The scene of the meeting was Dick Prescott's own room at his home over the bookstore kept by his parents.

The hour was about nine o'clock in the evening.
It was Friday evening of the first week of the new school year.
The fellows had dropped in to talk over the coming football season, because the week had been one of mysterious unrest in the football squad at Gridley High School.
Just what the trouble was, where it lay or how it had started was puzzling the whole High School student body.

The squad was not yet duly organized.

This was never attempted until in the second week of the school year.

Yet it was always the rule that the new seniors who, during their junior year, had made good records on either the school eleven, or the second eleven, should form the nucleus of the new pigskin squad.