When we get licked tomorrow by half-a-dozen wickets, said Jimmy Silver, lilting his chair until the back touched the wall, don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you fellows take down what I say from time to time in notebooks, as you ought to do, you’ll remember that I offered to give anyone odds that Kay’s would out us in the final. I always said that a really hot man like Fenn was more good to a side than half-a-dozen ordinary men. He can do all the bowling and all the batting. All the fielding, too, in the slips. Silver was head of the house, and captain of its cricket team, which was nearing the end of its last match, the final for the inter-house cup, and – on paper – getting decidedly the worst of it. After riding in triumph over the School House, Bedell’s, and Mulholland’s, Blackburn’s had met its next door neighbor, Kay’s, in the final, and, to the surprise of the great majority of the school, was showing up badly. The match was affording one more example of how a team of average merit all through may sometimes fall before a one-man side… .