“Oh!” The Duke laughed. “You have a dry wit, my friend, a dry wit and a ready. Well, to cut out the non-essentials and the rhetorical effects, Burtis, Collins asked me if I had enticed Mr. Gibson to the ’phone. Of course I ’lowed as how I had. Then he asked me why. ‘Because,’ quoth I, ‘he was over here to spy on the team and Payson wanted to try out some of the new plays for the Broadwood game.’ ‘But you told him that he was wanted at the telephone,’ says Collins. ‘Wasn’t that a lie, Wellington?’ ‘No, sir,’ I retorted, ‘not at all. We wanted him at the telephone so he wouldn’t see what was going on at the field.’ Whereupon Collins said ‘Um’ in two or three different tones, and looked kind of funny at me. Of course I was looking as nearly like an innocent little George Washington as I knew how. ‘But still, Wellington, hardly truthful, eh?’ he asked. I considered. ‘Perhaps not strictly, sir,’ I said, ‘but we had to do something, and what else was there?’ Well, I had him stumped there! He opened his mouth a couple of times, but he couldn’t answer. There _wasn’t_ anything else, was there? Of course not. Collins saw it, too, after a minute, but he wouldn’t say so. He hemmed a few hems and hawed a few haws and smiled in his funny dry way. And finally he said, ‘Wellington, if you applied some of your ingenuity to mastering your studies you’d be better off.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Then he frowned and waved his hand, you know, like that. ‘You may go,’ he said. And I thanked him and went. Only when I got to the door he stopped me. ‘Mind you,’ said he, ‘you’re not to think that I approve of what you did, Wellington, because I don’t. It smacks too much of deceit. It would have been better had you gone to a telephone and really called him up!’ ‘I never thought of that!’ I said. Then he grinned a little, and I grinned and came out!”