West, left to himself, sighed lazily and fell to digging holes in the turf with his brassie.

Tiring of this amusement in a trice, he arose and sauntered over to the side-line and watched the operations.

Some sixty boys, varying in age from fifteen to nineteen, some clothed in full football rig, some wearing the ordinary dress in which they had stepped from the school rooms an hour before, all laughing or talking with the high spirits produced upon healthy youth by the tonic breezes of late September, were standing about the gridiron.

I have said that all were laughing or talking.

This is not true; one among them was silent.
For standing near by was the youth who had aroused the merriment of Cloud and Clausen, and who West had shortly before dubbed "rural." And rural he looked.