shoulder-pads.

It wound up a comparative walkover, 36–13 for the Stallions, — and next morning Bill’s appetite for headlines began to be satisfied again.

The fat, black type with CADY CARRIES OVER TWICE and CADY-ZOMBROROWSKI COMBO HITS 8 OUT OF 11 began to appear in his clipping envelope more regularly.

The press notices didn’t exactly compensate for some of the other things he was missing, — but they helped. Anyhow, he’d completely given up any idea of hearing from Lou Ann, — after that collision with Walch, senior.

Why her old man had taken the occasion of that single, brief, uninvited appearance Bill had made at Lou Ann’s home to make such broad insinuations against Snub, — that Bill couldn’t dope out. The old boy must be smart, to run all those ritzy shops and latch onto all that jack, — yet the way he’d come at Bill about Snub hadn’t been smart at all.

If there was any undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Stallion’s Head Coach, it was kept far beneath the surface by the Vandal’s defeat and the neat beating the Rampaging Remuda handed out to Montana’s mighty eleven.

On his Intimate Interviews With Sports Stars, Murf made a veiled prediction that one of the contestants in the Pasadena Punch-Bowl on New Year’s Day would be the wonder team that was horsing around with the Coast Conference competition.

A couple of sportscribes came right out flat and said the Stallions were as good as in. After Bill and Zomby pulled the California game out of the fire with a fourth period rescue act that scored two TDs in nine minutes via five completions out of ten, — the campus really started to seeth.

Stanford was the big road-block the Stallions would have to hurdle. And Stanford, on the record, was terrific times two.

An irreverent soul daubed Scalp Those Injuns on the bronze statue of the University’s famous founder. Co-eds clustered on sorority steps, chanting One More River To Cross, — with ribald lyrics referring to Palo Alto.

Thursday night, before the great Clash, as the papers were calling it, they held a giant rally in the Student’s Union. The band lifted the roof, everybody sang, everybody cheered Snub and Jersey and the other coaches. Before Snub made his fight talk, the team trooped across the stage of the auditorium, one by one.

When the cheer-leader called out, over the P.A. system, — “Bill Cady, right end,” — when Bill walked the twenty feet from one side of the platform to the other and the crowd jam-packing the smoky hall roared and whistled and stamped and clapped... something in Bill’s insides did nipups.

His heart crawled up in his throat and stuck there. He couldn’t have spoken a syllable if he’d been offered a thousand bucks a word. He couldn’t see very well in all that smoke, somehow. He stumbled over Telfer’s feet.

This queer, quivery sensation he couldn’t understand at all. Butterflies in the belly before the whistle, — they were something you got used to at the start of a game when you were tauter than a fiddle-string. But this getting all choked up just because a bunch of the boys were shouting themselves hoarse to tell him they thought he was a great guy... it was downright disconcerting. Made him wonder whether there might be something that could give you a bigger belt than having your wallet swollen with big bills.

It disrupted his whole scheme of things...