CHAPTER I



O     UT of the crater-bowl of the stadium came
        the upleap and down-dying of eruption from
        a score of thousands of human throats, but
to the blanketed braves in the locker room it was
like the reverberation of artillery pounding away
perfunctorily beyond their range.
  There in their mole-skin armour, between halves of
the season's first game, these men who carried, in
heavy responsibility, the football honour of Harvard,
were more poignantly alive to the sharp staccato
of a single voice raised in the same walls with them-
selves-the voice of the head coach, impassioned
with exhortation and accusing violence.
  The volume that eddied up and down out there
was only such sound as boils and simmers out of a
gigantic caldron of humanity between its moments of
interest-the noisy whiling away of an interval with
brass bands and cheer clubs and college yells. In-
side, the head coach was using his single voice as a
scourge and sharp-rowelled spur on the crimson
cohort.
  "It's no excuse to say that our line-up to-day isn't
the same line-up we'll send against Yale or Prince-
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