With the departure of Fish, the east well of Hale ceased to be a scene of mysteriously fomented disturbance. Mr. Alsop, having been wofully betrayed through blind following of his own prejudices, resolved to be more cautious in forming opinions in the future, and less hasty in the performance of duty. He had yet to learn that a teacher may make a reputation in a week which he cannot live down in the whole subsequent school life of his pupils.

For Sam now began the busiest, most exciting period of the year. The college examinations were near enough to render devotion to lessons a matter of personal advantage; the outdoor school meet and the track contest with Hillbury challenged his zeal and ambition. Besides these serious interests, May and June offered their usual lavish opportunities for innocent but distracting amusement, ranging from tennis and scrub ball games and long walks, to the convention of wags, wits, and philosophers, which gathered every pleasant evening after dinner on the high steps of Carter, and intermittently sang songs and discussed men and things—mostly men—to the vast entertainment of the listeners. Here Brantwein, released for the time from the burden of the peanut basket, was a protagonist, with socialism as a general theme and every exposed head as a target for his verbal shillaleh. The crowd yelled applause for every crack he gave, and lavished double measure on every telling return.

Good practice in the high hurdles amounts to something more than daily exercise in starting, running, and jumping. The course is one hundred and twenty yards over ten hurdles, with fifteen yards clear before the first, and fifteen more after the last. Between each pair of hurdles lies a distance of ten yards; each barrier is three feet and six inches high. The runner must clear the barrier in such a way as to interrupt his advance as little as possible, by rising neither too high nor too low, by taking his jump neither too long nor too short, by landing in the right position, by adjusting his inter-hurdle strides to the distance and to his own powers. It has been known since the race was first practised that the average man must take three strides between hurdles; but the length of the jump, and the proper arrangement of short and long strides, are even now matters of dispute.

Collins’s theory, which of course Sam followed, was that the jump should be short rather than long. He insisted that to prolong the distance covered while in the air on the force of previous effort is to cut short the opportunity to use the legs; to overjump is to introduce into the race a series of dead periods when the runner is passively waiting for his feet to touch the ground before he can become active again. So the trainer labored with Sam to bring him over the hurdle to the ground at the earliest possible moment; to teach him the quick rotary whirl of the legs that neither drags nor interferes with the step, the forward leg doubled and slightly swung, the other brought quickly around after it in a wide arc; to force him to take the landing step short—in order to bring his feet under him—and to stretch the other two strides. Sam’s handicap was his slowness and a tendency to make his strides too long. His advantage lay in staying power; he could do twelve hurdles as well as ten. So the clever trainer worked him day after day on starts and over two or three hurdles, and once a week sent him over eleven.

“You don’t put me over the course enough, it seems to me,” complained Sam, one day. “I’m tired of that everlasting thirty-five yards.”

“If you can do two hurdles right, you can do ten,” answered Collins, calmly. “If you can’t do the first two, you can’t do any.”

“I should say that it’s speed between that I lack,” pursued Sam. “I get over the hurdles pretty well, but I lose momentum somewhere between jumps.”

“You take your first step too long, as I keep telling you. Four to five feet is all you ought to cover in that first stride after the hurdle. If you come down right and take the first step right, you can put speed into the other two and get just the right take-off to drop you over the next hurdle. Speed will come in time.”

“I wish it would!” lamented Sam.

“It isn’t all in fast running,” said Collins, “nor half. Taking the hurdles is the main thing. There’s really only two running steps between, if you throw out the short step. And what a fast runner makes in those two steps, he’ll more than lose on the hurdles, if he doesn’t do ’em right. Three feet lost on a hurdle is thirty feet on the race, a good second and a fifth. No one wins a race by that much. The work that’s cut out for you is to get your jump so near perfect that you don’t lose anything in going over. Then just steady, hard running will put you ahead of the fellow who hasn’t your staying power.”

“We all seem to have about the same amount of that.”

Collins hesitated. His first impulse was to deny Sam’s statement; his second to let it go unchallenged. After all, there was nothing so important for Sam’s progress as that he should continue to think that everything depended on hard, steady work. Sam was one who could stand work. While he was occasionally discouraged, he never became despondent; he did not grow irritable under defeat nor refractory at criticism. He disclaimed high expectations, smiled at discomfiture, and plodded on.

The school meet came and went, bringing little glory to the name of Archer. That Fairmount would beat him in the hurdles, Sam fully expected. The start was fairly even, but Fairmount was in the air above the first hurdle when Sam was leaving the ground on his first spring; at the fifth Fairmount was yards ahead. Yet at the tenth, strange to say, Sam had almost caught him. Archer finished less than two yards behind the leader, and fully six ahead of Sanderson, his nearest pursuer. Fairmount’s time was sixteen and four-fifths. So Sam, according to Collins’s estimate, had come close to seventeen seconds, a gain of at least a second by a year’s work. From this result, with which the trainer was fully satisfied, Sam was at least inclined to draw more consolation than discouragement. He had still another school year before him.

It was his defeat in the pole vault which caused him the most chagrin. Jones, of course, rose like a bird soaring against the wind; his light, lithe body arched the rod gracefully at ten feet, six. Sam surmounted nine feet, six—but Mulcahy reached nine feet, ten. It was not jealousy that beset the defeated vaulter, nor wounded pride, nor the mean ill-will that grudges success to a rival. Sam’s heart had harbored only feelings of congratulation towards Fairmount, who had beaten him in the hurdles; his enthusiasm over Jones’s achievements was genuine and whole-souled. These two were sportsmen through and through, to whom the joy of the contest, the delight of winning, the promise of gaining points for the school in the meet with Hillbury, constituted the whole stimulus and reward. Mulcahy cared for none of these things. At heart it mattered not two straws to him whether the blue or the red triumphed, as long as his own advance was assured. To Mulcahy, athletics were but a ladder by which he could mount, the means necessary to a desired end. He wanted prominence in school, distinction, prizes. He wanted the Yale Cup as the crowning honor of his school career. To win this, he professed an enthusiasm for athletics, as the unscrupulous politician professes the principles that win votes.

Ten days later Sam took part in his first contest with Hillbury. In the interval he did some work in preparation for the event which is not set down in the coaching directions. When Collins received from the secretary of the Academy the list of those whose work was “up” and who were therefore allowed to compete, the names of Fairmount and Chouder were missing. There was a hurried consultation with the faculty, resulting in the announcement that if the backward work were made up to the satisfaction of teachers by the day before the games, the prohibition on the two men would be removed. Bruce called upon Mulcahy, who was known to have had experience in tutoring. Mulcahy could not possibly find time for extra work. Then Sam undertook the case of Fairmount, and Moorhead volunteered to coach Chouder. Both tutors labored early and late to bring their charges into a condition acceptable to the authorities. Moorhead had the more difficult task, for Chouder was behind in two subjects, and learning came harder to his slow, unreceptive mind than chopping wood or running races to his sinewy body. It was Moorhead’s first opportunity to do something tangible for the school athletics, and he gave the best that was in him, freely and patiently, hour after hour, oblivious to the fact that there could be no public recognition of his service, no personal glory in victory. Fairmount triumphed over his geometry with a C, while Chouder, to his infinite satisfaction and the relief of his anxious tutor, scraped through his examinations on a brace of D’s.

So it happened that Moorhead, as he perched high on the cheering section at the Hillbury games, felt that he had more part in the contests than those who sat about him, mere longing hearts and vociferous units in the chorus. When Chouder took the two-twenty yards from Merton of Hillbury, running from the start like a predestined victor, Moorhead thrilled with the consciousness that it was in part his race and his victory. In the low hurdles his candidate was not so successful, as the redoubtable Kilham of Hillbury led at the finish, though Chouder pressed him hard. Fay and Shirley had to content themselves with second and third places in the hundred yards, but Bruce won the quarter in a grand burst of speed that cut the time down close to fifty seconds, and Weatherford made sure of the half-mile. Jones sailed deftly over the vaulting bar at ten feet, seven, with Mulcahy a safe third at nine feet, eight. And old Brandy Brantwein, feeling unusually free from the trammels of society by reason of the absence of the peanut basket, showed what socialism will do for a man by throwing the hammer four feet beyond the best cast of the Hillbury individualist, and putting himself into second place in the shot contest.

The general issue was already decided when the high hurdles were called. Seaton had won. Under the inspiration of victory, Sam felt that he, too, might achieve something worth while. His start was good, but at the second hurdle the two outside men, Kilham and Fairmount, were already ahead of him. At the fourth they were still farther ahead, but he pressed steadily on, clearing his hurdles by two inches, dropping short and driving himself forward with the routine pace. At the seventh hurdle only Kilham kept his distance; Fairmount was nearer. The tenth he passed at Fairmount’s side, with Kilham but a stride beyond. In the finish, Fairmount sprinted better and gained a yard, but was still behind the leader by the thickness of his body.

“If you hadn’t coached up Fairmount so that he could pass his condition, you’d have been second in that race instead of third,” remarked Duncan, as they discussed the events of the day, after the celebration.

“And we should have lost one point,” answered Sam.

“One point wouldn’t have made any difference in the result. You deserved second, anyhow, by the way you’ve worked. Fairmount will be gone next year, and then you’ll have things your own way.”

“There’s Kilham,” said Sam, wistfully. “He’s only an upper middler. He’ll be in Hillbury next year and beat me out again; then he’ll go to Yale and I to Harvard, and he’ll beat me four years more. That’s what I’m up against!”

“Oh, cheer up!” returned Duncan. “You’ve improved a lot this year. You may beat him all to pieces next year. They said that your race to-day was in mighty good time, and you weren’t much behind Kilham.”

Sam shook his head with a smile of resignation. “I haven’t won a thing this year, and I probably shan’t do any better next, but I’m going to keep right on. I’m too much used to losing to mind, and there’s always a chance that by a fluke I may win something.”

“It’s a shame!” thought Duncan to himself. “I’d never coach a fellow up just so that he could take a prize from me, if the school never won an extra point.”