THE BOXFORD GAME

The first cold snap gave way again to Indian summer with just enough northwest wind to make good football weather. The practice went on diligently. Lesser rivals came week by week to Deal and literally and metaphorically bit the dust ere the great Boxford game drew near. The school was a-quiver with excitement. The form leaders marshalled the boys onto the field in the bright clear afternoons and stimulated them to cheer until they were hoarse. The pros and cons of winning were the principal theme of conversation during recreation times, and hours and minutes were counted as the great day came nearer and nearer.

The day before the game a mass meeting was held in the Gymnasium, and the Head and Mr. Stenton and such other masters as had athletic proclivities were called upon for speeches, while the boys cheered everything enthusiastically without discrimination. Sandy Maclaren, the doughty captain of the eleven, mounted the rostrum amongst others, and delivered his sentiments in a terse series of twelve stammering words, “Boys, we’ve got to win; and that’s all I have to say,” which was greeted with an applause that more skilled orators seldom evoke. The form games were over, and the form teams had disbanded; all effort was concentrated now upon the chief game of the year.

Tony, from his place amongst the scrub players, heard it all with tingling ears and beating heart, absorbing that intangible energy—school spirit—as air into his lungs. This unexpected and vehement stirring of his emotions bewildered him. He thought he was just beginning to understand what love of school might mean. Then they sang “Here’s to good old Deal” and “There’s a wind that blows o’er the sea-girt isle” in a fashion that brought the heart to the throat and tears of exquisite happiness to the eyes. And at last Doctor Forester dismissed them with a few encouraging words that sounded very much like a blessing.

Jimmie Lawrence sought Tony’s side, as the boys poured out of the Gymnasium. “Hey, Tony, ain’t it grand?” he exclaimed, as he twined his arms around his friend’s neck. “Oh, say, boy, we’ve got to win.”

Tony gave a little gulp and squeezed Jimmie’s hand. “Oh, Jimmie, I never felt so great in all my life.”

The night before the game they were in Jimmie’s rooms in Standerland and a crowd of Third Formers came trooping in. “No school to-night,” cried Kit Wilson, “there’s to be a P-rade around the campus at eight-thirty sharp. Tony, you lucky dog, don’t it feel good even to be a despised scrub?”

Tony laughed. “Say, fellows, you don’t know how it all strikes a greenhorn like me. Why, it makes me feel bully to be alive.” And as he stood there in the center of the room, with smiling friendly faces about him, health and excitement glowing in his cheeks and a happy smile playing on his boyish lips, there was an unconscious feeling within them all that it was bully for him to be alive.

Rush Merton, an irrepressible, black eyed, black haired youth, proposed a fresh song and started to bellow it forth, but the boys were keen for talk and promptly smothered him with sofa pillows—an assault that was resented so violently that in much less time than it takes to tell Jimmie’s attractive rooms were in that sad condition, technically known as “rough-house.” In the midst of the hubbub a stentorian voice made itself heard, “Here stop this nonsense!” And Jack Stenton, the hardy popular athletic director, came in. “Don’t make nuisances of yourselves, children. Pick up those sofa pillows, compose yourselves, and listen to words of wisdom from an older and wiser man.”

“Hear, hear!” came in boisterous good-nature from a dozen throats. Rush gathered himself together from the pile of cushions, made an absurd bow, and indicated Mr. Stenton with a pompous wave of the hand. “Gentlemen, I yield the center of attention (and the center of gravity,” he added sotto voce) “to our beloved athletic director. Mr. Athletic Director, we are all ears.”

“Good! You are all Third Formers, eh?” said Stenton, with a smile, as he looked them over good-naturedly. “I fancied that I might find you congregated in this den of iniquity. Well, I have come up here to tell you fellows how much I appreciate Kit Wilson’s spirit in cheerfully giving his best form players to the scrub. He has set an example to the other forms that is bound to be a fine thing for the athletics of the school. And I want to tell you also that the form, this time, is going to get something out of it—an honor that I don’t think has fallen to the Third Form previous to this in the history of Deal School. After due consideration Captain Maclaren and I have decided to play Deering at left end in to-morrow’s game.”

For a moment there was silence, due to the overwhelming surprise, for they had hardly dared hope that Tony would be given a chance except as a substitute; and this meant that he had won out against Marsh who had played on the team last year. Deering himself looked in helpless amazement, first at Stenton, then at his form mates. Jimmie broke the stillness at last by exclaiming in a shrill voice, “Come to my arms, my frabjous boy,” and clasped Tony wildly about the waist. Then the cheers rang forth, despite Stenton’s protest, until Mr. Morris came running out of his study to find out what the racket was.

“Come, come,” Mr. Stenton cried at last, “cut this now; and you, young ‘un, get to bed and don’t celebrate any more to-night. Hello, Mr. Morris, we have decided to put Deering in the game to-morrow—hence this bedlam.”

“That’s fine!” exclaimed Morris heartily, as he shook Tony’s hand. “But you boys had better get out now and join the procession; they are meeting before the Chapel.”

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At last they were gone, having wrung Tony’s hand two or three times each, and Deering and Lawrence were left alone. For a moment neither boy spoke, but stood looking at each other, their eyes glistening with friendliness that had been heightened by the excitement and the common joy. Jimmie was as unaffectedly glad as if the honor had come to him. Then Tony slipped into a chair by the window, and putting his head upon his hands stared out upon the campus, which was beginning to be covered with groups of boys, converging toward the Chapel. “I wish old Jack had let me go out and help celebrate,” he said, with a little laugh. “I can’t sleep if I do go to bed.”

Jimmie sat down on the chair, and slipped his arm about Tony’s neck. “You must, dear old boy, all the same; ‘cause you’ve got to win for us.”

Tony laughed, and clasping Jimmie’s hand, he looked up at him with a sudden seriousness that in after days Jimmie was to recall as having been profoundly significant. “Jim,” he said, “I know that Sandy and Larry Cummings and Chapin and the rest of ‘em can play football a thousand times better than I will ever do, but just the same there’s something that kind of tells me that I am going to have my chance to-morrow in a special way. I must do something to prove to Jack and Sandy that they aren’t making a mistake. Oh, Jim, you don’t know how I feel—awfully puffed up and absurdly small. I wish it were you.”

“You’re all right, old boy; and Sandy and Jack know their business a blame sight better than we do. Now cut it for bed, and I’ll go out and help make the night hideous.”

In his own rooms, where Tony went as soon as Jimmie left him, he found Carroll deep in a Morris chair and the pages of a French novel. “Hello, Reggie,” he cried, “aren’t you going to p-rade?”

“Not I, kiddo,” answered Carroll, indifferently. “I fancy I’ve reached that patriarchal age, in spirit if not in the flesh, when one puts away childish things. I am mildly moved, however, to go and tell Stenton and Maclaren that I approve of them, but I’ll content myself with saying that to you. It is worth while to have swift-moving pedalities, isn’t it?”

“So it seems,” Tony muttered, a little disappointed by the coolness of his friend’s tone. “Well, good-night,” he added, “I am going to turn in.”

Carroll had not meant to be supercilious, and for a moment after Tony left him, avoiding his glance as he had, he laid down his novel and started toward Deering’s bedroom. His hand was almost on the knob, the generous hearty words on his lips, but he hesitated, and at last turned back and took up his book. The study door was open, and at that moment Mr. Morris paused at it, evidently on his way to the campus.

“Not celebrating, Reginald?” he enquired.

“No, Mr. Morris,” answered Carroll, rising.

A momentary wave of anger swept over Morris’s strong kindly face. “Is it that your school spirit is so slack or that your French novel is so absorbing?”

Carroll bowed with an icy politeness. “I am afraid, Mr. Morris,” he said at last, with compressed lips, “that whichever explanation I gave would mean the same to you.”

“I am afraid it would, Reginald,” said Mr. Morris, as he turned away, with something like a sigh. “Good-night.”

“Good-night, sir.”

Carroll sat for a long time without reading, listening to the shouts upon the campus. At length he picked up his novel, went into his bedroom, and undressed. Before getting into bed, he darkened his transom, lighted a small electric night-lamp, and laid a pad and pencil on the table by his bedside. For an hour or more, long after the excitement had ebbed without and the boys had got back and gone noisily to bed, long after he had heard the watchman make his stealthy midnight rounds, Carroll sat there in bed, gazing dreamily out of his window upon the moonlit sea and the misty outlines of Lovel’s Woods and at the ruby intermittent glow of Deigr Light, and now and then he jotted down a line or word upon the pad. This was what he wrote:

The pure stars shine above the flowing sea,
The strand is gleaming in the moon’s soft light,

The south wind blows across the murky lea,
The lamps of Monday glimmer in the night.

The moon sags slowly in the violet west,
A yellow crescent, cloud-hung all about,

As though in weariness it sinks to rest,
And one by one the glowing lamps go out.

So flutter all the little weary souls
In trembling dreams a moment and are still;

The school is wrapped in darkness; on the shoals
The tide turns; night enfolds the silent hill.

*********

The day of the game turned out bright and fair, after a dull gray morning, with ozone and freshness in the nippy air of early November. Recitations of a sort were held in the morning, though to be sure most of the masters fell into reminiscent vein and Àpropos of nothing at all told their classes stories of the bygone heroes of the School—of Nifty Turner’s mighty kick and Pard’s immortal run from the enemy’s ten-yard line. Mr. Roylston alone had the ability and the temerity to hold his form down to an unrelieved discussion of the sequence of tenses in CÆsar and mercilessly put Kit Wilson into detention for misconstruing an obvious Imperfect with the remark, “I guess to-day it is an Historical Present.” Kit served his detention and passed into history.

The team, including Tony in a brand-new red sweater with a gorgeous black “D” across the breast, were excused from school at noon, and had dinner in the Refectory with the Boxfordians, who had coached across the hills in the morning. By two o’clock the teams were on the field, passing footballs, catching punts and kicking goals in regulation fashion.

The boys poured out of the Schoolhouse after two o’clock call-over, and crowded the side lines, while the faculty and their wives and distinguished visitors from Boxford and Monday Port filled the line of wooden bleachers which had been run up the day before.

Doctor Forester and the Head Master of Boxford walked up and down within the lines, repeating the same amiable courtesies and remarks about the weather and the view and the condition of the teams that they had made for years, as though this were the first instead of the twentieth struggle in which Deal and Boxford had been engaged. It was a specially important game, as the score in games between the two schools was a tie.

The present scribe, who was not a football player, cannot undertake to describe that eventful game in technical language. The intricacies of formation and mass play were beyond his humble abilities at school, as he has no doubt they are to the majority of people who nevertheless follow the game with as keen interest as if they knew it. That is to say, it is inconceivable to him, that anything could be quite as exciting to a Deal boy or a Kingsbridge man as to see his school or college team pressing nearer and nearer the coveted goal, or to watch a fleet-footed boy dodge through a broken field, sprint as though the fate of empires hung upon his fleetness, and sprawl gloriously at last behind the enemy’s line on top of the ball. The technically curious are referred to Vol. LX, No. 2 of the Deal Literary Magazine, where they will find a more accurate account than they certainly will find in the pages of this chronicle. They will miss there, however, an incident, which impresses the scribe as having been the most important of the game.

Suffice it, the ball was kicked off at three o’clock by the Boxford center, and went sailing down the field into the arms of Sandy Maclaren on the ten-yard line, and eleven blue-garbed Boxfordians went chasing after it lipity-cut. Here one described a graceful parabola as his knees encountered the hardy back of Arthur Chapin, another went flying off involuntarily in a reverse direction as he caught Deering’s hand in his ribs, but one, surer than the rest, dived for a tackle and laid Sandy low just as he was crossing the thirty-yard line. Cheers rang out indiscriminately from both sides of the field, until the scattered teams had run together, and, kneeling face to face, with hands clenched, faces grimly set, the muscles a-quiver, waited while Kid Drayton, Deal’s little quarter-back, gave the signals in his high shrill voice, “Forty-nine, eleven, sixteen.” Then the ball was snapped, and Chapin, the half-back, was hurled through a hole in Boxford’s line for a gain of seven yards. Once, twice, thrice, the Deal boys made their distance to the indescribable joy of their supporters. Then the Boxford team, recovering from the unexpected strength of the first onslaught, stiffened and became as a stone wall, and held Deal for three downs, so that Thorndyke, the full-back, dropped behind for a kick. The oval went spinning through the air, Tony speeding away almost under it, dodging the player who tried to intercept him, so that as the Boxford half leaned back to catch the ball, he downed him in his tracks. For the first time Tony heard the Sis, Boom, Ah! of the rippling cheer ring out with his own name tacked on to the end of it.

Back and forth, now tucked tight under the arm of a red or a blue sweater, now sailing luxuriously in the air, the ball was worked over the field; near Boxford’s goal, near Deal’s; or worried like a rat by a pack of terriers in the middle of the gridiron. The two teams were almost equally matched, and the first half ended without a score.

“You are doing well, young ‘un,” said Stenton to Tony, as he stood in the center of the Deal team in the locker-rooms under the Gymnasium between the halves. “Give him a chance, Drayton, and send him around right end. I think it will work.”

“All right, sir,” the little quarter-back squeaked. “I’ve been counting on Chapin mostly, but toward the end he seemed to be completely tuckered.”

Chapin looked up from the bench where he was sitting. “You were so blame winded yourself that you could hardly give the signals,” he snarled.

“Drop that kind of talk!” exclaimed Stenton. “You have been playing like a tackling dummy for the last ten minutes. If you want to lose the game for us keep that up.”

“I am playing the best game I know,” Chapin answered surlily. “If you don’t like it,” he muttered, though Stenton did not hear him, “go get another of your Third Form pets. You chucked Marsh, one of your best players.”

The second half opened, and each team seemed to come back fresher to the fray. With a few trifling exceptions there had been no injuries. Chapin seemed the only boy on whom the strain was telling, and Stenton correctly surmised that that was because he had not been keeping training. And as a matter of fact at a fatal moment his form told. The ball had been worked down well toward Deal’s goal line, and each time through Chapin. Suddenly the Boxford full-back dropped back for a kick: the center sent the ball spinning to him, and a second later he made a drop kick that sent the ball like a great bird sailing majestically between the Deal goal posts. And the score was 4 to 0 in favor of Boxford.

Pandemonium broke loose on the visitors’ side-lines, while the home boys were still with apprehension and disappointment. Soon the ball was back in the center of the field in Deal’s possession, and was being pushed, inevitably it appeared, toward Boxford’s goal, and the strident cries of “Touchdown, touchdown, touchdown!” rang across the campus from the throats of three hundred Deal boys. “How much time?” cried Sandy. “Three minutes to play!” called the time-keeper, and his ominous words were taken up and repeated by the referee. Tony felt as if his heart would break. Why, why, why, he wondered, did not Drayton give him a chance? And Jack Stenton, anxiously pacing the side-lines, wondered too. And then suddenly Tony heard Kid’s squeaky voice ring out, “Sixteen, twenty-two, one,”—his signal! And bracing nerves and sinews, he waited breathlessly as the left half received the ball, and, dodging the arms of the Boxford player who had broken through, thrust the smooth little pigskin into Tony’s arms. Away he dashed, with Chapin, Maclaren, and Thorndyke interfering, round right end. He thrust his hand into the shoulder of the opposing tackle, successfully dodged a heavy Boxford boy who had dived to tackle, and with Chapin by his side, went tearing down the field, which was perfectly open save for the frantic quarter-back of the Boxford team, who was dashing forward to intercept him. Thirty yards more and the game was won! but the quarter-back was almost upon him. “Keep ahead! keep ahead!” he screamed at Chapin, who seemed for the instant to be lagging behind. Twenty yards!—and he could see the Boxford quarter dashing diagonally across the field toward him, and almost feel his arms pinioning his legs. An instantaneous glance—yes, yes, he could make it if Chapin would only keep up with him and ward off that quarter as he made his lunge. Then, just as the Deal boys rose to a man, with a frantic cheer, the supreme moment was come. The line was reached, but suddenly Deering felt a jolt; the quarter’s arms were about his waist, as they went sprawling toward the goal-line; but another arm clothed in a red sweater had thrust itself next Tony’s body and given the ball a terrific shove. In an agony of horror, as he fell heavily to earth, he saw the football fall out of his arms, bound to the ground in front of them, and Chapin and the Boxford quarter lunge together, as they all went down in the mÊlÉe. But the Boxford boy was on the ball and had scored a touchback!

There was a shrill whistle, and the crowd of players were about them, the Deal boys uttering harsh cries of anger and disappointment; the Boxford boys cheering in delirious joy, and above it all a hoarse voice screaming “Time! time!” Tony pulled himself together. “What’s that?” he exclaimed in bewildered fashion. “Deal this way,” yelled Sandy Maclaren; and then to him in a contemptuous aside, “The game’s over, you fool; get up and cheer.”

Suddenly he realized the whole situation, realized much more than any one else did at that strenuous moment, for he remembered the red-clothed arm that was responsible for the catastrophe of his losing the ball, and he gave a long look full into Chapin’s face, but held his tongue. With a sudden overwhelming bitterness he realized that Chapin had had his revenge.

As soon as the cheer was over he ran across the field toward the Gymnasium, passing Jack Stenton on the way, who gave him a glance of unmitigated disgust. “Couldn’t you have kept from fumbling for one second when the game was in your hands?” he hissed at him, forgetting himself in his bitter disappointment. Tony bent his head and ran on—not back to the lockers, but to his own room in Standerland, where he locked himself in. He refused to open even to Jimmie Lawrence, who came knocking there presently, loyal despite his grief, anxious only to commiserate his friend, whom he knew was suffering more keenly than any of the rest of them.