“Mom!” Sandy Steele called as the screen door slammed shut behind him. “Mom! It’s me. Sandy. I’m home!”
The whole crowd from Valley View High had gathered at the James drugstore that night, and, of course, most of the talk was about how the school’s football team would fare in the league competition that season, and especially how its heroes stacked up against those from the arch rivals in Poplar City.
As usual, Quiz Taylor was the center of a crowd as he spieled off the weight, height and past season’s record of nearly all the boys who would be playing for Poplar City in the coming fall.
“Honestly, fellows,” he said, his round face gloomy, “I don’t see how we can beat them. Of course, we have Jerry and Sandy, but we don’t have a runner to compare with their fullback, Tomkins.”
“What about Pepper March?” someone asked. “He scored six touchdowns for Valley View last year.”
“Yes, Quiz,” Sandy said. “What about Pepper? Where is he, anyway? You’d think he’d be here, the night before school opens.”
Quiz Taylor began to shake with laughter.
“D-didn’t you hear about Pepper?” he sputtered, his face crinkling with merriment. “Haven’t you heard about what happened to Stanley Peperdine March?”
“No. What happened?”
“Yeah, Quiz,” someone else said. “Cut the comedy, and let us in on the joke, too.”
Still chuckling, Quiz Taylor said, “Pepper won’t be home for another two weeks. A couple of the sailors aboard that ship they were on came down with one of those rare, tropical diseases. Pepper and his father had to spend the summer in quarantine.”
There was a roar of laughter at the expense of the unpopular Pepper.
Sandy Steele turned to his friend and said, “Well, Jerry, we may have had a stormy voyage, but I’ll bet we had a better summer than Pepper did.”
Transcriber’s Notes
- Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.
- Silently corrected obvious typographical errors; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.