A GATING AND A GAME

For the next few days Thornton’s thrashing was the principal theme of the school talk. The story was told, though no one knew whence it originated. Tony and Kit dismissed it with a laugh or an exclamation, but Finch, interrogated on all hands, gave a correct version. Thornton and his friends kept themselves in the background for a week or so, but nursed their grudge with the dogged determination of ill-will, and when occasion offered continued to torture Finch on the sly, but not so brutally.

The chief satisfaction that Tony got out of the incident, after the pleasure of thrashing a bully, was his talk with the Head on the subject. “I hear,” said Doctor Forester, as he stopped Deering after Chapel one morning, “that there have been some lively doings in Standerland of late, in the absence of the masters.”

Tony, not yet sure of the Doctor’s attitude, blushed and stammered something that was quite unintelligible. The Head eyed him keenly. “For once,” he said, laying his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, “I am not disposed to object to a somewhat vigorous method of taking the law into your own hands. I fancy you will have been successful in putting an end to the brutal hazing to which young Finch has been subjected.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Tony. “We were a bit rough and pretty generally out of order, but we hoped the end justified the means.”

The Doctor smiled and went on.

Tony found Kit at the lobby outside the schoolroom, and repeated the conversation in great glee.

“Great man, the Doctor!” remarked Kit, judiciously. “Now I guess we’ll let the Gumshoe whistle for his lines. What a relief it is occasionally to meet with broad-mindedness on the part of those who are charged with our education. Same with the Gumshoe’s gating,” he added, in illogical parenthesis.

The opportunity to test Mr. Roylston’s whistling powers came sooner than they expected. The day before the Boxford game, Jack Stenton called off the football practice, and had the school in to a mass-meeting in the Gymnasium. The boys sang the school songs with their traditional vigor, and listened with the utmost good nature and appreciation to speeches that in many cases had been delivered a dozen times before. The Doctor remarked that it was difficult to be original on such occasions, as though he was making the remark for the first time; but at the risk of repeating himself he did not mind saying that they had supreme confidence in the prowess of the team and that the school was confident of a victory on the morrow. Stenton gave, in his matter of fact way, impressing the boys deeply, a careful estimate of the abilities of the different players and what might be expected of them in the game, and offered a judicial estimate that the score would be two touch-downs to none in favor of Deal. Billy Wendell, the captain, stammered, in the traditional captain’s manner, that the team wanted the school behind them, and that—that was about all he had to say. Other members of the faculty made remarks, some of which were witty, some merely facetious, but all received with wild applause. Then they sang some more, cheered for the team, for the school, for Jack Stenton, for Billy Wendell, and the meeting was concluded by the Head declaring a half-holiday for the team, and removing Monday Port bounds for the afternoon in behalf of the two upper forms. Many of the boys had friends coming on the afternoon trains, and counted on this largess as a general permission to go in and meet them.

Kit’s mother was coming, with a couple of girls. Rooms for them had been taken at the Deal Inn on the Port Road near the school. Immediately after the mass-meeting Kit called to Tony, and asked him to go in with him to the depÔt and meet the five o’clock train.

“Are we really going to break the Gumshoe’s gating?” asked Tony.

“We certainly are,” responded Kit cheerfully. “To heck with the Gumshoe; bounds are off for the afternoon anyway. It’ll be a good way to get the matter officially to the Head. By gum!” he exclaimed, glancing toward the Schoolhouse, “Gumshoe’s got call-over.”

Surely enough Mr. Roylston was standing on the Schoolhouse steps, with a long line of boys in single file beneath him, waiting to report.

“Shall we tell him?” asked Kit.

“Guess we’ll have to,” answered Tony. “Let’s butt in to the middle of the line for once, and get it over.” Ordinarily, it may be remarked, Fifth Formers did not report, unless they were going into Monday Port. They made for the line, and Kit grabbed a Third Form boy by the arm.

“Say, Bunting, do you mind letting us in here? We’re in a big hurry.”

The small boy flushed with pleasure at the request from such popular and distinguished persons as Wilson and Deering, and readily made way. Mr. Roylston, who seldom failed to see anything that was going on around him, stopped for a moment and looked at them with an expression of stern disapproval. The boys thought that he was about to order them to the end of the line, but for once he disappointed them, and after a significant compression of his lips, went on with the call-over. There was a general titter along the line.

Soon it was Kit’s turn, and he was at Mr Roylston’s side. The master held a paper in his hand, on which was printed the school list. It was the duty of the master of the day to note on such a slip opposite each boy’s name the plans that he reported for the afternoon.

“Wilson and Deering, sir,” said Kit.

Mr. Roylston faced him. “Now that they have usurped the places of a score or so of boys who were in line before them, what do the Messrs. Wilson and Deering propose to do in such a hurry?”

“We are going to town, sir, to meet my mother who is arriving on the five o’clock train.”

“Ah, indeed!” said Mr. Roylston. “I am very sorry to put Mrs. Wilson to any inconvenience, but I fear I must do so. As you both are gated for the month, it is impossible for me to acquiesce in your ingenuous proposal.”

“Beg your pardon, sir,” said Kit, “but the Head has declared bounds off for the afternoon.”

“Undoubtedly,” commented Mr. Roylston, “but I have had the unpleasant duty of gating you for a month. Next!”

Wilson and Deering were swept on by the crowd. Without further ado, they cut across the field, climbed the stone wall and started across the meadows for the town.

In Monday Port they loafed about until five o’clock, when they went to the depÔt and met Mrs. Wilson. She was accompanied by two very pretty and attractive girls, Betty, Kit’s sister, and Barbara Worthington, her great friend and a boyish flame of Kit’s. The party had a merry time on the drive out the Port Road and a pleasant tea on the old-fashioned gallery of the Inn, in the golden light of the Indian summer afternoon. Absorbed in the unusual pleasure attendant upon the presence of girls at Deal, they quite forgot the predicament they were in with Mr. Roylston.

The master in charge had a better memory, and was waiting for them at the entrance of the cloister that led into the refectory, where the school was gathering for supper. He was very angry.

“I will trouble you,” he said, “to come with me at once to the Head. You have been flagrantly disobedient.”

The boys followed him without a word across the quadrangle to the Rectory.

“A very annoying case, Doctor Forester,” Mr. Roylston began when they were closeted with the Head in his study. “I gated Wilson and Deering for a month, but despite my warning at call-over, they deliberately ignored the gating and went to town this afternoon.”

“It was quite necessary, sir,” protested Kit, “that I should meet my mother, who arrived at five o’clock. Besides, sir, we think that Mr. Roylston’s gating was unjust, and we asked him to refer the matter to you, sir, and he refused.”

“That was not necessary,” said the Doctor, “except under exceptional circumstances. However, I may say that it is my general understanding that when bounds are raised the day before the Boxford game, that for the afternoon ordinary penalties and restrictions are suspended. Why were they gated, sir?”

“For brutal conduct, Doctor Forester, to their younger schoolmates.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said the Head, with something like a smile flitting across his face. “You behaved brutally toward smaller boys?” He faced the culprits.

Tony smiled in spite of himself. “Why, yes, sir, I suppose we did; we planned to.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” said the Head. “But, Mr. Roylston, for once let us compromise and temper justice with mercy. Only recently these two young brutes did a very effective and commendable service to the school,—they thrashed two bullies who had been making the life of a small boy quite miserable. Let us forgive them their brutality in the one case for the sake of their brutality in the other, where it was not undeserved. I am disposed to ask you to dispense the gating and the penalties for violating it.”

Mr. Roylston compressed his lips. “I—is it just, sir?”

The Doctor smiled in his odd way. “I am disposed to insist on your being merciful, Mr. Roylston. I will guarantee that there will be no more brutality nor disobedience. Let us threaten them with dire penalties, if they are reported for brutality again. Good-day, boys.”

As they went out, they heard the Doctor say in suave and cheerful tones, “Stay and have a bit of supper with me, Roylston.” “Thank you, no;” answered the master, “I have duties immediately. Good-evening, sir.”

“One for the Gumshoe,” said Tony blithely, as they turned onto the campus.

Kit was serious. “I have always said,” he remarked sententiously, “that the Gumshoe Ebenezer was an odious ass; but I have always had, until this moment, a sneaking conviction that in so saying I was doing him an injustice. Henceforth my conscience is absolved. Ass he is; ass he shall be.”

“Amen,” said Tony. “Fact is, Gumshoe’s had it in for Finch. Mysterious beast, ain’t he! We score to-day, kiddo, but the Gumshoe is not annihilated.”

“No, I dare say not. The possibilities of his getting back at us are pretty nigh endless. But say, Tonio, old sport, isn’t Bab Worthington a queen?”

“Quite the queen, Kitty; but Betty Wilson is no mere handmaid.”

“Oh, bother Betty; she’s a good sort. But let’s hurry, so we can get down early. I am half sorry I asked the crowd. Think I’d rather have—”

They both began to run then toward the dining-room, where the school was already at supper.

That evening “the crowd,” as our friends called themselves in their modest schoolboy way, including Kit, Tony, Jimmie Lawrence, Teddy Lansing and Tack Turner, went to the Inn and spent a merry evening under Mrs. Wilson’s indulgent chaperonage. There were other parties there, including the parents and sisters and cousins and an occasional aunt of various boys; a gathering of the clans loyal to Deal; a score or so of Old Boys, mostly from Kingsbridge, back for the game, who had overflowed from the crowded school into the Inn. In the proud consciousness of their undoubted superiority as college men, the Old Boys somewhat cast their younger brethren in the shade, and treated them with patronizing airs, asking them occasional questions in a patriarchal manner.

Tony alone amongst his companions seemed to shine that evening. There flashed into prominence, to their first observation, in his manner, his appearance even, something of that charm which was more and more making him a favorite, and which, though his schoolfellows never analyzed it, was to be cordially recognized later on. It would have been hard to say in just what Tony’s charm lay, perhaps it was that a certain serious sweetness of disposition, the finer traits of his character, for the most part unnoticed in the helter-skelter rough-and-readiness of school life, were emerging. Women, who are always quicker than men to estimate a personality, to be conscious of its finer as well as its more obvious strains, felt this at once in Tony. He was a success with Mrs. Wilson and the girls. His own friends, intimate with him in all the openness and yet sometimes quite misleading circumstances of everyday existence, who ordinarily thought of him merely as a boon companion, a genial playmate, gifted with a nice sense of honor but ready for a lark and a risk with the most reckless, were a little surprised at the evident impression he made not only on Mrs. Wilson, but on Betty and Barbara Worthington. His friends saw in him that night a facility despite his modesty, a social poise untempered by self-consciousness, that more distinctly than ever before singled him out as their natural leader. Kit indeed, felt several miserable pangs of jealousy, as he noted Barbara’s quick response to Tony’s gayety, and her unconcealed desire to remain part of the group of which Tony was in some sense the center rather than wander off with him for the too obvious pleasure of a tÊte-À-tÊte. But Kit himself was too whole-souled, too merry of nature, to sulk, and save for an occasional growl to which no one paid attention, before the evening was over, he was enjoying Tony as he had never enjoyed him before, wondering at the quick development of this social side of his character which had been unobserved.

As for Tony he was quite unconscious of anything save that he was enjoying himself immensely; that Betty Wilson was an extremely attractive girl, a thoroughly “good sort,” as Kit had said; and that he wished there were more frequent occasions when the girls came to Deal. He was not sentimental, so that he did not imagine that he had fallen in love.

The day of the game was a perfect one for football, cool and gray, with no wind blowing. The teams were in fine condition, and the Boxford boys, who had come over in the old-time coach across the hills, looked tremendously big and strong. Tony was still playing end, the position to which he had been so unexpectedly assigned in his Third Form year, and in which, through no fault of his own, he had been the means of losing the game. To be sure in the following year, when the circumstances of that defeat had been made rather generally clear, he had redeemed himself by good playing and they had won, but he felt a keen desire this year to blot out forever, if it might be, the bitter memory of that first Boxford game. He wanted, quite selfishly he told himself,—and perhaps he was thinking a little of Betty—to win a game as definitely as he had lost one.

As the team stepped out onto the field that afternoon, resplendent in their red sweaters with the big black D across the breast, and he sniffed the cool air and heard the chorus of Deal cheers ring down the lines, he lifted his head like a good hunter keen for the chase, and a thrill of determination went through him like a shiver. They must win!

Billy Wendell had the ball under his arm as they came onto the field. Immediately he tossed it to Kit, prominent to the spectators for his shock of yellow hair and his bright red cheeks despite the fact that this was his first appearance on the school team. Kit tossed it to Barney Clayton, who muffed it, and then made a quick dive and fell on it very much as a kitten plays with a ball of yarn.... So for fifteen minutes or so the preliminary practice went on, until the boys were well warmed up for the strenuous work of the game.

Then came the shrill note of the referee’s whistle; the two captains met in the center of the field; the Boxford boy called and won the toss, and the two teams trotted out to their places for the kick-off. There were roars from the two grand-stands, the antiphonal ringing-out of the Deal and Boxford cheers; another blast from the referee’s whistle, and Kit, who was playing center, gave the ball a kick that sent it sailing down the field to within five yards of the Boxford goal posts. A Boxford back caught it, but Tony downed him in his tracks.

Then the teams lined up, the Boxford quarter signaled to his full back for a line plunge, and in less time than it takes to write it, the great hulk of a six-foot boy went tearing through the Deal line. Deal received a shock as great as it was unexpected. They had foreseen no such smashing attack, and before they could rally to the defense, they had been forced for down after down over the smooth brown field until the play was well in their own territory....

We do not mean to describe the game in detail, for is it not written in the chronicles of the boys of Deal? Wendell rallied his team just in time to prevent Boxford from scoring in the first half, when the ball had been worried to within twenty yards of his goal. Then followed an exchange of punts, which, as Edward Clavering, Deal’s full back, could kick farther than his opponent, gave Deal a slight advantage. When they got the ball at last in the middle of the field, they made a few gains by end runs. They were swifter, more ingenious, better kickers than the Boxford boys, but the team from over the hills had the advantage in weight and strength.

During the intermission between the halves Stenton did his best to hearten his boys, but it was a poor best, for he felt pretty certain that they were bound to be scored against heavily in the next half. They could not stand the smashing of the line—already Clayton and one or two others had been taken out.

The second half saw a repetition of the tactics of the first. Boxford persistently hit the line, and within five minutes of the play had scored the inevitable touchdown. The enthusiasm of their supporters was only a trifle dampened when they failed to kick the goal. After that Deal worried them a good deal with trick plays, and once after gaining a considerable distance by an exceptionally long punt and a fumble, they seemed within striking distance of the goal. Clavering tried for a field goal, but to the sharp distress of his supporters the ball went wide of the mark. Boxford took the ball on their twenty-five yard line, and renewed their demoralizing attack. Despite the Deal boys’ desperate efforts, the ball was forced back into their territory, straight down the field by smashing center plays toward their goal. Poor Kit had been carried off, bruised and lame, but not seriously hurt; the veteran Clavering had succumbed, and Deal was left to finish the game with a team that was half composed of substitutes. It was a question now, it seemed, of simply keeping down the score.

Boxford fumbled, and again they escaped danger for the moment. But soon the ball had been worried again dangerously near their goal. Twenty-five, twenty, fifteen yards—Tony measured the distance with grim despair. Suddenly, as the Boxford quarter snapped back the ball, something unexpected happened. Signals got twisted,—at any rate, there was a fumble and a scrimmage, and twenty boys were scrambling in a heap, when the attention of the spectators was arrested by the shrill cry of the Boxford quarter, for Tony Deering, with the ball tucked under his arm, had emerged from the mass of players, and was speeding like a frightened deer down the field toward the Boxford goal.

The quarter made a desperate effort to intercept him, but Tony dodged as quickly as lightning flashes, and raced on with a clear field. The two teams, recovered, were rushing after him.... One could have heard a whisper from one side of the field to the other so tense was the excitement. The silence was absolute save for the pattering of the swift feet upon the turf.... Then the cheers broke forth, for Tony had planted the ball midway behind the goal posts. For five minutes there was pandemonium on the side lines, restrained for a moment, only to break forth afresh as Clavering kicked the goal. The game was won, for almost immediately after the kick-off, the whistle blew, and the referee called “Time.”

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