Interference and Other Football Stories Part 14

"Give us the dope!" ordered quarterback Slade. "We're ent.i.tled to one more time-out!"

"Now what's Speed up to?" wondered Coach Brock, who, for the past five minutes had been biting off fingernails at a rapid rate. "Looks to me like he's been knocked goofy and is delivering the boys an oration!"

With the calling of time the team snapped back into position and a new formation took shape before an astounded Coach's eyes. The ball was pa.s.sed and a hole was suddenly cracked open off left tackle. Through this hole a das.h.i.+ng Speed disappeared and then, as suddenly, reappeared in the face of Hamilton's surprised secondary defense. Two would-be tacklers were shunted out of the way by vicious Medford interference and Speed side-stepped another. The rest of the way to the goal line was unmolested and he romped across for his second touchdown of the quarter to tie the score at thirteen all!

"I never gave the boys that play," said Coach Brock. "But it's vaguely familiar. I've seen it some place before!"

"That play was shown in the Rockne picture!" informed a subst.i.tute.

Coach Brock blinked a moment, then put a hand to his head, staggered dizzily, and sat down. But he did not remain seated long for Speed Bartlett coolly toed the ball between the uprights for the point that sent Medford into the lead, fourteen to thirteen, just as the gun banged for the game's end, in one of the greatest last quarter finishes ever witnessed in the home stadium.

Phil and Milt were the first wild-eyed rooters to reach Medford's star halfback as other supporters swarmed on the field with one idea in mind--to tear down the goal posts. They hoisted a protesting Speed on their shoulders and hurried him across the field toward the Medford bench.

"Why carry me this way?" Speed shouted, looking down at them. "How about your car--is it broken down again?"

Something in the way Speed said this caused Phil and Milt to glance up suspiciously.

"How did you get wise?" Phil wanted to know.

"Never mind!" rejoined Speed. "Keep moving! Don't let this crowd catch me ... and keep me away from Coach Brock!..."

"Why?" gasped Milt. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing!" said Speed, "except I haven't had anything but a malted milk all day--and I'm darned hungry!"

"Can you beat that!" groaned Phil. "Hold up your side of him, Milt!

He's getting darned heavy!... Here we've sacrificed ourselves to save this guy's nerves ... and then, in this last five minutes, we get all upset ourselves! My stomach's tied up in such a knot that I couldn't even digest a soda wafer."

"Don't mention stomach to me," said Milt. "I'm a nervous wreck!"

"Hey!" shouted a jubilant Coach Brock, who saw that a gathering crowd was carrying the star of the game in triumph to the locker room. "Wait for me, Speed!" Then, grinningly, he held up a yellow slip of paper and signalled with it. "Don't you see--you b.o.o.b--I--I'm _coming_!"...

THE BRIGHT TOKEN

"Here, take this--it's your token of good luck," she had said. That was twenty years ago, when she was a wistful, dark-eyed slip of a girl and he a wiry, sandy-haired bundle of nerves that football authorities insisted on dubbing the best quarterback in Harvard history, a man who would certainly be accorded All-American honors at the conclusion of the season.

It was a bare hour before the game that he had met her in a secluded spot in the shadow of the stands. A cold rain was falling which, most every one admitted, made a Yale victory look overwhelmingly certain.

He could remember how the delicately traced fingers had clung to the lapel of his sweater, and how, when he had started to take leave of her for the locker room, she had restrained him.

The fingers had gone to her throat, had fumbled there an instant, and had undone the slip of a crimson bow which had been caught at the collar of her waist. Tinglingly he could recall how she had commanded him to hold out his right wrist, how sheepish he had felt when she had tied the bow about it--and yet how proud! He had kissed it then and she had laughed, a laugh of nervous admiration, and patted him on the arm. And he had gathered her into one last, impulsive embrace and whispered, "My darling wife!"

Ah, that was twenty years ago! Twenty years! And yet memory made it yesterday; for to-day Carrington R. Davies was going back--back to the scene of it all--back to witness the annual clash with the Yale Bulldogs, and to sit in the stands where he would be pointed out as one of Harvard's greatest old-time football heroes.

Every year since his graduation, C. R. D. had gone back on the occasion of the Yale game--gone either to Cambridge or New Haven--and he intended to keep on doing it as many years as he was permitted to draw breath.

As Davies took the train at the Grand Central Station, New York, he glanced apprehensively at the gray sky overhead and hoped that the weather man who had prophesied rain was wrong. Harvard would need a dry field this year to stand an even chance at winning. Her back field was light, fast, and s.h.i.+fty. It depended on a quick get-away and a sure under-footing. Yale's eleven was solid, heavy from end to end, with a stubborn defense that had allowed but two touchdowns so far that season, and a pile-driving back field that moved slowly but surely behind a battering forward wall. If it rained, Davies reflected, Harvard's last vestige of hope was due to be trampled in the mud.

And yet twenty years before, almost to the day, with a driving rain falling and Yale dangerously near Harvard's goal in the last quarter, the game locked in a grim nothing-nothing tie, a bespattered, sandy-haired youth with a crimson bow encircling his right wrist, had scooped up a fumble at his very goal line and dodged and slipped through the whole Eli team for a frenzied touchdown.

The final score of that heart-blasting contest had been five to nothing, and the sensational length-of-the-field run had clinched for the Harvard quarterback his right to All-American honors. The feat was talked about yet, wherever Harvard men gathered who had witnessed the spectacle of victory jerked from the grinning jaws of defeat. At the Harvard Club on Forty-fourth Street, New York, Carrington frequently ran into brother alumni who said, "I remember you when----" and then he was forced to listen to their versions of his crowning football achievement.

Davies found solace in going over old times. The Harvard Club was his haven of refuge. He was one of the best known men there. To enter the dining room was to nod to men at practically every table. There was a joy in feeling that he was among friends; in having his praises sung to younger grads by those who had chummed with him in college; to have his football prowess perpetuated by retelling.

It was nothing to C. R. D. that he was recognized also as one of the leading architects in New York City. He had worked hard the past twenty years, but perhaps it was not so much because he had yearned to go forward as it was to keep him from thinking too much on certain closed incidents of his life.

At times, like this morning, he found himself trying to piece together what his father, Martin S. Davies, would have told him had he not died with the words on his lips. It was only four years back. The elder Davies had been stricken suddenly while Carrington was in the West, and a wire had brought the son on the first train. He was told, on arrival, that the father was desperately ill; that he had held to the weakening thread of life and consciousness because of a strong-willed desire to impart some vital information to his son.

However, when Carrington Davies had been led into the sick room, the father, overcome with emotion, died from the shock, his fingers clutching the arms of his son, his eyes set upon his son's face, and the words: "Your wife--I--she's at----" trailing off into the darkness with him.

For days after, when all his father's effects had been painfully gone over, Davies had sat in frenzied study. It had been years since he had given serious thought to the brief, tragic romance of his college days.

He had suffered keenly for a time, but his father's counsel had held weight with him, held weight even though he could never forget the girl, nor that day of days when she had plighted her faith in him with the dainty crimson bow and he had gone out on the field of battle feeling like a gladiator. A silly, lovesick fool he had been, perhaps, on that glorious day; but no incident in his entire life thereafter quite came up to this.

When he had become older and more mature, when he had reached an age at which he could better judge the sort of woman he should marry, Davies, as his father said he would, had come upon the discovery that all feminine creatures were hopeless bores. Thus his unattached state grew to be recognized as perennial, and whatever romance he enjoyed came to him through the cultivated channels of his memory.

How angry his father had been when he had found that Davies had secretly married! The boy had written home for the family blessing and had received, by return mail, the family curse. Carrington Davies came of too good and wealthy a stock to have been inveigled into marrying a n.o.body, his proud parents told him. Why, the girl was an orphan, her parents had been dead some years, and she was employed at serving in a quaint little tea room under the brow of the university.

It was quite natural that a girl of her circ.u.mstances should have roped Davies in. Any girl who had really cared would have insisted that he wait until after graduation. Should this marriage become known to college authorities, Davies would be expelled. And then where would he be? Disgraced! His career ruined! And ruined by a girl who had cleaved to him only for the money that he represented!

Martin S. Davies made a special, hurried trip to Cambridge to make his son see all these points. And the elder man brought plenty of money to make any others concerned see as he wanted them to see. The affair was successfully hushed up. Carrington Davies, threatened with being disowned if he did not do exactly as his father dictated, had stood by powerless.

He reflected now that this had been the biggest mistake of his life.

But years of strict obedience to his parent had awed him, awed him into letting his father approach Hazel Nubbins, the girl who had so shortly before become his wife. What the elder Davies said to her or what proposition he made, the son never knew. But he recalled the satisfied expression his father wore on returning from the interview, when he said:

"It's all right, son. I've fixed everything. Now, for G.o.d's sake don't ever get into a jam like this again!"

And the next day Carrington Davies heard that the girl had left the place of her employ, pleading ill health. Weeks later, when he had come out of the daze occasioned by these happenings, Davies had been unable to obtain any information as to Hazel's whereabouts. And gradually, as the weeks stretched out into months, the whole affair shaped itself into the memory of a vaguely pleasant dream which had turned out a blundering nightmare.

Now, as he sped over the rails on the football special bound for Cambridge, his thoughts came racing back to the present at the dash of something against his window, a something that left a running streak.

"Rain!" exclaimed Davies disappointedly. "Drizzling, cold rain! The devil hang the weather man, anyhow!"

As the trip progressed the rain did likewise, true to forecast. At twelve fifteen, when the special arrived at Brighton, a stop one mile from the stadium, Davies stepped into a sullen, sweeping downpour.

There was little hilarity among the detraining football followers, and crimson colors gave way to the somber black of umbrellas. Davies raised his coat collar and pulled down his hat brim, making a dash for a store front that carried a light-lunch sign.

It seemed that almost every one else made a dash for the same place at the same time, and the race proved a dead heat with the first fifty.

These just managed to squeeze inside, Davies being about the forty-seventh by half an elbow and several sore toes. It made him feel as if he was bucking the line again; only there was little relish to it this time, with the general pell-mell and every one calling out his order in place of the familiar, "Rah, rahs!"

Just how Davies at last came by a Swiss-cheese sandwich and a cup of pleasantly hot and fragrant coffee he never quite knew. He just found himself jostled along, automatically holding out his hands when he came up against the counter, taking what was thrust into them, putting it out of sight as quickly as possible, while some one behind him was fighting for his place, and then following the path of least resistance, which led to the cas.h.i.+er's perch where the extent of his hasty appet.i.te was checked up in so many cents.

After that Davies discovered himself once more in the rain, feeling strangely alone and just a little bit dazed. It was early yet. He had half a notion to go up to the locker room and see the boys. He had done this in other years, had even sat in the dugout with them and had thrilled at the imagining that his presence had inspired them; but somehow, this day, Davies felt his inadequacy. It was a sort of left-out feeling; more than that, a sensing that his sun had set, that perhaps he had worn the halo of gridiron hero too long, and that his friends might have been humoring him.

It was such dampening, disconsolate thoughts as these that prompted Davies to hail a taxicab and go directly to the stadium. He would refrain from his usual haunts this year and, through this refraining, see if he was missed. It was quite possible, did he not remind Harvard, year by year, as to just who he was, that the old college would forget him. He must remember that the world lived largely in the present while he had been living largely in the past.

The rain had abated somewhat when Carrington emerged from the taxi and joined the wet line of Harvard and Yale enthusiasts crowding through the main entrance. There was life here; the atmosphere of expectancy that was bred by the very outline of the stadium, the concrete sides of which had rocked with throat-tearing sounds, time on time. How could one's blood help but warm, even under the pelting of rain, at the memories intrusted to the historic amphitheater of sport in which so many athletic cla.s.sics had been staged? Davies' heart leaped as he came inside the stadium and got his first glimpse of the green-sodded gridiron, now spotted with pools of water, the goal posts looking sleek.

Already the stands were alive with huddled humanity and bobbing umbrellas. Yellow slickers, dotted through the field of black, made Davies think of a checkered taxicab. He cursed himself for not having brought his own raincoat along. In years gone by he could have been wet to the skin and not minded it, but now he was conscious of a desire for dry comfort. Certainly he couldn't be getting old!