Play the Game! Part 6

"Lie down on the couch."

"Oh, I don't want to lie down, Skipper--I'll just----"

"Lie down on the couch, Jimsy!" She herded him firmly to the couch, tucked a soft, flat pillow under his head, threw a light afghan over him. Then she opened a window wide to the wet sweet air and drew the other shades down, and came to sit on the floor beside him, talking all the time, softly, lazily, about the English lady novelist who didn't take sugar "to" her porridge ... about the giddy mocking bird, singing in the rain ... about a new book which Carter thought was wonderful and which she couldn't see through at all ... until his quick, burdened breathing yielded to a long relaxing sigh like that of a tired puppy, and the hope of L. A. High and the last of the "Wild Kings" slept. She mounted rigid guard over him for three hours, banis.h.i.+ng the returned stepfather and house-guest, keeping her noisy little brothers at bay.

She had ordered a strictly training-table luncheon for one o'clock for her charge, and while the clock was striking the hour Kada brought the tray. Jimsy was still sleeping. Honor looked at him, hesitating, then she ran to the piano and struck her stepfather's rousing chords and began to sing:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night, Ten to make and the match to win--

At the first line he stirred, at the second he rubbed his eyes, and at the third he was sitting up and listening. She swung into the finish, and as always, it ran away with her. She had never gotten over the first choking thrill at the words:

_Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!_

Jimsy King came to stand beside her. His hair was mussed and his face flushed, and there was a sleep-crease on one cheek, but his eyes were clear and steady. "It's O. K., Skipper," he said. "I can. I'm going to.

I will."

Carter Van Meter drove Honor and Stephen Lorimer and Miss Bruce-Drummond in his newest car and the four of them sat together on the edge of the rooting section.

It was still raining a little, teasingly, reluctant to leave off altogether, and the field was a batter of mud. The rooting section of L. A. High was damp but undaunted. The yell leaders, vehement, piercingly vocal, conducted them into thunderous challenges:

_Ali beebo! Ali by-bo!_ _Ali beebo by-bo b.u.m!_ _Catch 'em in a rat trap,_ _Put 'em in a cat trap,_ _Catch 'em in a cat trap,_ _Put 'em in a rat trap!_ _Ali beebo! Ali by-bo!_ _Ali beebo by-bo b.u.m!_

The bleachers rocked and creaked and swayed with the rhythm of it. "My word!" said Miss Bruce-Drummond. She listened fascinatedly to their deafening repertoire. Greenmount's supporters, a rather forlorn little group of subst.i.tutes, with the coach and trainer and a teacher or two, and a pert fox terrier wearing their colors on his collar, elicitated a brief, pa.s.sing pity from Honor. They looked strange and friendless, these smart Northern prep-schoolers. The L. A. rooters conscientiously gave their opponents' yell and received a spatter of applause. The Northerners trotted out on the field and were hospitably cheered.

"There, Stepper," said Honor, tensely, "that's Gridley--the tallest one,--see? Last on the right?"

"So, that's the boy with the beamish boot, eh?"

"Yes. He mustn't get a chance. He _mustn't_."

Miss Bruce-Drummond looked at her friend's stepdaughter. "You're frightfully keen about it, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Honor, briefly.

"I daresay I shall find it very different from Rugby, but I expect I shall be able to follow it if you'll explain a bit."

Honor did not answer. She was standing up, yelling with all the strength of her l.u.s.ty young lungs, as the Southern champions came out. Then the rooting section made everything that they had said and done before seem like a lullaby; it seemed to the Englishwoman she had never known there could be such noise. Her head hummed with it:

King! King! King!

K-I-N-G, King!

G-I-N-K, Gink!

He's the King Gink!

He's the King Gink!

He's the King Gink!

K-I-N-G, King! KING!

Honor sat down again, her fists clenched, her lower lip between her teeth. If only it were time to begin ... time for the kick-off! This was always the worse part, just before.... It was L. A.'s kick-off. The whistle sounded, mercifully, and with the solid, satisfying impact of leather against leather she relaxed. It was on. It had started. All the weeks of waiting for the champions.h.i.+p game were over. This was the game, and it was just like any other game; Jimsy was there--here, there, everywhere, and they would fight, fight. And you couldn't beat L. A.

High. The mud was horrible. It took grace and fleetness and made a mock of them; both teams were playing raggedly. Well, of course they would, at first; it was so frightfully important. They would shake down into form in a moment.

"I don't believe," cut in the fresh, crisp voice of Miss Bruce-Drummond, "that I quite understand what a 'down' is. Would you mind explaining it to me?"

"Why," said Honor, without turning her head, "they have three downs in which to make----" she was on her feet again, screaming, "Come on! Come on! Come--oh----"

Jimsy King, with the mud-smeared ball under his arm, had made fifteen precious yards before he was tackled. He was up in a flash, wiping the mud off his face, grinning. The rooters split the soft air asunder.

Stephen Lorimer looked at Honor and at Carter Van Meter. He always felt sorry for the boy at a game; he looked paler and frailer than ever in contrast with the hearty young savages on the field, and he was never able really to give himself to the agony and wild joy of it.

Honor forced herself to sit still, her elbows on her knees, her hot face propped on her clenched hands. They were playing better now, all of them, but it wasn't brilliant football; it couldn't be. It would be a battle of dogged endurance.

"I say, my dear, is _that_ a down?" the English novelist wanted to know.

"Yes," said Honor, patiently. "That's a down, and now there'll be another because they have----" again she cut short her explanation and caught hold of her stepfather's arm. "Stepper! Look! _Gridley isn't playing!_"

He stared. "Really, Top Step? Why, they surely----"

"I tell you he isn't playing. See,--there he is, on the side-lines, in the purple sweater!"

"Well, so much the better for L. A.," said Carter, easily.

Honor shook her head. "I don't understand it." She began, oddly, to feel herself enveloped in a fog of depression, of foreboding. Again and again her eyes left the play to rest unhappily on the silent figure in the purple sweater. Jimsy was playing well; every man on the team was playing well; but they were not gaining. Jimsy King, on whose heels were always the wings of Mercury, could not get up speed in that mud,--a brief flash, no more. She began to bargain with the G.o.ds of the gridiron; at first she had been concerned with scoring in the first five minutes of play; then she had remodeled her pet.i.tion ... to score in the first half. Now, her throat dry, she was aching with the fear of being scored upon ... counting the minutes yet to play, speeding them in her heart. It was raining hard again. The rooting section, in spite of the frantic effort of the hoa.r.s.e yell leaders, was slowing down. What was it?--The rain? The mud? Was Jimsy not himself, not the King Gink? Was his heart with his father in the darkened room in the old King house?

"Of course, I'm not up on this at all, but I'm rather afraid your young friends are getting the worst of it, my dear!" said Miss Bruce-Drummond, cheerily.

"It's the longest first half I ever saw in my life," said Honor, between clenched teeth.

"Ah, yes,--I daresay it does seem so to you, but I expect they keep the time very carefully, don't you?" She looked the girl over interestedly.

"The psychology of this sort of thing is ver-r-ry entertaining," she said to Stephen Lorimer.

"Less than five minutes, T. S.," said her stepfather, comfortingly.

"You know, I'm afraid you'll think me fearfully dull," said the Englishwoman, conversationally, "but I'm still not quite clear about a 'down.' _Would_ you mind telling me the next time they do one?--Just when it begins, and when it ends?"

"One's ended now," said Honor, bitterly, "and we've lost the ball,--on our twenty yard line. We've lost the ball."

"Ah, well, my dear, I daresay you'll soon get it back!"

Honor sprang to her feet with a cry which made people turn and look at her. "Look there! _Look!_ See what they're doing?" One of the Greenmount players had been called out by the coach and had splashed his way to the side-lines, to be patted wetly on the back and wrapped in a damp blanket. That was well enough. That was the usual thing. But the unusual, the astounding thing was that two of the Greenmount team had slopped to the side-lines and picked up Gridley, divested now of his purple sweater, bodily, in their arms, and carried him, dry-shod, over the slithering mud. Honor gave a gasping moan. "I _knew_...." There was a dead, sick silence on the bleachers. The rain sluiced down. Somewhere in a near-by garden another giddy mocking bird sang deliriously in the stillness. Tenderly as two nurses with a sick man, the bearers set Gridley down. Slowly, solemnly, he stepped off the distance to the quarter back; briskly, but with dreadful thoroughness, the men who had carried him wiped the mud from his feet with a towel and took their places to defend him from the wild-eyed L. A. men, poised, breathless, menacing. There was a muttering roar from the bleachers, hoa.r.s.ely pleading, commanding--"Block-that-kick! _Block-that-kick!_ BLOCK-THAT-KICK!" The kneeling quarter back opened his muddy hands; the muddied oval came sailing lazily into them.... There was the gentle thud of Gridley's toe against the leather, and then--unbelievably, unbearably, it was an accomplished fact, a finished thing. Gridley had executed his place kick. They were scored on. It stood there on the board, glaring white letters and figures on black:

GREENMOUNT 4 L. A. HIGH 0