Consequently, when Bourne spun the coin and
Shannon decided to play with the wind, there would not be more than
seventy or eighty on the touch-line. Shannon asked me to referee, so I
found a whistle, and the game started.
It was a game in which there seemed to be two or three players who served
as motive forces, and the rest were worked through. On one side Shannon at
back, Amber the International at half, and Aspinall, the International
left-winger, were head and shoulders above the others; on our side, Bourne
and Acton dwarfed the rest.
Bourne played back, and Acton was his partner. Bourne I knew well, since
he was in the Sixth, and I liked him immensely; but of Acton I knew only a
little by repute and nothing personally. He was in the Fifth, but, except
in the ordinary way of school life, he did not come much into the circle
wherein the Sixth moves. He was brilliantly clever, with that sort of
showy brilliance which some fellows possess: in the exams, he would walk
clean through a paper, or leave it untouched--no half measures. He was in
Biffen's house and quite the most important fellow in it, and no end
popular with his own crowd, for they looked to him to give their house a
leg up, both in the schools and in the fields, for Biffen's were the
slackest house in St. Amory's. He played football with a dash and vim good
to see, and I know a good few of the eleven envied him his long, lungeing
rush, which parted man and ball so cleanly, and his quick, sure kick that
dropped the ball unerringly to his forwards.
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