THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE GIFT OF Mrs. Charles S. Aiken A ^ i^uUM ftifu^ CtJtJ^ u^ CHARLES SEDGWICK AIKEN EDNAH AIKEN A BREAK IN TRAINING <3 A Break in Training AND OTHER ATHLETIC STORIES ARTHUR RUHL ILLUSTRATED BY A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY NEW YORK THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY 1906 Copyright, 1900, 1904, by THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY Copyright, 1902, 1905, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Copyright, 1904, by P. F. COLLIER & SON Copyright, 1905, by THE CENTURY CO. Copyright, 1906, by THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY All rights reserved Published September, T906 THE outing press deposit, n. y. CONTENTS PAGE A Break in Training i Between the Acts 39 His First Race 69 The Quitter 91 Left Behind in Wings of Clay 157 With the Hounds 173 The Men They Used to Be . . . .201 A BREAK IN TRAINING A BREAK IN TRAINING 'T^HE Elder Halloway was speaking -*■ fast, and looking very hard at a white figure sweeping down the straightaway across the field. " But, my dear Sherwood," he snapped, turning squarely on the trainer, " it's the only thing! If you don't " The Elder Halloway had held the rec- ord for his distance for seven years after he left college, and though he was old enough to see a young Halloway try in vain to get nearer than a second and two-fifths to his father's time, yet he still cared just as much as though at any moment he could throw off some thirty years as easily as he might his clothes, and jump again into the running. He was the sort of man who saw nothing to smile about when each spring he buckled about his straw hat his old track-team 3 4 A BREAK IN TRAINING band. He could size up a flat-footed freshman just as a horseman sizes up a bandy-legged colt, and he knew more in a minute about the connotative and denotative significance of the word " fit " than this particular trainer would know in a lifetime. The Elder Halloway was very enthu- siastic and effervescent, and when he stopped talking it meant that he was per- plexed. When he twirled his watch-chain it meant that he was worried. On this occasion, as the figure rounded the lower turn, so that the moving limbs were thrown out clean and sharp against the dark green of the trees, the Elder Hallo- way stopped talking, took his watch from the outside pocket of his Norfolk jacket, and, with much vigor, yet quite abstract- edly, began to whirl the chain round and round his right forefinger. The cause of the Elder Halloway's agitation was young Mr. Hollis, who ran the half-mile. Hollis was rounding the lower turn in a " three-eighths " trial, and perform- ing badly. For a youth who had occa- A BREAK IN TRAINING 5 sionally been known as the " Great," who had a faded initial on his shirt, and the prospect of running, within four days, what was to be, in all human likelihood, the last race of his life, he was doing very badly indeed. Every eye was on him. He could see the fielders, on the green inside the cinder-path, pause, and he noticed that the crack of the cricket- bat from the practice-crease over beneath the Willows ceased as he swept by. Away up at the finish-line he could see the trainer standing, watch in hand ; near him a pole-vaulter leaned on his pole, his clothing a chalk-white in the sunlight; and all about, the half-dressed men, who had run or were waiting for their trials, stared down toward him with the same critical and deferential gaze that they would have bestowed on the action of a coach-horse, or the wake of a racing yacht. Most of this he saw out of the corner of his eye, and the rest he felt, because he had been there so many times before; yet, though he went through the motions of his beautiful stride, young 6 A BREAK IN TRAINING Mr. Hollis knew — and gritted his teeth at the horrid truth of it — that he hated that track, hated his task, and had in him that moment no more of the spirit of the race than a mule in a dusty treadmill. The spring and lift were all gone out of him. Even the turn, with his body leaning inward and his legs eating up twenty-three feet of the track a second, thrilled him no more than the lazy gait of a two-mile jog. He couldn't get his back into it. Running only from his legs down, he seemed to be carrying his body as he would an over-loaded knapsack. As he bore down to the finish of the quar- ter, and knew that from where the train- er stood, on to the last " two-twenty," he must spurt, he shrank inwardly, as a tired man shrinks from bracing up to an ice- cold plunge. The apathetic " Move up a little, now ! " in the trainer's irritating voice, rasped him as he passed between the rows of eyes, and, squeezing his pace up another notch, he pounded on. Theo- retically, he was merely " letting out " a A BREAK IN TRAINING 7 bit — this wasn't a race — but he realized, only too sickeningly, that his arms were coming up; that there was a weakish bending in the small of his back; that his head was crooking over to one shoul- der, with the cords of his neck drawn taut on the other side — that, to put it straight, he was " finishing on what he had left." Too far gone to ease his legs gradually to a walk, he stopped short as he passed the stone mark. And as he walked slowly back across the field to get his sweater, a nasty sort of headachy pain began to creep up the back of his head and over his eyes. Now, when a half-miler goes back on a three-eighths trial, something is out of joint. It is so alluring a distance. When you're sent over a quarter you must, for the moment, become a sprinter, and your red-hot fifty-four seconds or so looks duf- ferish enough beside the " fifty flat," or better, of the racing quarter-miler. A whole half-mile trial comes too seldom, and is too stupendous an event to be con- sidered lightly. But when you do a three- 8 A BREAK IN TRAINING eighths trial in 1.27, with the last furlong clipped out in 28 seconds, it looks as though it would be mere play to finish out the last 220 yards of the full half in 30 seconds more, and — voila! You've beaten even time! And here was young Hollis stumping back to his trainer, the Tantalus-tremble all gone out of him, and the black thought of what would have come had this been a race, and had he fin- ished it out, grinding hard in his brain. " That was all right," said the trainer, in that slow, grieved, forbearing tone of his that was enough to demagnetize a storage battery, and that said very much plainer than any words that it wasn't at all all right. " Don't be afraid of let- ting yourself out, you know. Only four days more." He was a good trainer in some ways, but he knew nothing of fourth dimensions. " Going to give you some good stiff work to-morrow." '' But I " Hollis started quickly to speak in nervous irritation at the thought of bracing up to another trial under the watch, then wheeled about and moved A BREAK IN TRAINING 9 away toward the " gym," his spiked shp- pers danghng in his hand. As he tiptoed up the stone steps in his bare feet, the baseball squad — bronzed, bare-armed, rank with vigor and the zest of sport — clattered out upon him. He drew aside, grinning wanly as a man he knew, bla- tant in his coppery bloom, made a pass at him with a cleated shoe. " Pish ! " chirped the man, sweetly. " Go zuan! " grunted Mollis, in a rau- cous voice, just as though he felt that way. And going a bit hollow inside as he thought how his words lied, he pattered into the empty, lonely " gym," where the sweet day was smothered in a thick at- mosphere of oily leather and sweaty clothes. The cold shower only irritated him. On the way to the training-table he caught sight of his room-mate, Longacre, and the rest of the crew-men, loafing across the Square, in their flannels, fairly lazy with strength and saturated with the salt air and sunshine of their six-mile pull along the Charles. That rather 10 A BREAK IN TRAINING rubbed it in. Pretending not to see, he turned sharply to the left and walked on toward Beck alone. For dinner, in the lifeless sultry June twilight, there was warm tomato-soup and warm roast-beef and warm rice- pudding. And the plates were thick. And the freshman " miler " with the black wiry hair and the horse-teeth crunched and gnawed and licked his chops, and neighed for very joy of feed- ing. Over the unpadded jangling table glimmered a vision of a green arbor, from which one saw trees and a quiet river, of a snowy cloth, and things crisp, fruity, and cold — glimmered and vanished in the jangle. Mollis sniffed, nibbled, and pushed away. With nerves a bit on edge, very alert, sleepless, yet with the feverish stubborn- ness of the stale athlete sticking to his rules, he turned into bed as the clocks were tolling ten. It was very hot in the room, the straw matting smelled of heat, and over from the Square came the ris- ing and falling whirr of the trolley-cars A BREAK IN TRAINING li as they swept toward and out from town. On the ceiling was a patch of yellow thrown there from the Yard lamp, and through the door as he lay there he could see, out beyond the open study window, the moonshine in the elms. Somewhere below, Longacre — the crew hadn't begun strict training yet — and the rest were singing : " I h-a-ve to go to be-e-d by day — And does — it not — seem hard — to you, When all — the sky — is clear — and bloo — oo — " He stood it for a while, and then leap- ing out of bed he tiptoed to the front win- dow and dashed out the contents of a water-pitcher. The torturers scattered, laughing, and with arms about each other's shoulders loafed away. But after he had flung himself down again he could hear them, from far across the Yard, mockingly fling back : " Hear the grown-up people's feet Still going past me on the street — And I— should like — so — so — o much to play. I have — to go — to be-e-ed— by day." 12 A BREAK IN TRAINING Hollis didn't know that he had slept at all, until he noticed that the whirr of the trolley-cars had grown to the locust-like insistence of day. As he slouched out into the study he saw, on the carpet be- neath the letter-slot, a small envelope, pale gray and blatantly feminine. He turned it over to see the writing. That Halloway girl! Wouldn't he come out that afternoon to do eighteen holes — yes, thirty-six if he had time — and spend the night, of course. He could run in the morning. He didn't deserve to be asked, but the family were going to sail in a week and — well, next year who could tell where he would be? Young Hollis got up and began to pace the floor. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit a match before he caught himself. The last time he had seen that Halloway girl had been at three o'clock of a certain morning in the preceding February when, with the orchestra playing the tenth extra and her partner buttoning and unbutton- ing his gloves on the sidelines, he had whirled her sixteen laps around the hall A BREAK IN TRAINING 13 without a breathing space, and not sur- rendered her until the orchestra was half way through " Home, Sweet Home." He hadn't so much as written since. That was only because he was discreet. Young Hollis stared out at the Yard, and the robins, and the sunlight now pour- ing over the roofs of the dormitories, and thought very hard. Then he walked into his room, and glared into the glass. It seemed that he looked very thin and old, and drawn and hollow about the eyes. He was still, you see, at that Grecian period when straightness of limb and bloom and what is vaguely known as a just-off-the-yacht air are deemed quite the most important social assets. He dipped his head in a bowl of water, and brushed his hair, and looked again. Then he went into Longacre's room, where the great babe lay sleeping. "Bob," said he, "wake up! Do you hear ! Wake up ! " Longacre opened his sleepy eyes. " Tell Sherwood," said he, " that I've run this morning; that I've been called 14 A BREAK IN TRAINING into town ; that I can't come out at four- thirty; that it's — it's very important." " Uh! " grunted Longacre. " Get out — go along ! " And he turned to the wall. Young Hollis watched him for a mo- ment, running his hands slowly through his hair. Then he scribbled a note, which he pinned on his room-mate's coat. That afternoon, a good hour before the first runner came down to the field, young Hollis, first-string man in the half-mile, was alighting from a train at a station in the woods, with Cambridge twenty miles away. She awaited him at the station, sitting alone in a yellow Hempstead cart, and hanging on for dear life to a bob-tailed horse, who declined uproariously to stand on more than two of his legs at a time. That eased matters. *' Dear me!" she exclaimed, "I do wish you'd hurry and take these reins! He wasn't meant for the road. He ought to have been born an equestrian statue ! " Hollis took the reins. His knowledge of handling horses and driving elephants A BREAK IN TRAINING 15 was about equally extensive, but he took them. Clop-clop-clop-clop they went spanking along the country road, with the hot summer air blown to coolness as it whizzed past their ears. On this particular afternoon, contrary to her usual habit of going bare-headed. Miss Halloway wore some sort of filmy, pictury, hattish thing. The sun glim- mered through it into little lights in her hair just the way it glimmers through leaves into the water. There was a light- blue-and-gold band of Persian embroid- ery which crossed her fawn-colored crash waist just at the shoulders, and that looked as though it felt at home beneath the sun-pierced hat brim. From this band upward to the low, loose knot at the nape of Miss Halloway's neck was, as near as is humanly possible, a straight line. These and other details there were of a sort which no man, and particularly a very young man, who hadn't stayed out of bed later than strict training hours, danced, or been to a theater for a couple of months, and who was rather hungry. l6 A BREAK IN TRAINING could afford to neglect. And so, as they whirled round the gateway into the coun- try-club grounds, the near wheel rasped against the gate-stone. " Gracious ! " remarked Miss Hallo- way, " you're as reckless as Uncle Jimmy! " Hollis laughed lightly, and turned his eyes to the front. Was it because he held the reins? He had a feeling — one that he had lost in those last few weeks — that he had the whip-hand. " Tidy little beast," he observed, and he knew less of horses than he did of driving them. "Like 'em lively!" When they walked down to the first tee everybody at the club-house followed to see the younger Miss Halloway drive off. It was, as Hollis was well aware, generally regarded in the light of an event. Addressing with her usual preci- sion, she swung freely, and, topping, sliced the ball a scant dozen yards, almost under the skirts of the gallery. The look which she tossed back to Hollis would have been sufficient to send him alone A BREAK IN TRAINING 17 through half a dozen Balaclavas. With the unerring skill of a man who had never had a driver in his hands but twice be- fore, he proceeded to drive clean away over the bunker and within a dozen yards of the green. When he had run down a fifteen-foot put, and taken the hole in three to Miss Halloway's five, she leaned on the flag a moment and looked at him. " You know Teddy Battell," she said. Hollis knew Teddy Battell very well in- deed. " I had him out here the other day, and they all came down to watch us drive off. He was — well, mine, you understand? And I made about one hundred and fifty on the drive ofi the first tee. And he missed two strokes — and then — he broke a window in the basement of the club- house! " "Teddy Battell," observed Hollis, "has generally been very lucky." Miss Hallo- way's eyes flashed. In her ethics of the out-of-doors, a girl's guest had no right to be a dufifer. l8 A BREAK IN TRAINING " There are some things," said Miss Halloway, " which can never be for- given." Teddy Battell, it happened, was the man who had waited that night un- til the orchestra had begun to play slowly on the last bars of " Home, Sweet Home." They walked on in the warm sunshine. Young Hollis had known the girl only as she sweetly reigned in that upper air where lights dazzled and music was play- ing. He had never seen her as he saw her now — so near, so real, so touchable, and then all at once so thrillingly Diana-like, as she swung for the drive with the rhythm-line sweeping down through her uplifted arms, across her breast, and out and away with a swirl from the tip of her wind-blown skirt. And even as his heart was leaping at the swift beauty of it he would drive — as only one can when one forgets — far, far beyond her best. It was rankly brutal. He could not seem to help it. And along with the mascu- line fun of it, as they strode on and on, there began to well up within him a sud- den tremulous, half-tolerant tenderness. A BREAK IN TRAINING 19 On the home-stretch, as the afternoon was waning, he lost his ball. He began stamping back and forth through the dusty timothy and clover outside the fair- green, wondering what the girl would do. What she did was to drop her club and, up and back, swish-swish, come tramping after him. She wasn't merely strolling, or pecking at the grass, but trudging on and on as though she were a brother. And when he had given it up and started back to pick up his club, she just straight- ened up with the queerest look of half- quizzical appeal, and brushed the hair from her eyes. He approached her. They had been together, it seemed to him, a long while now, and they somehow knew each other very well. The girl had unloosed her stock, and crumpled it in her golf- bag. She was warm, a wisp of hair brushed her cheek, and bits of dust from the clover were on her neck and arms. It came over him very quickly. He felt that he must take her in his arms and run away with her — away and away and away over infinite velvet meadows walled 20 A BREAK IN TRAINING with dark shadowy woodlands, all in the air and sunshine. " Miss Halloway — " he said. They were standing in the long grass, face to face — she in the shadow, he to sun. The girl looked hastily to the ground. " I'm afraid — you've lost it," said she. " Yes! I have! I know I have! " said Hollis, looking straight at Miss Hallo- way. She lifted her eyes as quickly as they had fallen. " It's a pity," she said, a little help- lessly. Then, running on, " People don't often beat me. You have — " She moved to where her golf -bag lay. " You've done it so well that I hate to have you lose the hole because we can't find — " But she unbuckled the pocket, and moving away just the least bit breath- lessly, she tossed back a new ball. The sun was reaching horizontally through the elm branches when the cart rolled out upon the road home. They were just coming to a bit of the way where for a good half-mile the road was A BREAK IN TRAINING 21 level as a floor, when Miss Halloway dropped her score-card. Hollis was out after it so promptly that the restless horse pirouetted ahead a dozen yards or so be- fore he picked it up. Just as he stooped Miss Halloway gave a quick little cry, and there was the sudden clatter of hoofs. The horse had bolted. Hollis saw the cart bounding away from him, the girl's shoulders swaying as she sawed on the reins. He leaped into his stride. With his flannels and sneakers he was — except for the lack of spikes — for all practical purposes, in his racing clothes. The glory of his strength, of having strength and speed and wind that another man in his place wouldn't have had, swept him on in a whirlwind of fierce joy. A desperate two-twenty, and he had the cart almost in hand ; another forty yards, and swing- ing over the back of the seat he seized the reins. The girl sat up very straight with her fists clenched. " My ! " said she. " It's — all — right," gasped Hollis, pull- ing the horse back on his haunches. Then 22 A BREAK IN TRAINING they went on, the reins very tight, young HolHs grandly silent. "How did he do it?" said Hollis presently. Miss Halloway's eyes came round very slowly — just the least crinkle in their corners. " Will you forgive me ? " " Forgive ? " echoed Hollis. " I — I gave him the whip," said Miss Halloway very quickly. " He isn't used to it." She gave him a look which she might have bestowed on an Academician, who had tossed off for her a sketch, or to a poet, who had sighed her out a song, and said, simply : " I wanted to see you run ! They drove presently up the winding driveway and under the porte-cochere. The elderly Jenkins, the Halloway house servant since the memory of man, awaited them. The family were gone. They were in town and could not get out for dinner. Not without appreciation of the formida- ble nature of the situation and yet serene- ly withal, Jenkins announced that dinner was readv to be served. A BREAK IN TRAINING 23 " Mrs. Halloway said not to wait, ma'am," said he. "That Mr. Mollis would not want to wait, ma'am." " To be sure," replied Miss Halloway, and she turned to Hollis. " You won't mind, will you, or think it queer? You know you must — that is, we must dine alone. You know you must expect — things to be different — in the country?" Hollis bowed. It appealed to him as more discreet than shouting. The table was set on the rear porch, whence the lawn rolled gently down to the river. The sun was very low, and the cool smell of grass dampening with dew breathed in with the coming twilight. They sat down with the square of soft linen between them and regarded each other. " I wonder," began Miss Halloway, " what we'll have." " I don't remember," said Hollis, grin- ning, " to have been so excited in years." " And besides," continued Miss Hallo- way, " it's so important. Jenkins says that he has his orders, but I'm so afraid 24 A BREAK IN TRAINING that they aren't right — that it may — don't you know — put you all out of condi- tion " The vision of a certain other table clouded Hollis's sight for just an instant, and then the picture came true. " It doesn't make much difference, does it," said he, tentatively, his eyes loitering away toward the river, "about that? This Is pretty nearly enough — just this." ' " Oh, no ; it isn't," said Miss Halloway, briskly. " / know. You have to have steaks and red beef — the red beef of Old England, tum-titi-tum-tum — and — and r-r-raw, carnivorous things. I know that." As she spoke the self-contained Jen- kins, gravely solicitous, set down before her and Hollis grape-fruit — cold as the snows of the Sierras, ambrosial with sher- ry and ice. Hollis stared as one whose dreams come true. He wished that it were polite to ask how somebody had known. . . . . Afterward came tiny pink clams — piquant, tantalizingly evanescent. A BREAK IN TRAINING 25 . . . . And then a steak — such a steak — with mushrooms and hashed pota- toes in cream, and crisp, mehing rolls, and " Uncle Cyrus, he was Uncle Jimmy's father," said Miss Halloway, gazing at Hollis very gravely, " spent six months in Andersonville in war time, and they lived on biscuits and old bones. I remem- ber hearing Uncle Cyrus tell how they felt when they were exchanged — the first real dinner they had, you know " " Yes ! " assented Hollis. " I mean," said Miss Halloway, " don't they give you anything good at the train- ing-table ? " " Oh, it's good for you," said Hollis. " It's very good — but it isn't good to eat." Jenkins had appeared again. He set on the soft linen at Hollis's hand a glass — amber of tint, hollow like a lily, up from the slender corolla of which bubbles were laughing. ** It was my orders, ma'am," observed Jenkins, a well-repressed but very evi- 26 A BREAK IN TRAINING dent perturbation ruffling his demeanor, " that it was for Mr. Hollis, ma'am. And I must explain, ma'am, that I was — that he was — that is, that Mr. HoUis was to have only one glass, ma'am." Young Hollis would at that moment, at Miss Halloway's suggestion, have drunk treacle with enthusiasm. As it was, the bite of the wine was the last touch to give him a grip on the world. Every bit of the steak seemed to slip into its predestined internal niche. There spread through him that delicious sensa- tion — a union of the joys of the Sybarite and a master-carpenter — of knowing that what he ate was doing him good. Miss Halloway was just scooping out some bar-le-duc and making ready the coffee — the fragrance of coffee in the open air ■ — when the Elder Halloway, in riding clothes, strolled across the lawn. " Well, well. Holly! You here! " said he. " He's letting you knock off toward the end, is he? " Hollis suddenly felt everything going A BREAK IN TRAINING 27 out from under him. Here he was caught red-handed — a traitor. " Yes," he said, hastily. " I — you see, I ran this morning." " Yes — yes — to be sure. Never thought of that. Sorry wasn't here when you came. Working inside all day — lot of stuff piled up — no day for that sort of thing — had to walk me round a bit — came over here. Fine sunset that was to-night — fine — but " The elder man beamed on the younger. " Wish I could get up a complexion like yours. No need of walk- in' for you. Just look at him, little sister — doesn't he look fit ? " Hollis was laughing. He nodded to- w^ard the lawn and the river where the green of the willows was darkening to black. "Don't wonder, do you?" " Wonder ! No — don't wonder at any- thing — chap of your age! I saw your three-eighths yesterday " " Really," said young Hollis, turning quickly about. " I wasn't — a " " Oh, of course, I know. Not letting 28 A BREAK IN TRAINING yourself out. I could see that all right. Quite right, too." " But you don't see," said Hollis. " I was." " Oh, no ! No, no, no ! Don't believe that. You were slipping along too easily for that. Gazelle — Empire State — Deer- foot — you remember Deerfoot, the Sha- wanoe — just like that." " Well," said Hollis, " I wish " " Wish you could have seen yourself? Yes, I know. Bring my camera over Fri- day. Mujt have your picture running. Last race and all that, you know — ' how fine he looks ! ' Of course, a man never knows himself. When he's got his spikes on seems just hard work " " Um," assented Hollis, nodding gravely. " That's one funny thing about the track. Man's running about half-speed — thinks he's up to his limit. You know how it is. Gets a bit blowed — bet you felt that way going down the third two- twenty — when he's running alone. Thinks he couldn't move up an inch — A BREAK IN TRAINING 29 you know the place, just in front of the Carey steps. Gets in a race and, by jim- iny, goes twice as fast, and never turns a hair. That's the way / was." For so knowing a man this was a strange opti- mism. Holhs smiled in somewhat depre- cating amusement. " Alan that held his record for seven years! " said he. " Right you are. Oh, yes, I was — real- ly. Always went away down in last two weeks — blue — no — black! 'Way be- low the surface! Went in and by jim- iny, always won ! " The Elder Halloway slapped his knee and laughed aloud. " Yes, sir ! Always won ! " He prattled on in his disarming way until they pushed back their chairs from the table, and then, dropping a word about taking a look at Miss Halloway's new hunter, he swung down the lawn and dis- appeared behind the hedge of rose-bushes that walled the garden. The light went away, and the crickets and katydids awoke, and the great moon climbed up behind the trees across the 30 A BREAK IN TRAINING river. Young Hollis pointed that way, " It — it just occurs to me," he said, " that I haven't seen one for a month." Miss Halloway laughed Hghtly and watched him. " You poor boy," she said, as tender as an elder sister. Presently they wandered down on the lawn — the silver lawn — where the senti- nel elms stood in high dignity. There was a bench in the shadow, just at the edge of a circle of light, where a couple of white rabbits were nibbling the wet clover. And there young Hollis and the girl sat down, while the rabbits hopped near to be fed — quaint white bundles in the moon- light, their soft noses damp with dew. " Oh, yes, I read that," said Hollis, after a time. " And I've heard him say things like that, too. He's rather proud of speaking about the track, just as you might about a fresh-air park and the things children do there, but he's never lifted a finger to help — he could put up a crack game of tennis if he wanted to. you A BREAK IN TRAINING 31 know — but he can be clever up to the limit making fun of those who do. I suppose he's right, too," smiled the young man, somewhat bitterly, for this was a very serious business for him, and he felt more about it than about anything he had ever been in before. " We aren't big and smooth and fine like the crew, and we aren't brave like the football men. We don't look very impressive in the photo- graphs, and " " You talk as though I were a — dear me — a kind of matinee girl," spoke up Miss Halloway, quickly, " or just an out- sider. Don't you know it was my Uncle Jimmy Halloway who ran ? " " You're very polite," said Hollis, quietly, *' but you — you cannot under- stand. When you go down to Soldier's Field there's the crowd, and the band, and the real fighting, and when you go to New London, there's the river, and the white yachts, and the big show of it all. And that's what the crowd sees. They don't know what it is to swing down a lane in llie countrv, on an October even- 32 A BREAK IN TRAINING ing, with the ground still soft and the frost in the air and the leaves burning, and six miles behind you and four more to go, and the hounds 'way to the front and 'way to the rear, calling ' Tally- ho ! ' They don't know what it is — just the feeling your spikes grip on the cin- ders as you start — there's nothing much in the track that shows " "Shows? But that isn't your part. You have the fun. You're there. You're doing it. And if you do it, and do it well, why what else is there!" Hollis turned toward the girl and tried to fathom her eyes. " Do you mean that? " he said, almost sternly. " r>o girls feel like that? Do you see our part — my part? " The girl turned toward him and laughed, pityingly, yet, gladly, like a brother. Into the mellow night there tinkled an old forgotten song that young HolHs had thumped out night after night on his banjo, and that the chorus used to sing when he and his crowd had front- row seats back in his freshman year. A BREAK IN TRAINING 33 "It's Uncle Jimmy!" whispered the girl, lifting her head to listen, her hands dropping loose on the bench. " I haven't heard him touch a piano in an age ! Dear, dear Uncle Jimmy! " she cried, suddenly. '* I wonder if there are any other Uncle Jimmys ! Any others in all the world ! " Young Hollis glanced at her, then, clasp- ing his hands tightly, looked down at them and at the ground. " No," she went on, with a new earnest- ness, yet a bit haltingly, in the way of a young girl talking about things of which she was not supposed to know. " I'd rather do what you do. The eleven is fine, it's more than fine — but it's a game, and you might win by luck, or a trick even. You can't do that. And the crew — you understand, I had a brother who rowed, so it isn't as though I didn't know — there are others to help you. And if you rowed prettily — that is. just rowed pretti- ly, but didn't pull hard — you see I — I knew it to happen once. He rowed num- ber two, and nobody knew about him but the man behind him — the man at bow. 34 A BREAK IN TRAINING It wasn't nice. They won, you see, and the man at two didn't pull. And nobody on shore knew — he rowed so well. But you, don't you see " — she turned full on him her fresh face, all life — " what you do you do all yourself, without any luck or any help, and if you win, why what you did, and what you planned, and what you felt — and all of it — it's yours ! " " I didn't know," began Hollis, falter- ingly, " I didn't know that girls ever felt that way — " She turned her head away from him, looking off over the silver grass. "And you'll — be there?" he asked. She laughed a little, very low. " What a lot you've got to learn about girls ! " she said. Young Hollis slept that night in a great still room that smelled of all things sweet and clean and cool. Vaguely he re- called, as he slipped away to sleep with the night-breeze fanning the curtains, a stuffy smell of straw matting, a path of light flickering on the white ceiling, the rising whirr of trolley-cars and their A BREAK IN TRAINING 35 clumpety-clnmp as they crossed the Square. All outside was the silver night, all inside the coolness and quiet, and somewhere under the same roof the girl — whose heart would be leaping upward with his as he fought toward the finish line — was sleeping. There was tea and things for everybody up in Hollis's rooms after the games. Everybody was there. Over by the open window, looking down at the younger Miss Halloway, stood young Hollis — a bit pale and drawn and shaky, but keyed high and exultantly dazed, as became one who had gone stale before a race and then beaten even time, run the second man off his feet and into a faint, and walked from the field with- out anybody's help. " And then you didn't see me waving at oil! " It was the vivacious Miss Ban- nerly who insisted on being heard. " Why, it's the same one I carried last year at New London, and I knew it 36 A BREAK IN TRAINING couldn't lose! And they had to pull me down — just drag me back into my seat — just snuff me out — and you didn't see." "No," said Hollis, plaintively, "I didn't see anybody. You know when " "I know that you're just a brute! They aren't all that way. Don't I know that they get to the last turn of the last lap, 'way behind — I saw this in print, so it's true — and then they — I mean he — sees a ribbon — his ribbon — fluttering at him up in the stand — and bang ! Doesn't he just waltz away from them all and win — and — they sit in the window-seat after the race — and live happy ever after!" Young Hollis looked very much dis- tressed. " But don't you see," he said, " when you're finishing out on what you've got left, and your face is all screwed up in a knot, and there's nothing to breathe, and the track's trying to come up and hit you " " Then," Miss Bannerly set the tip of her parasol sharply on the floor, " why A BREAK IN TRAINING 37 it's — it's just ' fate on the side of the strongest battaHons,' and girls don't ever help at all." Everybody was laughing straight at Hollis. The Elder Halloway turned that way. " Quite right ! " said he, with much composure. He had been leaning with his back to the mantel, pulling his mus- tache quizzically, while his eyes rested on young Hollis and Miss Halloway like those of a benevolent and chastened Me- phistopheles. " Quite right, Miss Ban- nerly. Chivalry is dead. It's muscle and wind that wins races, you know. And that — why, that depends on the trainer. Isn't that right, Holly ? Race all depends on the trainer ! " Young Mr. Hollis looked at the Elder Halloway very hard. He must have thought of something which had not oc- curred to him before, for he started just a bit and got very pink. "Jimmy — Halloway," he said, slowly; and then suddenly going over to the elder man he threw an arm about his shoulder, 38 A BREAK IN TRAINING and wrung his hand for all he was worth. Then he turned, apologetically, " Yes, yes — of course, Miss Bannerly, it all de- pends on the trainer." BETWEEN THE ACTS BETWEEN THE ACTS TRAVIS sat in a big leather chair by the Triglyph fireplace nibbling sugar wafers and sipping Russian tea. The wa- fers took away his appetite, and he didn't like the tea, but his friends believed that he could preserve an unmoved and even effete exterior in the most violent emo- tional crisis, and he was determined to maintain his reputation at all hazards. Outside it was a dazzling February after- noon. The track men were running on the board oval behind the gymnasium; tlie baseball men were sliding on real dirt in the cage; the crew candidates were swinging, bare-backed, over the rowing machines, and there was skating on Spy Pond. " We are trained to the hour." an- nounced Travis, tapping the air decisively with his teaspoon. " We are fit for the 41 42 A BREAK IN TRAINING fight of our lives, and. as the piigihsts say, we are bound to win." The struggle thus referred to by Travis was a team-race in which the four young men from St. David's were entered to run at the invitation games at ^Mechanics' Hall that night. The race was one of the usual number of special team-races of a winter meet, and, with the genial pur- pose of exciting rivalry, had been ar- ranged for teams, each one of which was to be made up of graduates of some one school of the preparatory class. Travis read this in the papers one day and was immediately seized with an idea. He gathered forthwith three of his friends — Randall, Craigie, and Smith-Robinson — and declared to them that this was a great chance for the St. David's men to show what they were made of, and for each of them, individually, to prove that he had some stuff in him. " We've been here now for nearly four years," Travis had said, " and nobody ever heard of a St. David's man going in for anything yet. We've been butter- BETWEEN THE ACTS 43 flies long enough, and we've got to get out and do something. We've got to show 'em we're athletes, I tell you, and — and all that sort of thing. Nowadays if a man can't do something — can't show he's got the stuff — why, I was talking with a girl last night and she said — you know Teddy Bellairs' sister " " Oh ! " smiled Randall. " Oh ! " cried Craigie. "Miss Bellairs!" whistled Smith-Rob- inson, wagging his head. The three young men from St. David's had been completely mystified to hear such unusual sentiments issue from the mouth of the effete Travis. They knew all about the incomparable Miss Bellairs and her cupboard full of golf cups, and all the rest of it, and now they thought they understood. Travis repeated what this gifted young woman had said to him and branched out into the benefits to be de- rived from manly sports, and how their discipline fitted one for the sterner strug- gles of what the English Department calls the outside world. 44 A BREAK IN TRAINING " What we need in this country," de- clared Travis, " is men of iron. Next year we'll be among 'em. And, if we don't go in for something pretty quickly, don't see how we'll ever qualify to — to direct great enterprises, and all that sort of thing, and be — well, by dammy, cap- tains of industry and men of to-morrow !" Travis's speech was received with the enthusiasm which his three followers al- ways bestowed on every manifestation of his genius, and it was decided, at once and unanimously, that St. David's should put a team in the field. As only a week remained before the night of the games, it was thought inadvisable to enter on any strict regime training. Besides, as Travis explained, sport was fast ceasing to be sport in this country because of the un- seemly zeal for mere winning which domi- nated it, and such methods as going to bed at ridiculous hours, eating food one didn't like, and being put through one's paces on a track each day by a trainer were commercial and vulgar. All three of Travis's team-mates applauded these BETWEEN THE ACTS 45 sentiments, and as a first step in their preparation for the race the four young men enveloped themselves in their long ulsters, and, strolling over to the board oval behind the gymnasium — a region to which they had never penetrated before — they stood in a group at the side of the track and studied carefully the appearance and motions of the runners who were striding along bare-legged in the frosty air. ]Most of them looked so queer that the St. David's team felt very much en- couraged, and it was with great delight and confidence that they went off to buy their running clothes and spiked shoes. On the advice of Travis, who had read in a book of training, which he had procured at the library that afternoon, that one's preparatory work should be taken as near as possible at the time at which one was going to race, they decided to do their running in the evening. This had two advantages : There was nobody about to embarrass them, and in the dark one seems to be running about three times as fast as one is going actually, which light- 46 A BREAK IN TRAINING ens the fatigue of training and is very- stimulating. So rapidly did the team im- prove that after five evenings of work Travis said that he thought they had rounded into form and that on the next evening, the last before the games, they would perfect themselves in starts — which he had understood were often the decid- ing factor in a race — and would run through their distance at top speed to give them a fighting edge. This was done with great success and satisfaction to all concerned, and on the following after- noon, after a morning of complete rest, the St. David's team found themselves in the situation indicated in a few sentences back, receiving their final instructions and watching their captain trifle with his tea. Having arranged that the team should meet at Mechanics' Hall at 9:15 o'clock at the latest — the race being called for 9 130 — Travis slipped on his ulster and, thrusting his hands deep into its pockets and assuming an air of impenetrable gloom, sauntered over to his room. " Dammy ! " he said, " I'm all of a flut^ BETWEEN THE ACTS 47 ter, I am! Never was so excited in my life ! " And crouching on the carpet, he began to practice starts between the win- dow-seat and the bedroom door — a di- version which, as the room was only about fifteen feet wide, was less practical than hazardous. He had just come up — bang! — against the opposite wall after one of these plunges, when his door, which was never locked, opened tenta- tively, and the astonished face of an A. D. T. messenger boy peered in. The note which the boy removed carefully from the inside lining of his cap was from that austere matron, Mrs. Beacon- Jones, who knew Travis's family very well indeed, and who thought him such an agreeable youth that she was for- ever inviting him. on the briefest no- tice, to fill up a vacant place at din- ner. Travis was sufficiently used to invitations of this sort to open and be- gin to read the message with his accus- tomed calm — a condition of the emotions which, as may be imagined, was com- pletely o\-erturned when his eye fell on 48 A BREAK IN TRAINING the name of the beautiful Miss Bellairs, It appeared that Mrs. Beacon-Jones had spent the week-end at The Oaks and brought Miss Behairs back to town with her; but she was to return in the morn- ing, and wouldn't Mr. Travis like to come in to dinner — quite informally, just among ourselves, and all that. " Dammy ! Well, now, I say ! " mur- mured Travis. " What's to do ! " Not wishing the messenger boy to witness his agitation, he told that shivering youth to make himself comfortable in the big chair by the grate, and he then sat down at his desk to compose a note. It would be flying in the face of fate to decline such an invitation, and, besides, as Travis sud- denly recalled with much satisfaction, his friend, Ricketts, who had spent a year at Oxford, had told him that over there a man always went to a garden party be- fore he jumped into his running clothes or got ready to row on the river. " The only trouble," mused Travis, " is the dinner. I shall eat too much, and anyway we wouldn't get through until BETWEEN THE ACTS 49 nine o'clock, and I don't quite see how I can feel very keen for racing only half an hour after! " After a minute's thought, however, Travis seized his pen and rapidly wrote two notes. One of them was addressed to a certain ticket agency, where Travis was well known, reserving three seats at the Hollis for that evening. In the other Travis accepted Mrs. Beacon- Jones's invitation with enthusiasm, and informed her that, as he had heard Miss Bellairs speak inquiringly of the " Jump- ing-Jack Girl," he was going to retaliate for being asked to dinner on such short notice by inviting them to go to the the- ater afterward. Travis added that they must surely not miss Lola Lane's song about " My Congo Waterlily," which came near the beginning of the first act, because, so everyone said, that was quite the best thing in the piece. " I think," observed Travis with satis- faction, " that that will do very well. In order to reach the theater we shall have to dine very early, and I shall have such 50 A BREAK IN TRAINING an extremely good time that I shall for- get all about worrying over the race. And what is best of all, I shall very distinctly have it on the other three." Travis was far too much in awe of Miss Bellairs's personal prowess to risk any mention of his own venture until he felt that his status as an athlete was defi- nitely established, and from the easy prat- tle with which he beguiled the dinner hour and the ride downtown no one would have suspected that in somewhat less than two hours he was to appear in running clothes and spiked shoes for the first time before any audience. On arriving at the theater he left his guests for a moment in the foyer while he stepped to the ticket office and wrote a note, which he asked should be delivered promptly at the close of the first act to ** Mr. Travis, who was to sit in E3, but had not yet reached his seat." He then rejoined Miss Bellairs, and the party arrived at their stalls in the fifth row on the aisle just as the merry villagers of the royal city of Bezing Be- zazza fluttered in from the wings to sing BETWEEN THE ACTS 51 the entrance song for the MilHonaire and the Sixteen MilHners, who had been cast away on their lonely island. The first act was short and a great success, the " Congo Waterlily Song " had been en- cored four times, and sung to red, yel- low, purple, and variegated lights and in pitch darkness. The curtain was just go- ins: down when an usher came down the aisle and handed Travis a note. After reading it through he explained, with ex- treme politeness and concern, that he would have to leave them for a few min- utes, but that his friend, Dunster, whom he saw sitting in the front row, would, he knew, be delighted to take his place while he was gone. Dunster was a harm- less young man who was known both to Mrs. Beacon-Jones and Miss Bellairs, and who happened to regard Travis in the light of a hero. " What's up ! " he whispered, when Travis had made his request. " Nothing," sighed Travis wearily, running his fingers tentatively over his tie. " Little team-race on, down at Me- 52 A BREAK IN TRAINING chanics' Hall — got to run. Be back in an hour." Duiister gasped and regarded Travis with kindling eyes. " You don't care what you do, do you?" he murmured. " If anything should happen! " mused Travis. " Of course, there won't, but if anything should, you know, just see that they get home, and all that, won't you, old fellow?" Poor young Dunster was so unnerved by this Olympic dismissal of the austere Mrs. Beacon-Jones and the incomparable Miss Bellairs that no sooner had he sat down beside them than he forgot all about Travis's request not to say anything about the race, and straightway blurted it all out with exuberant comments on Travis's genius. " Never was such a man ! " cried young Dunster. " You see how it is — some- body's given out up there — or broke a leg or something — and they had to send for Travis. He's the man they had to have — only one that would do. Here he is in BETWEEN THE ACTS 53 the theater; nothing further from his mind than running — he never trains or anything hke that, you know — note comes telHng him to come quick ; gets up, says nothing, saunters out, and I bet you," cried young Dunster to the sympathetic Miss Bellairs, " I bet you he goes up there and beats 'em all out, and '11 be back here in an hour without turning a hair ! " Young Dunster worked himself up to such a pitch of enthusiasm, and Miss Bel- lairs was so impressed with the noble self- sacrifice exhibited by Travis in leaving her in order, so to speak, to do his duty as a man, and so excited on her sport- ing side by the news that the effete Mr. Travis was an athlete beneath his purple and fine linen, that when Dunster, in a sudden burst of executive ability, pro- posed that they should leave the play, jump into a carriage, and rush with all speed to the scene of action. Miss Bel- lairs replied that they would be rank quit- ters if they didn't, and even Mrs. Beacon- Jones acquiesced and said that she really believed she would like to go. 54 A BREAK IN TRAINING Travis reached the contestants' room in the basement of Mechanics' Hall at 9 125 o'clock. The place was crowded with men in all stages of undress, and stifling with the heat from the steam pipes and the mingled smells of sweaty clothes and liniment and wintergreen oil. Some of the runners were stretched on the padded benches, taking their rubbing gratefully; others were nervously tying quadruple knots in the laces of their running shoes ; freshmen were having their numbers pinned to the backs of their shirts with conscious pride, and the bald-headed vet- eran from the Jolly Pathfinders' Athletic Club of South Boston, who had already contested in the shot-put, the mile run, and the handicap-half, was now, with four rubbers in magenta and yellow sweaters, and one boy with a mysterious black bottle, preparing himself for the fifty-yard dash. Into the humid heat of this cheerful and extraordinary place there came, every now and then, the megaphone voice from the stairway as the coming events were called ; up the BETWEEN THE ACTS 55 Stairs hurried the fresh runners, down them toppled the sick-looking ones, and steadily from the great hall overhead came the muffled booming of the band and the stage-thunder rumble of feet tearing around the banked and boarded track. " Where the deuce have you been ! " demanded Randall. " Five minutes more and we should have had to run w^ithout you ! " Travis, picking his way circum- spectly between the files of sw'eaters and littered clothing, slipped off his outer coat and dropped it across an empty bench — revealing to the startled gaze of the sturdy runners from the Thistle Harriers, who occupied quarters adjoining, an evening costume whose chaste splendor threw those gentlemen into amazement and dismay. " Dined out ! " smiled Travis, adding a coat and w-aistcoat to the pile. "Thought I'd never get away!" By the time Randall had recovered from the shock of this announcement sufficiently to communicate it to the dumbfounded members of the vSt. David's team the 56 A BREAK IN TRAINING megaphone was already bellowing from the stairs the first call for their race. At the same moment Travis, wrapped in a dressing gown which, with his running clothes, he had left at the hall on his way into town that evening, appeared and suggested that it was about time they were getting upstairs. The great hall was crowded with spec- tators and ablaze with lights, and as they stepped, blinking, into the arena, Larry Devine, the East Somerville Wonder, was just finishing an exhibition quarter-mile to the tune of " The Wearing of the Green." Rows of eager spectators banked three sides of the big hall and crowded the balcony, and as the band stopped and they became the focus of a vast compos- ite stare, the four novice members of the St. David's team felt very much, as Smith-Robinson confided to Randall, like entries in the poodle class approaching the judges for the preliminary round of judging. The light-footed Mercuries who represented Duxbury High, Cam- bridgeport Collegiate, and East Chelsea BETWEEN THE ACTS 57 Latin lost no time in soliloquizing, but promptly began to act as though they had been there many times before. Toss- ing their blankets and robes aside they trotted out on the track, and in the man- ner affected by the sophisticated strode solemnly around on the tips of their toes, to get the feel of the going and of the steeply banked corners. The three lesser members of the St. David's team fol- lowed their lead, but Travis, with his thumbs in the cord of his gown, stared at the ceiling, buried in thought, only now and then casting his eyes toward his prancing opponents with the air of one picking flaws in their style or weak points toward which to direct an attack. " Better try the corners ! " cried Ran- dall, putting his mouth close to Travis's ear to make himself heard through the resumed dinning of the band. He jerked his head toward the fan-shaped wdiite pine inclines that curved at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees round each corner of the track. "Aren't you going to try the corners?" 58 A BREAK IN TRAINING stuttered Smith-Robinson. He was to run the first relay, and he was pale and quite unstrung. All at once the noise of the band was hushed and the big hall became still. The starter's whistle squealed, and the first four runners — Smith-Robinson, and the three unknown quantities from Duxbury High, Cambridgeport Collegiate, and East Chelsea Latin took their places at the starting line. This line was in front of the main entrance to the hall, and they were to run three laps in each relay, fin- ishing where they ha.d begun. Smith- Robinson was lucky enough to draw the pole. Craigie, as they had arranged over the tea and wafers that afternoon, was to run the second relay, Randall the third, and Travis, as became the originator of the St. David's team, had the honor of fighting out the finish. " Ready! " said the starter. " Set! " Now, Smith-Robinson was extremely nervous, and as he had never run before, he knew nothing about the penalty im- posed for starting ahead of time, and he BETWEEN THE ACTS 59 feared nothing. And so it came about that when the starter had slowly knelled out the " Set! " he could contain himself no longer, and over the line he shot, like a rabbit out of a grass-tuft, beating the pistol by precisely the permissible fraction of a second and causing all the veteran sporting gentlemen in the hall to wag their heads with delight and wonder, and observe that that young feller couldn't 'a' caught it better if he'd a been Duffey him- self. The result was that Smith-Robinson found himself, after the mad jostling at the first turn, in the lead, a position which so terrified him with its responsibility that, in sheer fear that the three men who were puffing behind him should pass him, he ran with a speed that no one, least of all himself, had ever dreamed that he possessed. Br-r-r-r — thrump — thrump — thrump — Br-r-r-r! went the spiked feet down the long side, over the resounding banked corners and on again. It takes pretty good running to pass a man who has the pole, on the short sides and ugly corners 6o A BREAK IN TRAINING of an indoor track, and on Smith-Robin- son flew, as though pursued by the Head- less Horseman — around two laps, on through the third, down the long side, and all out and wobbling, with the three others trailing Indian-file behind him, he dived forward and touched Craigie's frantic fingers only a fraction of a second behind the veteran runner for Cambridgeport Collegiate. " Two of 'em behind you ! " cried Trav- is, slapping Craigie on the back, as he jumped away. " We're still ahead ! " Craigie was the least likely man on the St. David's team, but in the instant that elasped before the second runner for East Chelsea Latin — a grim-looking gen- tleman, somewhat bald, in a green jersey with a broad purple band about the mid- dle of it which gave, as one might say, a touch of color to the scene — before this runner could reach the hand of his own man, Craigie was safely away in pursuit of Cambridgeport Collegiate. The grim- looking gentleman was, however, not to be denied. At the end of the first lap he BETWEEN THE ACTS 6i was on even terms with Craigie. Bump- ing elbows, neck and neck, they fought round the second lap, then the purple and green slipped by and in the die-away of the last lap Craigie just managed to beat out Duxbury High for third place. " Up guards and at 'em ! " yelled Trav- is, as Randall slapped Craigie's hand. " There's one behind us ! We're still ahead ! " Br-r-r-r-r — thrump — thrump — thrump — Br-r-r-r! went the helter-skelter of pounding feet. Travis, his robe thrown aside, his fingers working nervously, watched the flight and pursuit, and tried to keep his heart inside his ribs until it came his turn. He had seen some track games once, but he had never seen any- thing like this — the sink-or-swim, head- long, thundering pace, dying away with each runner only to be caught up and whirled on again — the yells and the smell of heat and gas and the drum-beat roll on the pine boards — this composite re- duction of a prize-fight and a pony express with a band booming away in the gallery. 62 A BREAK IN TRAINING Round they came toward the last lap of the third relay— " St. David's ! " yelled Travis, as they pounded by, Randall and the Duxbury man neck and neck — and then vv^ith the three others he jumped into his place on the starting line. It was a moment calculated to agitate even the most imperturbable heart. Craigie and Smith-Robinson lay prone at the side of the track. Travis's turn came next, and with half a lap yet to go he could see that Randall was weakening. Slowly the four drew nearer. Travis, leaning back as far as he could from the line, stretched an arm toward Randall and called to him: " Come 071 ! Come on! " The band was booming triumphantly " Hands Across the Sea." On the runners came, in close single file now, Cambridgeport Collegiate in the lead. There was a moment's sud- den wait as they struggled round the last turn, then Clang! went the gong for the last lap. A runner beside Travis jumped away — a second — a third — then a damp hand touched his and — he was off! ' BETWEEN THE ACTS 63 Clang-clang-clang ! rang the nervous gong. A yell of joy went up from the crowd and the band jumped into the dou- ble-quick. Travis was round the first turn before he even found himself. It was now or never for the gentlemen from St. David's — three men ahead and Travis to the rescue. Down the long side he fairly flew. Not having gotten the feel of his legs, nor of the track, the hard floor seemed to rebound against his feet. He could not have stopped any more than if he had been running on glary ice. The steeply inclined corner reared in front of him. Instinctively leaning inward, he took it blindly — the pine boards suddenly slapped him a staggering blow in the face, and he was sliding foolishly up and along the incline with ten thousand slivers at once rushing into his knees. Travis didn't know, of course, that a fall at the first corner is the novice's proverbial fate, and to the indoor audience one of its live- liest delights, and as the crowd yelled and the three other men pounded away and he scrambled to his feet, he was very 64 A BREAK IN TRAINING certain that the light had all gone out of his life and he would never be the same man again. Beaten as he was, he was bound to finish game, however, and be- fore he really knew that the galleries hadn't collapsed or that there hadn't been a subway explosion, he was up and after them. It seemed seconds, but as a mat- ter of fact he had shot forward, slid twenty feet across the boards, gathered his feet under him and jumped after the leaders so quickly that the whole thing looked like some sort of curious manoeu- ver in the race. He could hear the people cheering him and see handkerchiefs wav- ing over the rail and feel the air blow cold against the raw flesh of his knees as he got into his gait again. " Keep it up ! Keep it up ! " the crowd roared. "Yay, yay! Good boy! You're all right ! Go it, young feller ! " On down the long side and past the starting line, where Craigie and Randall and Smith-Robinson, raised on their el- bows, were staring at him in despair, on around the second lap he fought, with BETWEEN THE ACTS 65 the distance between him and the leaders remaining the same. Clang! went the gong for the last lap. The band began to play so fast that it ran away from the tune, and the latter, in despair, so to speak, stumbled and twisted itself into a knot. Casting reck- lessly into the running the last ounce of steam they had, the four runners fought up the long side of the hall, across and down the other side. Travis several yards behind, began to " climb stairs." Randall, Craigie, and Smith-Robinson hobbled up the side of the track calling on him to come, and the three leaders, close together, all out and wobbling, but not to be overtaken, hit the last corner, when — " Just like that ! " cried young Dun- ster, bringing his hands together with a clap, as he described the incident after- /. ward. " Down goes the first man just as though you'd knocked his legs from under him. Two men right behind him — all out — dead to the world — Travis had run 'em off their feet, you know — won- ;x 66 A BREAK IN TRAINING derful man, Travis — wonderful endur- ance, wind, and all that, you know — down they go, too ! All in a heap — can't get out of the way! Travis just misses 'em — wonderful quickness, presence of mind, and all that, you know. Hurdles back man — swings out — dives ahead and hits the tape ! " It was at the psychological instant thus vividly pictured — just as Travis stag- gered past his prostrate opponents — that young Dunster and his convoy entered the hall and started down the main aisle, which gave an unobstructed view of the finish. And as Travis hit the tape he fell squarely into the arms of young Dun- ster, who, in spite of the long ulster in which he was enveloped, and a policeman, had vaulted the rail and now, with one arm supporting Travis, pointed in tri- umph behind him where stood Mrs. Bea- con-Jones and the incomparable Miss Bel- lairs. With a rare stroke of genius Travis permitted his gaze to fall lightly on Miss Bellairs, and then to pass on as though BETWEEN THE ACTS 67 she were but a picture on the wall. Miss Bellairs beheld this, saw Travis hurry the reviving members of his team off to the dressing-room, and when he returned a few moments later, faultlessly arrayed and apparently quite unruffled, there came through her look of critical admiration a flutter of deference and submission. " To think," she murmured, half aloud, " how I have misjudged him! " *' Just telling them," breezed Dunster, as the four members of St. David's team came up. " how you go in for these things without any training or any of that sort of bother, you know, and " " Yes — yes, that will be all right," smiled Travis reassuringly. " But I promised that I would be back by the third act, you know, and it's only ten o'clock now, and that thing is monstrous- ly long and — and, I say we all go back together." " You see," he said, turning toward Miss Bellairs and starting toward the door, " it's in the last act that that " The rest of it was not heard, because 68 A BREAK IN TRAINING Travis and Miss Bellairs swept calmly away as though there was nobody else in the world. Young Dunster and Mrs. Beacon-Jones followed, the latter observ- ing that this sport seemed quite as dan- gerous as football, and that she did not see why it was necessary for Mr. Travis to knock all those young men down. The three lesser members of the St. David's team brought up the rear. " This thing mixes me all up," said Smith-Robinson. " Certainly it is most extraordinary! My man beats me out on the first lap, your green-and-purple sweater chap makes it worse in the sec- ond, Randall finishes last in the third, Travis falls down and loses the whole race, and yet St. David's team beats 'em all and we get the cups, and you'll read that we won in to-morrow morning's pa- pers. It mixes me all up, and what I want to know is, are we athletes and all that now, or aren't we — that's what I want to know ! " HIS FIRST RACE HIS FIRST RACE THE Freshman was a boy who could have done some things very excel- lently, if he had not been too bashful to do his best. In crises he was likely to come out strong, but that was because he forgot himself. He had lots of sand and seriousness and endurance as long as he worked down in the crowd ; then when he found himself on top, with people staring at him and expecting things, he got frightened and ran away. One who is chosen for the team, however, may not run away. With none to help or shield him he must start from the mark, and, on his own legs, with none but his own strength of will, win, or run until he drops. This last merely shows that he has the right spirit. Now, the Freshman had a perfectly healthy body and very i)rettily shaped 71 72 A BREAK IN TRAINING muscles, but joined to these a set of nerves that hung Hke hair-triggers. Be- cause of this, he felt and was hurt by- many things which had no reason to hurt him, and never touched other people. Be- cause of this, the week which had passed since he had read in the 'varsity daily his name among the entries had been a night- mare, in which all the outside world seemed leagued in a plot to disgrace him. Because of this, every time the cheers or the starter's shrill whistle came to him where he lay wrapped in sweater and blankets on the floor of the locker-room, or he saw the runners drag themselves in from the last race to fall on the floor in a heap, or caught the warm, rank smell of liniment and witch-hazel which weighted the air of the room, he cringed and pressed his hot, sweaty hands be- tween his knees. The Freshman stepped out on the track as a nervous horse steps on a shaky bridge. The white figures of the others in his event, the half-mile, were already there, slowly trotting for a few rods down HIS FIRST RACE 73 the track, careful, business-like, and self- possessed, as though they really believed it did some good. With long, springy, limbering strides, the Freshman followed. He held his eyes away from the great wall of crowded " bleachers," as you would keep your eyes fixed upward when climbing a precipice. The big, moving, many-colored mass said nothing, but it had a silent stare, the sum of hundreds of watching eyes, which was awful. After a dozen steps he turned and walked slowly back. Even that had made his breath come quicker, and he tried to cal- culate how far he could go before his wind would give out and the wretched hollow feeling would overcome him. He fancied he might get as far as the first quarter. In front of him the starting line tape was drawn across the black cinders. He drew near it with a shivery feeling. He was not a coward. But there was some- thing so new and untried and relentless in it all. There was no luck, no escape. In two minutes he must cross it, either 74 A BREAK IN TRAINING ahead, or with only enough strength left to drop gracefully. The great crowd, a blank of black with splashes here and there of white and blue and pink, stared down gayly and whispered all over, like great trees rustling in the breeze. It was fun for the crowd, sitting in its summer clothes in comfortable seats; it used to be fun, the Freshman recalled, for an- ■ other crowd, to sit beneath the silken awnings and turn down its thumbs to the gladiators below. Getting used to all this strain, and learning how to run one's self to a standstill, is what wins races. Many grow to like it. The Freshman, however, was running his first race, and he looked at the crowd and the mark as you might at the glittering surgical in- struments and the rows of eager-faced medical students waiting to see your leg cut off. The eight figures stood waiting. A clerk-like young man, with book and pen- cil, examined the number on each man's back. " All right," said he, stepping aside. HIS FIRST RACE 75 Then a sharp-eyed fellow stepped for- ward with a little nickel-plated pistol in his hand. " Ready, in your places," he said, sternly. The Freshman had the outside. He felt a dim gladness. Not so much would be expected of him. Next him was a blue jersey, and so on alternately. The crimson veteran was next to the pole. " On your marks," commanded the sharp-eyed man. Each runner glanced at the toe of his shoe to see that it touched the line. " Ready! "—" Set! " Two of the blue jerseys crouched to the ground with arms stiffened straight and thumb and finger just touching the tape. The Freshman leaned forward and squeezed his sweaty fingers tighter. His mouth was like cot- ton. He listened for the shot behind him, as though the pistol were loaded and pointed at his back. Unconsciously he leaned farther and farther forward. There was a quick wabble in his legs, and he sprawled over the line. 76 A BREAK IN TRAINING "Come, come, come!" drawled the starter. " This is no fifty-yard dash." And he lowered his pistol. The Fresh- man stepped back, much confused. " Now ! On your marks ! " Again there was crouching and leaning and stiffening and straining of muscles. " Re-eady !— Get set ! " There was a tense, tearing instant; then a short, fool- ish little click. Someone said something between his teeth. The Freshman had sprawled across the line again. The crim- son veteran straightened up and slowly turned his head. He looked much bored. The starter sighed distressedly. He turned a chamber in the revolver. " All right ! Now — on your marks ! " "Ready!" Set!" The starter glanced sharply along the rigid line. Then his arm w^nt up above his head. There was a snap, a quick scattering of cinders, a leaping of muscles into life, and the Freshman felt himself falling through bottomless depths of air. When he came to himself he was a dozen yards down the track, fiercely elbowing for the place HIS FIRST RACE 77 next the pole. The first furious moment of pushing and cutting across in front and cutting in behind was over, and, like different sized stones rolling down a steep incline, the runners had shaken them- selves into place. It suddenly occurred to the Freshman that the thing which had hung over his mind like a heavy paining cloud had burst. He could not have told why he was try- ing so madly to pass the object at his side, and thus was wasting the strength that should have been saved for his legs. He had no idea of the pace they kept, nor how long he could stand it. The blue jersey merely moved faster, and blind in- stinct urged him ahead. Then he remem- bered that the blue jersey, being on the inside, was running the shorter distance, and that there was a whole half mile ahead of them. There were a great many chances to one that he would have for- gotten this. The Freshman dropped in behind and hooked his glance to the num- ber on the other's back. As they passed the first turn, he saw 78 A BREAK IN TRAINING the veteran sweeping grandly into the first straightaway, as one sees the loco- motive from a car window when the train rounds a curve. From that steadily ad- vancing white figure, its legs rising and falling with the regularity of pistons, he felt a sort of attraction, as though it drew the others after it. Between the leader and himself were figures, but he did not know how many, or that a blue jersey was second, a crimson band third, then two blue jerseys, and sixth himself. He realized only the inexorable fact that he was in something which could not stop. He fixed his eye on the big black number in front of him, as in the midst of a herd of stampeded cattle you would fix your eye on the animal in front. The rejoic- ing of a strong man at running a race did not occur to him. He felt entirely on the defensive. As his mind accustomed itself to the steady, relentless stride, stride, stride, and he began to feel his toes touch the ground and hear the breath rush in and out of his nose, he felt a new difficulty. It grew HIS FIRST RACE 79 big and important in his mind. The pace was too fast. There is, of course, a speed which no man can keep up for half a mile. It troubled him that the others did not see that they were going at this pace. It seemed foolish and unfair, and he felt like stopping to expostulate. Sometimes, as you stand beside a locomotive, the safety-valve bursts into its fiendishly thunderous rattle. You put your hands to your ears, but it does not stop. You feel like saying to it, " Wait a moment, please, till I am ready, then you may be- gin." Such was the Freshman's state of mind, as with the same sort of irritating effect, the outrageous pace dragged him on. Thud — thud — thud — went the feet in front and behind him. He was now just entering the straightaway opposite the grand-stands. He observed that he was keeping stride with the man in front of him. He knew that old runners some- times wear out novices, by thus making them run an unnatural stride, It worried 8o A BREAK IN TRAINING him, but he could not seem to change. His eyes still clung to the number. He studied it nervously. It was 83. Each roughness in the printing, the spots of dust, the threads of the cloth, he exam- ined intently. It occurred to him that it could be easily made into an 88. At the time this seemed more or less significant. The thudding crunch of the spikes into the track and the splatter of cinders against his bare legs, which he now began to notice, told him how fast they swept along. Now and then a lump hit his face, and one, swifter than the rest, struck into his eye. It scratched painfully, and he saw the black 83 with but one eye. They were directly across from the stands now, and as they filed rhythmically by there were pleased little " Ohs " which he could not hear. Nor did he notice, except in a confused way, the shouts from the half- dressed figures who, leaning from the balcony and upper windows of the field- house, yelled, " Good work! Hang on " and " Keep it up ! You're all right! " A white, flat stone slipped past beside HIS FIRST RACE 8l his feet, and he knew that the 220 mark was passed, and the race was just quarter done. It would take three times the strength he already had used to finish. Just as the dread impossibihty of all this sank on his mind, the blue jersey behind pushed forward. As the Freshman saw it, out of the side of his eye, he in- stinctively quickened his own stride. Then he discovered that his legs, which he had forgotten, lifted very heavily, and his breath came hissingly between his teeth. This meant that he was getting tired. At the same moment the black 83 began to move steadily away. What was happening was this — they were just en- tering the straightaway that led past the stands, and the more experienced men were feeling the stimulus of the crowd. As the Freshman saw the number slip from him, saw the wall of spectators looming up ahead, and thought that there was still more than half the distance to run. a cold fear struck him. He doubted tliat he could pass the crowd. He squeezed his fists tighter and bit his lips 82 A BREAK IN TRAINING hard. He cast a short, defiant look at the stands, and, lest they see how weak and wabbly he really was, he stepped as straight as though he were running be- tween two barb-wire fences two feet apart. The rope fence had broken just as the runners had been sent off, and the crowd had pushed out on the track. With cries of " Get back ! Get back ! Give 'em a show!" the mass opened into a narrow lane, through which the racers tramped single file. With the same ceaseless crunch — crunch, swish — swish, and breath hissing through teeth, they ap- proached the gauntlet of stares. To the Freshman the glimpses of faces and or- dinary clothes seemed far away and ir- relevant, as might appear the trees and shore to one struggling in the water. As he entered the lane, the stares reached out for him, pulled him toward them, and then dismissed him with a shove. As he neared the upper end he could see the timers leaning out over the edge of the track, watch in hand. A voice HIS FIRST RACE 83 said " fifty-seven " as he passed, and he knew that he had done the first quarter- mile in three seconds less than a minute. Even in his quarter-mile trials he had nev- er done better. There was still another quarter to go. The rashness of the thing- seemed monstrous. He almost smiled at the irony of it. But at that moment, just as they passed the timers, the blue jersey ahead of him sprang away, apparently as fresh as at the start. That is what always happens. When the distance is half covered, and the race is merely from one mark to the same mark again, a sort of devil-may-care courage seizes the racers. It is in the lit- tle sprint that follows that the half-mile may be won. The novice is likely to be deceived by this sudden freshness. He does not know that his rival is really as weak and hollow as he himself. The Freshman felt his last ounce of strength leave him. It was only a desperate stub- bornness that made him squeeze his fists and go through the motions of spurting. At the moment he remembered having 84 A BREAK IN TRAINING once read, " When you pass the quarter mark you should begin to pick up those ahead of you — if there still remain any." Again he almost smiled at the irony of it all. Faster came the chuck, chuck of spiked feet. They were past the crowd, and rounding the upper turn. More des- perate were the Freshman's struggles to increase his pace ; and, finally, just as they turned into the long side, he felt the prick of cinders against his bare legs. All his strength of will he centered on the black 83 in front. It seemed to move forward with the steady relentlessness of the rear platform of a railway car which one is trying to catch. They were now in the middle of the long straightaway that led past the field house. His breath seemed only to touch the top of his lungs before an irresistible pull snatched it back. His legs were growing wooden. He felt that he could last but a moment longer. At that instant something took his gaze away from the 83. Just to the right of the blue jersey and slowly fall- ing back toward them, was the crimson- HIS FIRST RACE 85 banded runner who had held third place. His stride had so lost its regularity that he had swerved toward the center of the track. His arms, which had moved stiff and steadily at his sides, were doubled up as a child runs, with fists churning in front of his face. His head and upper body pumped, as though he were push- ing himself along. The Freshman was amazed. That one of those others should thus show signs of weakness, while he himself kept his feet, seemed incongru- ous. Then the exhausted runner wab- bled; once his foot struck out sideways, and he was thrown out of his stride. At that moment number 83 passed by. Close upon him, mystified but dogged, the Freshman found himself slowly but steadily slipping past the beaten racer. As he did so the face of things changed. When he snapped his eyes back to the 83, there was a new look in them. Before, it had been the stubborn terror of a child ; there was now a suggestion of the eyes of a fox-terrier who stands before a rat-hole with tail bobbing nerv- 86 A BREAK IN TRAINING ously and legs trembling with excite- ment. It was a big thing which the Fresh- man had learned in the last second, but it did not make new legs, or lungs full of air. They were just passing the three- eighths mark, and he must finish as he was. The same relentless chuck — swish — chuck — swish — beat upon the cinders. The Freshman's legs seemed to have lost all feeling and to rise and fall mechanic- ally, like wooden sticks. Suddenly one of them slipped, just as when someone hits you unexpectedly behind the knee. This meant that he was falling out of his stride, and it frightened him. The breath fell so shallowly into his lungs that he seemed to be seizing it in bites. Once he discovered a fist in front of his face, and he knew then that he, too, was " pumping." Things were getting wavy and hazy before his eyes. He was learn- ing the meaning of the phrase, " running yourself out." It means to run till you are ready to drop, then shut your eyes, squeeze your fists, and sprint! HIS FIRST RACE 87 The Freshman did not reaHze, in the excitement of it ah, that he was uncon- sciously increasing his speed at every step. But he saw the 83 come nearer — slowly, maddeningly slow — but steadily nearer. As each dead leg heaved for- ward, and the breath slipped from the grasp of his teeth, he approached inch by inch until he could have touched it with his hand. Then a rash courage came to him. His eyes left the 83 ; he swerved quickly to the right, his left arm grazed the other's right, and he was past. They were entering the stretch. Strid- ing ahead, with first place easily his, was the veteran. The second blue jersey was not more than a rod ahead. The Fresh- man fastened his eyes upon the advanc- ing back, and, foot by foot, came up to it, as you would pull yourself, hand-over- hand, up a rope. He shut his eyes for an instant, and again swerved to the right. Then he heard something from the wait- ing stands down the track. For several seconds there had been confused cheer- ing, but he had not understood it. This 88 A BREAK IN TRAINING was something he had never heard before. It was his own name shouted out by the black waving mass that stretched all along the straightaway to the tape. All in a flash it came to him that the great crowd, instead of being a cruel, silent, staring enemy, was with him. And the track, instead of being a sort of operating table, was a place on which to run and some- times to win. And the other runners, the spectators, every detail of it all, were only parts of a big game which, after all, ought to be fun. Fifty yards away in front he could see, stretched breast-high across the track, the narrow line of crimson tape. With the shouts at his side sounding gloriously in his ears, he took his eyes from his rival, and held them to that narrow streak of red. In his mind he took in the number of strides and the strength it would take to reach it, just as you understand a whole sentence of print at a glance. He felt that he could do it, though it had come to be amazingly hard. For the track had taken on an odd habit of rolling, HIS FIRST RACE 89 rather like the deck of a ship; once it came up to meet him so that his foot struck before he meant it to. From the finish mark he could hear the trainers sternly calling, " Keep your feet ! Keep — your — feet ! " Then at last he saw the back in front of him waver a bit in its course, and the arms and upper body begin to pump. The Freshman fixed his eyes again on the wavering number, and again drew him- self nearer and nearer. He was almost neck-and-neck now — just a shade behind, then a shadow ahead. The two strug- gling figures seemed inevitably to run to- gether. The track behaved strangely, and the Freshman could not keep clear of the man at his side. The tape was not more than ten feet away, when their elbows hit hard against each other. For a moment the Freshman thought he was falling; then, half running, half diving, he lunged toward the tape — and fell on the other side. Scrambling to his feet, with arms and neck hanging very limp and breath com- 90 A BREAK IN TRAINING ing quick, he looked round him in a dazed way, as though he wondered what had happened. Then, because his knees sud- denly felt very queer and weak, he started slowly to sit down, when many arms grabbed him and he felt himself raised. There was pushing and noise and much dust. As for the Freshman, he blinked down from somebody's shoulder in pleased embarrassment upon the crowd, and then, because he had done a big thing and felt very empty and weak and queer, he let his head droop and beneath his half- closed eyes grinned inside at the crimson " H " on his chest. THE QUITTER :i THE QUITTER YOUNG Mr. Jones sat on the bleachers in a perfectly lovely new suit of flan- nels and wearing a new straw hat, with a very aesthetic hat-band, which shone airily in the afternoon sunshine. He as looking very fit, he was quite free from every care, all the other admirers of Miss Bannerly were gnashing their teeth in envy, and Jones was convinced that the world was a very comfortable place in- deed. For one thing, he was going to see a race in peace. He had slept like a babe all the night before and he hadn't spent the morning rubbing his damp hands to- gether, and wishing for some hygienic anaesthetic which would put one to sleep the day before the games and let one wake up fresh, and rather pleasantly sur- prised, just as one's race was called. These were invitation games, so that 93 94 A BREAK IN TRAINING nothing particular hung on any particular race — unless, perhaps that mile run in which several New Haven men had en- tered — and Jones could sit at his ease, with a free conscience and that interest which only an outsider can have, and watch a lot of young men whom he knew very well, and whose particular abilities and failings he knew all about, running themselves out for his amusement. It was a very beautiful day, so beautiful — with the fresh green in the grass and the willows, and the warm May sun smiling down from the blue, and the nice-lookinsf people in nice-looking clothes sitting all about and chatting quietly — that he didn't even bother to talk very much, but just sat back and smiled now and then and let himself bask in things. And as he watched the shot-putters poised for the throw, with their right arms drawn back into a tensely coiled living spring and their outstretched left arms outlined against the trees, and the sprinters prac- ticing starts at the top of the track below the Willows, and the white figures and THE QUITTER 95 the crimson and blue sweaters dotting the green near the starting Hne about the field-house steps, he was pleasantly con- scious of the fragrant beauty of it all and \vhat a great thing it was to be young and fit and about to run — which you don't at all feel when you're actually about to race, and you're doubling the knots in your spiked shoes, and licking your lips with your cottony tongue and listening to 3'our heart thump and wondering why that Eli — who feels just as you do and is worried to death at your maddening coolness — should look as though lie were made of rawhide and steel springs and was ready to bite the heads off ten-penny wire nails. "Whee-ee-eel!" Good gracious ! What was that shiver up his backbone and that quick throb un- der his handkerchief pocket? And why (lid he feci as though someone had sud- denly called on him for a speech ? It was only the hurdlers crouching for the start of the first heat away down there at the other end of the straightaway. q6 a break in training *' You must know just how they feel ! " murmured Miss Bannerly, " I guess I do! " said Jones, taking off his hat and fanning himself. There was a far-away snap, a little puff of smoke floated off over the grass, and the four runners were already taking the first hur- dle. And how prettily! Thud — thud — thud — clip ! Thud— thud — thud — clip ! With each stride perfectly calculated, the swift rush, rise, clip and recover smoothed into one motion as the notes of a violin are drawn out in one sweep of the bow; how the four white figures fairly ate up the ground and sailed toward the finish line ! " Pretty ! " whispered the girl. " Yes," murmured Jones. He had never had an idea that track games could be so much fun. He had always been like the man who beats the cymbals in the band, and now for the first time he was out and away from it all and he could catch the tone of the swift, sweet music. How easy and simple it seemed, sit- THE QUITTER 97 ting there in the stands ! That quarter- mile dash — merely a swift and pretty bit of running! And yet he could feel even now the start of the only four-forty he had ever raced, the sudden collapse at the lower turn, the struggle through quicksand to the tape and now — a swift, pretty bit of running, and that was all ! How easy to see that the second man was really all in at the three hundred mark, and that if young Gray had sprinted then instead of waiting, he could have finished second, possibly even won. How ridiculously plain that the Freshman who dropped out at the lower turn, was running himself out in the first two-twenty ! This new point of view filled Jones with excitement and delight and he began talking to Miss Bannerly with such vi- vacity and charm, that she was presently compelled to murmur : " I'm awfully glad that yoii didn't have to run." That was, of course, one way of put- ting it, and he was just telling her that 98 A BREAK IN TRAINING although he'd rather run than eat, there were some things even more important than running when " Whee-ee-eel ! " And over the grass came the far-away cry of, " All out for the mile ! " As the sound struck his ear he started instinctively, and he forgot on the in- stant all about the beautiful day and the girl and how fit he felt, and he was back with the rest of them in the contestants' room, just jumping up out of his blan- ket, with his heart knocking against his ribs. He took out his stop-watch and carefully set it. Was it because this was his own event and he knew all about it that the men seemed to look more wor- ried as they took their places at the start- ing line? Young Merriman was posi- tively ghostly. Jones kept his eye on him. " Do you see that one on the outside? " he whispered, " I've beaten that man time and again ! " "Why — then why aren't you running?" inquired Miss Bannerly. They do ask THE QUITTER 99 such difficult questions. The truth was that in the trial to pick the four, this man Merriman, who nobody had reckoned with, and whom Jones had, indeed, beaten every time he had been in the same race with him before, had hit up the most un- expected and spectacular sprint the mo- ment they rounded the first turn of the last lap. It isn't at all easy, after you have run three laps, to come up into your sprint that far from home, and when Jones did finally let himself out — if such an ironical phrase may be used to describe the groggy battle of the last fifty yards — young Merriman beat him out for fourth place by a wabbly neck. And when everybody wanted to know what he had been afraid of and why he hadn't sprinted before, he swore to himself that he had had enough of it, and that for once he would survey the games like a gentleman in his proper raiment and his right mind. It is much easier to put this down here than it was for Jones to explain it, and he had hardly begun when the starter's pistol snapped and they were off. He lOO A BREAK IN TRAINING leaned forward and pressed the spring of his stop-watch. In his mind he was jost- Hng with the others for the pole. It was a terrific moment. The girl laughed lightly. " Look at them bump each other! " she cried. Jones glowered at her absent-mindedly, and back at the track. A man he knew, coming up to get a better view, sat down in the aisle beside him. "Too bad about Foote, wasn't it?" he said. " Slipped on the stairs in the locker building and sprained his ankle! " Jones suddenly saw that there were only seven men running. That meant — it meant, among other things, that with the only really first-class man of the four out of it, young Merriman stood a chance of a place — stood a good chance — hang it all — of winning ! The line trailed out. Could that be a mile gait they were running? How slow and dog-trot it looked from the stands ! Merriman was third. As the pack trailed on round the first lap, he THE QUITTER loi pressed his pacemaker and at the upper turn, starting the second lap, swung out, sprinted a few steps and cut in just be- hind the leader. There was some cheer- ing and polite applause. Jones knew him well enough, however, to see, by the look of his face as he strode past, that he was pretty well up in the air. Two things were likely to happen. He might go to pieces or his overwrought nerves might carry him through to run as he had never run before. Jones settled back with a pleasantly barbaric satisfaction at what he was about to see. Round the second lap they strode, in Indian file, on to the five-eighths, and up past the Willows toward the finish of the third. All at once there were little breaks in the file. It was that vague premonitory stir which shows that the point is being reached where the race ceases to be a dogged grind and suddenly shifts into the sprint for home. To know when this point has been reached is extremely im- portant. If one starts to jump a picket 102 A BREAK IN TRAINING fence and yields for the least fraction of a second to that qualmish feeling that comes just at the take-off, one is likely to balk altogether, or land ignominiously tripping. Blow it aside, leap hard and trust to luck and a sort of outside force comes, sometimes after one is in the air, and lifts one over handily. There is the same psychological instant in a race. The men who " never know when they are beaten," take it without knowing it. The veteran runner feels it by instinct, or ar- ranges it. From the outside one can easily see the spot where the change be- gins; to perceive it on the inside, with senses jaded and goaded by the running, is very hard indeed. Very suddenly, just as they crossed the three-quarter mile stone, the man who had led all the way, broke into a half sprint. Before young Merriman could hit up his pace he was ten yards behind. ■Jones saw his startled, haggard face, saw his fists go up as he responded to the challenge and his head snap back — a bit too far with a quarter-mile yet to go — THE QUITTER 103 and he knew that, one way or the other, within the next two-twenty the race would be all over but the shouting. In an instant the wavering file was dis- arranged and broken. Down the back- stretch they all went in a mad run, the three in front keeping their relative places, the others jostling back and forth. All at once everybody began to yell. The leader was weakening. He had set the pace from the breakaway, and young ]\Ierriman's hysterical speed in the third quarter had not let him lower it as he ought to have done. Jones's practiced eyes caught all the subtle signals of dis- tress, and the sight nearly drove him off his seat. All the steam stored up in his two days' rest and lack of worry seemed shouting for release. "He's got him! He's got him!" he cried. He wasn't thinking of the fact that at the seven-eighths mark a man is about as well fixed for intelligent calcu- lation as an exhausted swimmer going down for the second time, but of what he could do to that man in front if he could 104 A BREAK IN TRAINING only jump out on the track now. And at that moment the man in third place who had been paced by Merriman all this time, swung out, jostled Merriman's el- bow as he passed, and with a burst of speed which he had picked out of the air, so to speak, began to walk away from him. It was a heart-breaking challenge, com- ing just then. The boy responded. He held his own for a dozen strides, looked almost to be gaining, then, all at once, stopped. He didn't fall, he wasn't quite " out." He just stopped. And with his head down and his arms hanging limp and stepping unsteadily he started back across the grass toward the field-house. Something was said afterward about his losing a shoe, but the fact remained for all that that he had quit, with two men ahead in distress and two hundred yards yet to go. " Look at him ! " cried Jones. " Why, the man's stopped ! " He could not be- lieve his eyes. His blood was up, he had been running the race in his rival's shoes, THE QUITTER 105 and in each of Alerriman's strides had felt himself overhauling the men ahead. " If I could only get out there! " He was pounding his knees in despair. " I could beat 'em — just look how easy it would be ! And he's going to win — that Eli — do you see ? He's all out and Merri- man's going to let " " Maybe he's hurt," suggested the girl, watching the beaten boy limp across the f^eld. "Hurt! Hurt!" Jones mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. " Why, he had the race! Another thirty yards and he'd have won! Oh! " he groaned, "Quitter!" The girl looked at him inquiringly, and something of his chagrin and desperation communicated itself to her. " If only you could have run ! " she cried. "Yes! If only I had run! If I had I would have been in the race! But I can't run — don't you see, it's too late." " Quitter ! " repeated the girl in a whis- per. She was looking across the field I06 A BREAK IN TRAINING at young Alerriman, now stretched on the grass near the field-house, with his face buried in his sweater, and the word was only a sort of echo of her sympathy, but it came out at a strange instant and Jones looked around quickly and flushed. " Oh, if you only could have run ! " she said. There was a lot of yelling, which told that the race was being finished out, but Jones did not even look that way. He was thinking very fast. " I think I shall run ! " he said, quiet- ly. And at this he arose. Of course, Miss Bannerly didn't know at all what it meant, so she merely smiled at him kindly. *' There are still three races left " — he turned suddenly to Miss Bannerly — *' You see I've just got an idea. And it won't keep. And so I'm going over to the field-house — if you don't mind — Please don't mind — and take off these clothes and run one of those open handi- caps with a lot of strange gentlemen and give them the race of their lives and — and maybe bring you back one of those THE QUITTER 107 big, shiny mugs you can see on the table over there on the field. Please don't mind," concluded young Jones, helplessly. " It's my last chance, and I've really got to and it'll only take a minute." " Of course," said Miss Bannerly, who didn't understand at all, but was a very nice young person indeed. " And don't forget the cup !" Young Jones burst into the locker- room with somewhat the same pictorial effect that might be produced by drop- ping a basket of roses into a boiler-room full of stokers. He pulled off his flannels, tossed the straw hat on top of a dusty locker and jumped into his running clothes. Everybody had been entered for every- thing as was the enthusiastic custom in invitation games and of the three events that remained Jones chose the handicap- half because it came first. He had never tried the half before, but, as he explained to his friend Apley, he had a new idea and he wanted to try it before it got away from him. Apley. who was studying his programme to find out Jones's handicap, lo8 A BREAK IN TRAINING said that he would be lucky if nothing but the idea got away from him, "You get twenty yards," said Apley. " but the scratch men aren't going in, and the New York A. C. man on the ten yards didn't come up, so you're running scratch, that's what you're doing. There's a gen- tleman named Devanny on the twenty- yard mark, too " — it seemed to amuse Apley immensely — " he comes from Worcester, eats cinders and runs in his sleep, and Mr. Corrigan from Somer- ville, who ought to be at scratch, but gets twenty-five and — why — if — here isn't " Jones looked where Apley's finger pointed and saw a " Y." It was nobody they had ever heard of, but in that race the unknown stood for his whole college, and the shock was so great that he could only throw his arms about Apley's neck and declare that he died happy. And, of course, Jones won. At the quarter he had cut down his field. When honest Jerry Devanny, who ran races as methodically as he might saw wood, THE QUITTER 109 started to move up at the backstretch turn, Jones, thinking only of how slow the pace would appear if he were looking on, swung out into the middle of the track, and took the bit in his teeth. At the three-eighths he had fought Devanny to a standstill, and he felt that same lift coming, which, when you have once got up in the air, seems to carry you over the impossible wall. Rounding the lower turn he pulled away and with his friends laughing and the trainer nearly in col- lapse, romped down to the tape, in what the racing reporters might describe as " under double wraps and going away." " Always thought he had it in him," rattled Apley, when he and Jones had gone back to the stands ; " but the trouble with him's been, you know, he was such an awful quitter." "Sir!" Aliss Bannerly raised mena- cingly a limp parasol, which had chanced to break just as the runners swung into the stretch. " What shall we do to him ? " she demanded. Jones tossed Apley a benign acknowl- 110 A BREAK IN TRAINING edgment of the " We " and " I don't be- lieve I would do anything," he said. " Be- cause," and meditatively he clamp- clamped the lid of the pewter mug up and down, " the grand-stand point of view is very illuminating. Because he's really quite right." Young Apley looked from one to the other and smiled with great good humor. " Jones," he began, oracularly, " you're a noble fellow. How true the words of the graduates that in these our sports we but prepare for those sterner — I mean," he broke off, laughing, " maybe you'll have a chance to use that new idea again." LEFT BEHIND LEFT BEHIND EVERYBODY in the house— in all the world it seemed — was sleeping, but the Vandalia filler sat up in bed, staring with dry, wide-open eyes at the wall. Tlie dormer room, tucked up under the roof, was stuffy and close and smelled of heat and wallpaper and rag carpet. Through the little window, from the trees and grass outside, came the steady whirring of the tree-toads and crickets. Suddenly the stillness was broken and the campus clock tolled two. As the harsh note grated on his nerves his heart gave a thump and lie threw himself back and buried his face in the hot pillow. It seemed as though he must shut out the world and forget. But he couldn't for- get, and you can shut out the world with a pillow — only so long as yon can hold your breath. He slipped over the edge •'3 114 A BREAK IN TRAINING of the bed — that ridiculous, high, hot feather-bed — and with his chin in his hands and his elbows on his knees, blinked at the little windows and the patch of moonlight on the floor where the Other Man lay sleeping. And as he watched him, snoring there comfortably in his sleep, his own secret returned again and bit into him, as it had returned so many times that day and night, and all the disappointment and bitterness and despair of it. And he felt that life had tricked him, cut him off in the flower of his youth and put him on the outside, and he was an outcast with his hand raised against the world. When they had arrived that night, with a lot of the other teams that had come down for the interscholastics, and had been assigned to that one remaining va- cant room, the Other Man had told him to go ahead and take the bed, because, as he explained, a miler needed all the sleep he could get, whereas a bit of wakeful- ness the night before the games only served to put an edge on a sprinter's LEFT BEHIND 115 nerves. " It'll make me start quicker," said he, spreading a blanket on the floor. That was just like the luck of the Other Man — to give up something and after all to get it back again. And the Vandalia Miler blinked at him, and thought and thought, and wondered whether the Other Man would make the 'varsity in his fresh- man year. For the Other Man was going away to college and the Vandalia Miler couldn't go. That was his secret, which had been his for only a day, and which he was somehow too proud to tell. That was why he believed that he was an out- cast, a pariah — why, a shivery abyss yawned between these two old friends, though you might have thought that it was but a yard or two of rag carpet that separated him, sitting there on the edge of the bed, from the Other Man, sleeping in his blanket on the floor. They had grown up in Vandalia, in that little prairie town, from the beginning; gone swim- ming together and skated and rung door- bells, gone through the grammar-school and into the high-school, and then, when ii6 A BREAK IN TRAINING most of the town boys were dropping out to go to work and the ones who were going to college went away to " prep." school, they had decided to stick by the ship. They would stick by their town as long as they could, but when they had to leave they were going, not to one of the State universities, not to Chicago, but down into the distant and glittering East. One didn't go down East to college from the Vandalia High-School. They were about the only men left in the class after their sophomore year; the rest were girls — the girls they had grown up with and written notes to and divided their apples and candy with, back in the kid days. Once there had been a cane-rush — some- body had read about one in a book — and two legs and an arm were broken and one boy nearly killed. The girls were ordered to keep out. They jumped in, carried water, bandaged black eyes with their handkerchiefs, freshman girls untied the freshmen as fast as the sophomores tied them up — that's the sort of girls they were. And he and the Other Man were LEFT BEHIND 117 the only men in the class and going down East to college afterward. Probably you do not understand just what that meant. You may know, perhaps, some little high- church school, built on the top of a hill like a robber baron's castle, where there are just about enough boys to make up the teams if each boy plays on all of them, and the one who is captain of the eleven is generally captain of the nine and the track team and leads the banjo club. If you were chosen captain of the eleven in your freshman year, you would, of course, be a much greater man than the President. But you wouldn't have a lot of good-fellow girls to watch you and to tell you so. And the Vandalia Miler had both — he and the Other Man. They pounded out the only decent eleven the school had ever had and a nine and a paper, and all the rest of it, and divided everything — just as though it was a Trust. One of them would write the editorials calling down the faculty and the other would preside at the mass- Ii8 A BREAK IN TRAINING meetings; he would lead the mandolin club, with about six yards of satin ribbon which one of the girls had given him tied to his mandolin to show that he was leader, and the Other Man would lead the glee club and sing all the tenor solos. And at last, in their senior year, they got up a track team. It was the last chance they had — after June the deluge. They sent to Chicago for real running clothes and spiked shoes — it had been sneakers and trousers cut off at the knees before that in Vandalia — and taught the school a brand new cheer. The merchants put up the money to send the team down to Pardeeville, and the night before they left there was a mass-meeting and a dance and speeches. The Vandalia Miler, blinking at the torn mosquito-bar that covered the little window, smiled grimly as he thought of that speech — of that droll school orator of theirs, older than the rest of them, with his high forehead and Henry Clay scalplock, and his arms outspread and his voice in his boots : " With every heart in Vandalia beating LEFT BEHIND 119 for you, every eye turned down the prairie toward the South, you go — to run for Vandalia, to win for Vandaha, and if not to win, to fight to the last ditch for the purple ' V ' upon your breasts ! " And he and the Other Man had gone home to- gether on air, and told each other how they were going to make the team when they got down to college and show those effete Easterners what it meant to meet a real man and — and there was a light in the library window when he got home, past midnight though it was, and his father was in there locked up with his lawyer. Something had happened. It wouldn't be announced for a day or two yet, but everything had gone to smash, and it meant that the Vandalia Miler must stay behind and go to work in the hard- ware store. That's where they had ar- rived at last, though his father would have had him go on just as he had planned. He didn't sleep much that night, and he had gone down to the train the next day as late as he could and slipped on when nobody would see him, 120 A BREAK IN TRAINING while the girls were singing and waving flags from the station platform and the rest of the men were leaning out of the windows and laughing and waving their hats. And here he was — where he had longed to be — sent down on the team to run for his school and his town, and it all seemed like something in a pantomime, outside of him and far away, unreal and part of a horrid dream. But he had to run. It came back, just as it did every minute or two, like a quick pain. He w^ent hot all over. Those others, who were going to fight it out with him, were all sleeping now, just like the Other Man. He must hang on to himself — get some sleep. He gritted his teeth, squeezed his fists, and told himself that after all they were kids and he was now a real man. There are a number of things — he would begin very sternly — more important than going to college, and a 'varsity initial won't help you much before a judge and jury or patch up anybody's broken bones or tell how the market's going, but — and here he slipped and raced away again — LEFT BEHIND 121 but no more will a Victoria Cross nor a rag from the captured colors. And just as long — just as long as there are men in the world with hearts under their coats and blood in their veins there'll be some- body to work the last gun and to head the forlorn hope and fling a life away for a smile or a cheer or a bit of ribbon. And it doesn't make any difference whether he's got on a cuirassier's breast-plate or football canvas, a running suit or khaki. And when the others are ready to go and the band begins to play, it isn't any fun to be left behind and He got sorrier and sorrier for himself, which is a very, very bad thing for a very young man to do, until at last he flung himself back on the bed, and wath his head full of charging cavalry, photographs of 'varsity teams, batteries galloping into ac- tion, and lonely outcasts left behind, he finally dropped asleep, just as the night was graying and the birds were begin- ning to chirp in the trees outside. For just a minute he forgot, and then some- body shook him and he saw the Other 122 A BREAK IN TRAINING Man was standing over him, fresh as paint. " Gee, man ! " he laughed ; " you look dead as a smelt ! Don't mean to say you stayed awake with all that bed to range about in ! " " Oh, no," said the Vandalia Miler; " I slept all right." He ran very well in spite of everything. Had he had a bit more experience in rac- ing, he would have tried sooner to get within striking distance of the leaders. As it was, coming round the upper turn into the stretch, he sprinted past the fifth and fourth men and lost his feet and fell, completely run out, just as he was being beaten for third place about seven feet short of the tape. It was one of those races of which the spectator may always remark that if the man had had a bit more sand he would have won. The Other Man had already won his brilliant victory in the hundred when the Vandalia Miler was beaten. A lot of people were con- gratulating him and the trainer of one of the State universities had just promised LEFT BEHIND 123 him board and tuition if he would enter there that fall as the Miler staggered over the line. The Other Man said things to the trainer and told him that he guessed he'd mistaken his man. " Where we're going," and he smiled at the Vandalia Miler as he helped him to the dressing-room, " they don't have professionals on the team ! " The Van- dalia Miler didn't say anything — you can't say much just after you've run your- self out in a mile race — but just as soon as he could, he pulled on his clothes. He was special correspondent for the Van- dalia Blade. They had made him feel very proud and important a couple of days before when they had asked him to " rush in a thousand words after the games, just as soon as he could jump on a wire." So he dragged himself over to the railroad station and jumped on the wire. It was not what you would call a creative mood. But he sent the story. By biting his lip and stopping every little while he told all about it, while little black spots chased each other up the paper, and 124 A BREAK IN TRAINING the rest who had been beaten were com- ing to, and the Other Man was making* friends with the " prep." school stars and promising to look them up when he got down East. When the story was off the wire he went back to the boarding-house and lay down on the tall feather-bed. He was still there when the Other Man came up to dress for the dance that was to be given for the visiting teams that night in the college gym. The Other Man began early because, with only a little wavy mirror and a smelly kerosene lamp, a wet hair-brush and a straight stand-up collar about as high as a cuff, it takes one quite a while to make one's self look like a Gibson man. The Other Man spatted down his hair in the light of the little lamp and whistled between his teeth ; the Vandalia Miler lay on the feather-bed staring at the whitewashed ceiling and thinking. He couldn't ask the belle of the ball down to the football game next autumn ; he couldn't promise to send back a college pin for a red satin pillow with LEFT BEHIND 125 a white initial on it and bet boxes of Huyler's on sure things with all the girls who wanted to lose and make tobacco- pouches for him. He couldn't put on any dog at all. It was back to the tall grass for him. " Better hurry up and get ready," said the Other Man, puffing over his tie. '' Don't think I'll go," said the Vandalia Miler. He mumbled something about having a headache and feeling pretty dopy. " What's the sport, anyway," he added, " meeting a lot of girls you're never going to see again? " He was, you see, in a pretty bad way. The Other Man turned round and stared. Then he laughed. Such remarks were not worthy a reply. "See you there!" he chirped pres- ently. Then, with his trousers turned up an extra reef and his straw hat stuck on one side — all very rakish and kinky — he blew out and down the stairs, three steps at a time. The Vandalia Miler thought some more. After a while he got up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes. Then he 126 A BREAK IN TRAINING jammed his running clothes into his suit- case — they weren't going to be much use to him any more — and started for the station. Everybody in Pardeeville was going to the dance. On the front porches in the Hght of the hall lamps he could see the girls slipping their light scarfs over their shoulders, and now and then far down a cross-street catch the glimmer of white through the trees. The sidewalk was narrow, with a picket-fence on one side and big elms on the other, and every little while he and his suit-case would have to flatten up against the fence while a couple passed him, with low words, perhaps, that he couldn't hear, and a rip- ple of laughter, white dresses — whiter in the dark — and a breath of perfume in the air after they had gone. The station was deserted and silent as the tomb. The only sign of life was the lamp shining through the window and the sleepy tele- graph operator nodding over his key. The Vandalia Miler chucked his suit-case against the wall and began tramping up and down, counting the number of steps LEFT BEHIND 127 from one end of the platform to the other. After a long while, he went over to the little grocery across the street, bought a box of " sweet caps " and smoked them relentlessly, one after an- other, inhaling the last two or three, to convince himself that he was hardened to all things and didn't care. Really, though, things were getting more and more on his nerves, and he did care. Hours, it seemed, dragged away. He sat on the baggage-truck, trying not to listen. It was clear moonlight, still, and clear as a bell. The gym where they were dancing was only a few blocks away, be- hind the trees, and on the other side of the track was open prairie. There wasn't a sound there on the station platform ex- cept the clicking of the telegraph key, and he could hear the faint music of the violins and the toot-toot of the cornet coming over the trees. It was after midnight when the train thundered in. He was in his seat, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, when the rest came down the street on the run 128 A BREAK IN TRAINING and the Other Man, panting and excited, bounced into the seat beside him. The Other Man had to tell about it, whether anyone listened or not — what she said and he said, and how she cut her dances right and left to sit 'em out with him and came down to within half a block of the station to see him ofif. And then there was a waltz that the Other Man wasn't ever going to forget — " the finest waltz I ever hope to hear, and that's a fact." The Vandalia Miler stood it for a long time. Once he sat up suddenly and jammed on his hat. " For heaven's sake for^r^ it ! " he said. " Aren't you ever going to get over being a kid ? " The Vandalia Miler, you see, had had to get over being a kid in twenty- four hours, and it didn't come so easy. " Whatever's wrong with you?" laughed the Other Man. " Never saw anybody so peevish in my life ! " And he began to whistle the tune harder than ever. The train was a milk-train. It stopped at every cross-roads. It was stiflingly LEFT BEHIND 129 hot and smelly in the car, and the Other Man kept on humming, steadily as a ; pianola, and keeping time by snapping his fingers, but for all that, the Van- ' dalia Miler finally dropped asleep. He dreamed that he was down East, after all, and winning the mile, down a track , about like a sublimated skating-rink, with an audience of a billion or two people, ris- ing to him from a sort of stadium made of pure white marble and gold. He was just being heaved up in the air by the frantic populace when he woke up. And the Other Man was shaking him by the j arm and telling him that they were back ; in Vandalia. He didn't need anyone to tell him that. It was growing light as they stepped off the train — that dead-to- the-world time of night when the lamps | are getting pale. He was just blinking 1 his eyes open and seeing the old station ! and the lumber-yard and the Waldorf ' -j Cafe, and everything inside him seemed \ to be caving in, when the Other Man, ! still up in the air and keen as a mink, be- gan to bray out his everlasting waltz. 130 A BREAK IN TRAINING The Vandalia Miler jumped as though a revolver had been shot off just behind his ear. He whirled round and almost yelled : "For heaven's sake, man, shut up!" The Other Man looked at him and laughed. " I don't see what license you've got to be so all-fired grouchy," he said. " If you'd won " "Well?" cried the Vandalia Miler, stepping closer. " It looked to me " " Looked to you! Are you calling me a quitter? " You must remember that it had lasted two whole days and nights now and the ends of his nerves were all sticking out. " Say it, will you? " He dropped his suit-case on the sidewalk and clenched his fists. " Just say it now — hoiv did it look to you ? " And then, before anyone guessed what was coming, he shot out with his fist. The Other Man's hands were down, helpless. He caught it fairly on the tip of the jaw and went down in a LEFT BEHIND 131 heap, and the VandaHa Miler stood over him, half waiting to swing again, half scared at what he had done. The others rushed in to pull them apart, but the Other Man just jumped up with a grim little laugh, as though it was all a sort of joke and the Vandalia Miler a kind of wild man with bad manners. Then he walked ahead with the rest. All in all, it was about the completest thing he could have done. It left the Vandalia Miler, you see, quite on the outside. And that was the end of Damon and Pythias — and all their plans and dreams. The next day the Other Man went down East to tutor for his entrance exams. The Vandalia Miler went to work in the hardware store, selling frying-pans and shingle nails. The Vandalia Miler left the store in charge of the repair-shop man and started home for supper. He had just sold an improved gasoline stove to a farmer's wife from Vienna Centre who had never burned anything but wood, and he was considerably excited. He swung up State 132 A BREAK IN TRAINING Street, whistling. There was a bulletin in the Blade window with letters in blue ink splashed on it a foot high. This is what he read — what stopped his whist- ling short: TRIUMPH OF" VANDALIA BOY Underneath was a dispatch with a New York date-line, telling how the Other Man had won the intercollegiate mile at Mott Haven that afternoon. He felt his face getting hot. He put his hands in his pockets and squeezed his finger-nails into his palms so that folks wouldn't see. There was a beautiful picture framed up in his mind — a picture built up of Sunday supplements, stories in magazines, and the imagination of a young man who had never seen Mott Haven, and who stood on a wooden sidewalk on the main street of a freshwater town a thousand miles away. It was a sort of composite of Henley and a Thanksgiving game, and the Other Man stood in the foreground in the afternoon sunshine, panting easily and smiling politely at the applause. In LEFT BEHIND 133 the two years that the Other Man had j been away he hadn't come back even for j his vacations, and he was getting to be a we -used -to -know -him -when -he -was - young sort of a man. There had been many stories about him in the Blade. News was rather scarce out there, and . they Hked to hear about each other. And j every time the Other Man did anything the town people felt somehow that Van- dalia had done it and were glad. There was considerable local pride in Vandalia. They would do anything for anybody who did something for the town. But the Vandalia Miler hadn't learned this yet. ! He got away without being obliged to talk to anybody, and hurried home. 1 There, without knowing just why, he un- earthed his old running clothes, and just { as the sun was setting that evening the Vandalia Miler started jogging round the old dirt track at the fair grounds, | training again for the mile. They didn't go in very heavily for ] sport in those days in Vandalia, and everybody soon knew what he was doing 134 A BREAK IN TRAINING and wondered why. The high-school boys came over of late afternoons and watched him run. Then they got to pac- ing him, and finally they asked him to help them get up a team to lick Sugar River. Sugar River was a town about twenty miles north of Vandalia. The only difference between the two towns to an outsider was that one had an opera- house and a six-story hotel, and the other had ten blocks of brick paving. A foot- ball game between Vandalia and Sugar River would have made the '94 Spring- field game look like an international peace congress at a vegetarian breakfast. The Vandalia Miler helped them with the team. He didn't know, of course, that it was about the most important thing he'd ever done in his life and he was thinking too much of himself and the Other Man to be very much interested. But he did it as well as he knew how. Sugar River annihilated them. They lost every point. It didn't especially increase Vandalia's love for Sugar River. The Vandalia Miler was embarrassed, LEFT BEHIND 135 but he kept up his own running, not train- ing enough to get tired of it, or stale, but just enough to keep him fit and getting better. Some days he took a lot of little sprints, some a jog of five miles or so, some a rest or a bit of tennis, but no smoking, and all the time plenty of sleep. Sometimes he'd try it at sun-up, before the rest of the town was awake, just to test his steam and press himself a bit; and sometimes, on moonlight nights, when he could see the track plain as day, he'd go over after dark and whirl off his mile at top speed, stripped to the buff — racing through the moonlight with the cool night smell coming up from the grass and the cool wind blowing on him all over. Those were the times when he even forgot the Other Man. It seemed as though he was tireless, eating up the dis- tance like a ghost with a feeling all the time of Fve-done-this-before-in-the-dawn- of-things-a-million-years-ago. The next day, when he was back in the hardware store, he would smile inside at ordinary folks plodding about in their foolish store- 136 A BREAK IN TRAINING clothes. The point is, you see, he began to run for the fun of running. It was the only thing he'd had for company since the Other Man went away. By the time summer was over he was brown as an Indian and hard as nails and he could run like a broncho. In August, in Vandalia, came the Clearwater County fair. It was the big- gest fair in the State — more people, big- ger pumpkins, fatter hogs, taller corn, more balloons and bands and red lemon- ade and noise. The fair grounds began to fill up with red thrashing-machines and candy booths and side-show tents — not the place for a young man who preferred to be alone. On the afternoon of Wednes- day, the third day of the fair, the Van- dalia Miler stopped at the corner drug- store for a drink of soda-water, on his way home. He was just swallowing a glass of Arctic Mist and recalling that a preparation known as Lemo Kolo had tasted just like it a year ago, when out through the window, over the colored- water jars, he saw the Other Man, home LEFT BEHIND 137 again after his triumphs in the vast and ghttering East, togged out in very tricky flannels and blowing along State Street, bowing right and left, and beaming like a fresh-plucked rose for joy at getting home. You might just as well have flashed a searchlight in his eyes at ten paces. He was all in. The two years that had passed rolled up like a patent window-shade when the spring slips, and he was back at the railroad station, just home from Pardee ville, watching the Other Man walk away through the mel- ancholy dawn. He saw him pushing open the screen, and he braced himself for an instant to face it out, cold and rather haughtily. Then he flung a dime on the counter and, red as fire, hurried out the side door. That night the Blade published a long programme for Thursday, the big day at the fair. There was to be a special ex- cursion from Sugar River, a free-for-all trot and a tw^o-fifteen pace, the McHenry Zouaves, the Diving Horse, a fat ladies' potato race, Pavella the King of the Tight 138 A BREAK IN TRAINING Wire, and — " an open mile foot-race for the championship of the world." That was the way the Blade put it. They could always be trusted in such cases to do the right thing. Of course it was the Other Man's crowd who had conceived the idea of the race. He had brought some of his friends home with him from the East to show them what the West was like, and they had thought it would be good sport to make him trot out and per- form for the girls and the merry villagers. " For the championship of the world," said the Blade, " that this is no mere jest is evidenced by the fact that first among the list of entries appears the name of our famous young townsman, the present in- tercollegiate champion. He informed a representative of the Blade this afternoon that he had kept up his training for just such a contingency as this, and that he never was in finer fettle. The scribe found him at his home. ' The Elms.' on the beautiful estate north of the city, where he is entertaining a number of wealthy young society men from Eastern LEFT BEHIND 139 hon-ton circles, and found him as modest as he was when he left his native town two years ago. He said that nothing would please him more than to run at the fair-grounds' track. ' For it was here,' said he, ' that I won my first race, you know ! ' " " Oh, hell! " said the Vandalia Miler. And then he called up the superintendent's office at the fair-grounds and told them to enter him for the mile. 4: :)c ^e :): H< There was, in the first place, a piping hot August afternoon, the kind that they have out in the corn belt, when not a drop of rain has fallen for a couple of months and the leaves are drying up on the trees and the grass is yellow and crackly under foot, and the dust follows after the farm- er's wagon like smoke. Then, inside a high board fence, was the fair-grounds, with big wooden halls here and there, oak- trees with locusts singing away in the branches, and packed full of people and prize cattle and pumpkins and lunch-boxes and chewing candy and noise. There were 140 A BREAK IN TRAINING farmers in their store-clothes just in from thrashing and farmers' girls in white dresses with pink and baby-blue ribbons, and, in between, children with sticky pop- corn and red balloons and squawkers. There was a "natural amphitheatre" with benches running along the side hill, where the hushed crowd gaped at the spellbinder waving his arms beside the ice-water pitcher. There were prize pig pens and sheep pens, the art hall with its pictures of peaches tumbling out of baskets and watermelons just opened with the knife lying beside them, and the tents where Diavolo ate glass and blew fire out of his mouth and the beautiful young lady stood out on a platform by the ticket-box, in faded pink tights, with a big wet snake wound around her throat and her span- gles blinking in the sunshine. There were sample windmills and cane-ringing games, and wherever there was room a man shaking popcorn or pulling candy over a hook, or a damp little shed smelling of vanilla, where people were eating ice- cream and drinking red lemonade. You LEFT BEHIND 141 get all that and lots more going at once, with the barkers yelling and the sledge- hammers thumping on the strength- testing machines and the merry-go-round organs squealing away, with the sun blazing at ninety-four in the shade and everywhere the smell of hot people and clothes and stale perfume, of lemonade and popcorn and peanuts and dust and trampled grass — you take all that, draw a third-of-a-mile circle through the thick of it, push the crowd back a bit, and you have the Vandalia track that day as the engine bell in the judges' stand tolled out the warning signal and the old marshal on his white circus horse rode down the track sidewise, bellowing out the " mile foot race fer the champeenship of the world ! " As he caught the sharp command of the bell — the same bell that for years and years had called up the trotting horses from the stables — the Vandalia Miler jumped out of his blanket in the Tight- Wire Man's tent and pushed through the crowd to the mark. The farmers' girls 142 A BREAK IN TRAINING giggled as they saw his bare legs and a train of small boys followed him, gaping solemnly in the manner of those deter- mined to see just how it was done. The Vandalia Miler was very pale. As he took his place on the starting line he was the only one there ready to run. He stared straight ahead at the people edg- ing up closer and closer to the little lane that was left for them to run through, licked his dry lips and rubbed nervously his bare left arm. There they were, the farmers and the townspeople, the men and the girls that he and the Other Man had grown up with and gone to school with. And he felt that if he could beat him — so slim and smiling and sure — beat him in Vandalia, there and then, with Van- dalia and the county and the old crowd looking on The engine-bell clanged again peremptorily. " Coming ! Coming ! " Somebody was shouting uproariously over the heads of the crowd. A big tan buckboard drove in between the surreys and lumber- wagons, and out hopped the Other Man, LEFT BEHIND 143 all wrapped up in a great plaid ulster, his bare ankles showing underneath it. He threw off his coat and stood there laugh- ing and shaking hands with his friends — in his 'varsity running clothes, the crim- son ribbon across his chest. The Van- dalia Miler saw him and gripped his fin- gers tight. It seemed to him that the crowd suddenly became still; the uproar of the squawkers and carousel organ sounded vague and far away. At the same moment there was a stir just under the stand, and a big, tow-headed fellow began to pull off his overalls and shirt. " Hey, there! " he called up to the start- ers ; " I want to get in this ! " The crowd began to laugh good-naturedly, but the Vandalia Miler didn't laugh at all. He was trying to remember where he had seen this farmer's face. On the sleeve- less jersey which the tow-headed man wore underneath his flannel shirt was a spot cleaner than the rest. It was where an initial had been torn away. He turned to find the Other Man in front of him, smiling and holding out his hand. 144 A BREAK IN TRAINING He took it, scarcely knowing what he did. " So we're going to have it out, right here and now," laughed the Other Man, looking him straight in the eyes. " Yes," said the Vandalia Miler. His mouth was all cotton, so it came in a quick sort of whisper. " Yes," he repeated. " I hope," began the Other Man, and then he paused and grinned a little and blushed. " It's been quite a while — I hope " All at once someone cried — " Now, ready! " The crowd that had ap- parently been pushing and shoving aim- lessly about the judges' stand closed into a compact mass and out came a yell — one of those old-fashioned, wild-Indian, give- 'em-the-axe, and all that sort of thing yells, with Sugar River at the end. " Sugar River — Sugar River — Sugar River! " three times, like that. It was like marching into the middle of an Irish picnic with a brass band playing " Boyne Water." A hoot and a howl came back from all along the track and the crowd — all Vandalia, it seemed — began to stam- LEFT BEHIND 145 pede in toward the judges' stand. The Vandalia Miler grabbed a couple of hand- fuls of long grass from the turf at the side of the track and wadded them up in his hands for *'corks." His face wasn't as pale now and a new look jumped into his eyes. He turned to the Other Man, yelling above the uproar of the crowd : " You want to look out for him: He's a ringer, and he's running for Sugar River ! " And in the thick of the noise and the pushing and the dust, the starter swung his hat downward and with the single cry of " Go ! " sent the three run- ners away. The Other Man cut across from the outside like a flash and took the pole. The Vandalia Miler closed in behind, tight on his heels, eyes hooked to his back, just below the shoulders. The tow- headed man trailed the two, big-boned and heavy, but striding long and strong as a horse. Into the crowd they went — a sort of curving chute, walled in by faces and clothes smelling of popcorn and dust, and a baking sun beating down from 146 A BREAK IN TRAINING overhead — like three machines, stride and stride ahke, the Other Man leading the way like a race-horse, strong and confi- dent, as if he were only playing with the game. Out into the open and the cooler air of the back-stretch they swung, past the red thrashers and pig pens, round the lower turn, and toward the judges' stand again. They were going like a three-horse tandem, the Vandalia Miler so close up that the dirt from the Other Man's spikes splashed his shins. He could see indistinctly the crowd still jost- ling and shouting under the wire, see the lobster-red face and white mustache of old Skerritt, the starter, leaning out on the rail of the judges' stand toward them and bellowing through his hands some- thing about beating out Sugar River. He felt the mass open up and close in after them, the suffocating walled-in chute growing hotter and heavier, the pull of the second quarter beginning to drag hard on his legs and wind, and at the time he saw plainly that the Other Man was, if anything, increasing the pace — pushing LEFT BEHIND 147 ahead like a doped race-horse, at a half- mile gait, forgetting that there was any- body behind him. The pace held — screwed up tight — stride and stride alike, round the upper turn and into the open again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a big mullen leaf — one of his old mile- stones — slip past their feet, the beginning of the third quarter. But the shade of a let-down in the pace which he expected there and which prepares for the last quarter never came. As they struck the cooler air — it was like getting out of a cornfield into the road — the noise about the judges' stand — Sugar River and Van- dalia all mixed together — came reaching across the field bigger than ever, and every time it puffed out louder the Other Man's back jumped ahead a bit. The Vandalia Miler stuck close — not press- ing, not letting himself lose an inch. He was holding every ounce of steam, run- ning every stride with his head. Round the lower turn they pounded, every dozen strides or so letting slip another link, and then, just as they were rounding into the 148 A BREAK IN TRAINING straightaway there suddenly puffed up from the judges' stand a great roar of " Sugar River! " At the same instant he heard a hoarse breath just behind his neck, an arm bumped his elbow, and the tow-headed man pushed by on the outside and went up after the leader. The crowd down the track was going wild. Old Skerritt was banging the engine-bell for the last lap like a fireman going to a fire. The Vandalia Miler didn't shift his eyes a hair's breadth from the Other Man's back. He was surprised at himself to see how cool he was ; how he was calcu- lating whether the Other Man was tire- less or had merely lost his head, whether the Sugar River man could make good with his bluff or whether, as they neared the crowd, he was just playing to the gal- lery. In the next two-twenty he would know. There was more than a quarter yet to go, and he tried to feel it all as a unit and know just how much he had left. Past the stand and into the crowd again — the Sugar River man's chin slewed round a bit. He was lifting into the LEFT BEHIND 149 sprint! And a quarter yet to go! He saw the Other Man's back jump forward as he met the challenge, saw them fight- ing, shoulder to shoulder, knew the mo- ment had come, that here and now the race was to be lost or won, and he squeezed his grass corks, shut his eyes, and bore on hard. For a dozen strides he fought, like a man under water trying to get to the surface, when suddenly, from the edge of the track ahead came a quick, triumphant cheer. He opened his eyes. The Sugar River man was ahead! He had squeezed past and was on the pole, drawing away from the Other Man. But it was not the Sugar River yell that was echoing across the track. It was a new and different cry — nervous, compact, fierce, relentless. It forced itself through the general hullabaloo and dominated it, and suddenly it came clear to the Van- dalia Miler's ears — the old drum-beat cheer — his cheer — the one he and the Other Man had taught the school before the team went to Pardeeville. And his name was at the end. Down came a pair. I50 A BREAK IN TRAINING of arms a rod or two in front of him and out it smashed again — that wonderful yell with the sudden shift of the beat in the fifth line, like getting under a big weight, all together, and shoving after you've been pounding it. He fought on in a dizzy sort of trance, not knowing what was happening, but feeling suddenly light and confident and strong. He felt himself gaining — felt that somehow the backs of the other two men were drawing irresistibly nearer. Someone ran along beside him, waving a hat. " You've got him! You've got him! Keep it up! Keep it up ! " the man cried. " Van- dalia! Vandalia! Vandalia!" All at once it came to him that he Jiad got him — got the Other Man — got the ringer — that Vandalia was going to beat Sugar River and they were calling on him to come. The cheer shot out again — a little farther ahead — as fast as the beat stopped it was caught up and carried on. Someone — it was the boys he'd trained who had done it — had strung relays all round the track. It became a regular bombardment. The LEFT BEHIND 151 crowd listened — wavered — and broke loose. They came swarming down from the seats on the side hill and over the rail. They followed along behind in a drove, yelling like Indians. It looked like a pic- ture of the flight from Pompeii with everybody laughing — boys and men and girls stumbling along in the grass at the side of the track and scuffling up the dust behind. He could hear them laughing and screaming: "Keep it up! Keep it up! " and " Beat him! Beat him! Van- dalia! Vandalia!" and steadily all the time from behind and in front came that drum-beat cheer, ripping and pounding out above the rest. The relays crossed each other and overlapped, taking it up and beating it in — swinging it, jamming it at 'em. It seemed as though that whole fair-ground had jumped together in a twinkling and was calling on him to come. It all hit him in a flash — shivered up his backbone. He had stayed behind, but he was somebody, after all, and he stood for somebody and they stood for him and ex- pected things of him. He forgot the 152 A BREAK IN TRAINING Other Man, forgot himself. He was Vandalia now, and VandaHa must smash Sugar River. It was more than getting even, more than winning; it was fighting for his friends, for his town, for his coun- try. His feet seemed lifted from the ground. Maybe Vandalia was a dull place to live in, but it was everlastingly healthy. All his running and going-to-bed-with- the-chickens came back to help him now. Rounding into the stretch, he took the bit in his teeth and turned everything loose. With every stride he seemed to pull the Sugar River man's back nearer, hand over hand. His elbow bumped an arm and he heard the Other Man gasping out, " Beat him ! Beat him ! " as he passed by. Nothing could have stopped him then. There were fifty yards left. He shut his eyes again; his elbow bumped an arm, then the engine-bell was clanging over- head, and the tape hit his chest. The crowd closed in, there was a great uproar all around him, and he turned just in time to see the Sugar River man go down LEFT BEHIND 153 and out about six feet short of the line, and to catch the Other Man in his arms as he drove forward and fainted clear away. He picked him up like a child, and, spent as he was, carried him into the Tight-Wire Man's tent. Outside the crowd cheered and howled, and pushed up against the canvas walls, and from the distance came the boom of the band, marching toward them across the field. He swabbed on witch-hazel desperately — panting, dizzy with excitement and happi- ness, and a queer, happy-weepy remorse. The Other Man opened his eyes and blinked. " Bill " — he grinned the best he could and held out his hand — " I guess we've been fools long enough." Then he got tired again. " It was a great race," he said, without opening his eyes. The Van- dalia Miler swabbed on the witch-hazel the harder. " Yes ! " he panted ; " Yes ! " He meant that he thought it had been long enough. Somehow he couldn't re- member any words. And then the crowd 154 A BREAK IN TRAINING pushed in. The Other Man raised him- self on his elbow. " Go out to them, Bill," he said ; " I'm all right. You don't want to forget — you're ' champeen ' of the world ! " They grabbed him up, protesting, lifted him on their shoulders and carried him out of the tent. He felt the cooler air and he saw the faces turned toward him and heard the cheers and cries, and then they marched out to the people — his own people at last — with the band booming away at the head. That, in a way, is about what they've been doing to him ever since, out there in Vandalia. At least that is what Star- buck said as he told us the story — we who had run together and played together and were back from East and West to see another class day, to tell the old stories, run the old races over again, swing home again with the pack through the frosty autumn, toward the lights of the Square. Starbuck, you see, was the Other Man. " They've just nominated him for gov- LEFT BEHIND 155 ernor out in our State," said he, " and they're telHng the story of that race all the way from South River Junction to the North State line. I'm one of Bill's spellbinders; that's \vhy I tell it so well. He's our Favorite Son now, and he's only just begun." Starbuck took a couple of brisk pulls at his cigar and blew a big cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. " Begins to look," said he, cheerfully, " as though I was the man who was left behind." WINGS OF CLAY * WINGS OF CLAY IT was his last race. He might never — in that busy, serious " afterward " — even tliink of wearing a spiked shoe again. He would run, of course — for fun. But even were he some day to run a race, never again could he stand just as he stood now — fit as it was possible for him to be, his four years' experience behind him, the level track down which he had flung himself so many times call- ing him for the last time to come. And it was tlie race, too. He and Eleven — " that man Eleven," as we called him, had met at last. The instant had come when he must put everything to the touch and beat his best ; win or — some- thing breaks. He was the fastest man we had. He li.'id come out on the track one May '59 i6o A BREAK IN TRAINING morning in his Freshman year, explain- ing that he had never worn a spiked shoe, and had then slipped along a hundred yards in eleven seconds. The trainer called him back and asked him who he was. Within the week the men with the initials were considering what was going to happen and the second-string men had come to their annual decision that there was no use trying for the team until next year. He was so obviously born a sprinter that, like a lawyer or a doctor, he had a sort of manner of this kind. One who knew about such things could see broken records in the way he thought, and talked, and bore himself, almost as much as in his lithe, compact, nervous body. As you sat beside him in the drowsy air of the lecture-room, he would suddenly start — particularly if it were well along in the season, and the men were getting just a bit fine — and per- haps his shoe would smartly rap against the footrest. Not understanding, you would inwardly wish that he had more repose of manner, and never suspect just WINGS OF CLAY i6l what the thrill was that had so suddenly snapped him from his dreams. A few hours later, when you both were running trials together, and the pistol really did ring out, you would wonder why he beat you on the start. With a hair-trigger command of his muscles, he had the nerves of a cart-horse. His only sort of worry was the anxiety to do the thing he had done before, well enough to please himself. There were four of them in the finals — the two lay-figures who had managed to qualify, he and the other man. Every- body knew that it was his day, that he had waited for this. Everybody was whisper- ing about him and pointing him out as he strolled across the turf from the field- house, a sort of careless Mercury. He was exceedingly graceful and good-look- ing and " different " and he knew that, too, and without knowing it would have been very unhappy. It was part of that which put him past a man ten inches from the tape — this sureness of himself — a something of which the literal-minded l62 A BREAK IN TRAINING were not aware. Maybe vanity is per- missible when one runs in even time. Standing just behind the mark and gaz- ing down the track, he took a long satisfy- ing breath and patted his chest comfort- ably. He could see Eleven just trotting across the green from the field-house. It was a way the latter had — a vivid appre- ciation of dramatic values. Eleven was the sort of man who wore his medals and was fond of entering a preposterous num- ber of events in indoor winter meets, where no one worth while was running, and of winning race after race with a bored air while the brass band boomed in the gallery. ''Ah!" he nodded, with the politest rising inflection as his rival trotted up. Eleven nodded back and whistled cheerily between his teeth. His racing clothes looked as though they had been made from a museum battle-flag. That's what he wanted. It showed that he had been there before. Eleven grinned. " I'm goin' to lose you fellows," he said. WINGS OF CLAY 163 The fiendish wail of the starter's whis- tle mounted up and pulsated in the warm, grass-scented air. He heard it — pirouet- ting for a dozen paces down the course — as a battery-horse hears the bugle. De- tails eliminated themselves and he some- how grasped firmly what he had only touched before. It was as though the fragrant summer day, the glimmer of rib- bons and smell of grass, the glory of his strength, the race and the winning of it, were distilled into a nectar which he was just about to drink. " On your marks ! " Eleven, projecting a withering, who- the-deuce-are-you look at the starter, be- gan to paw out with his spiked shoe, and pack with expert nicety, a hole for his rear foot. The two who didn't count kneeled to their task with playful sighs of self-commiseration. With his right foot firmly braced a few inches behind, and perfectly parallel with the left one, his thumbs and first fingers spanning the starting line and his weight resting easily on his right knee, he gazed down along- 164 A BREAK IN TRAINING the white strings, which, fencing each runner into his narrow path, stretched to the finish hne. As his eye set hun- grily on the crimson thread which in less than a dozen seconds was to be broken by the breast of the winner, he had to jam his fingers hard into the cinders to hold back the sudden impulse to leap the dis- tance at a bound. J He could " feel " that distance in a single mental impression, as a sort of line-of-beauty curve, with a sweep up- j ward for the dive at the start, a sus- ' tained middle-distance line, and another sweep upward for the climax at the end, just as you feel the line the lash will take when you are about to crack a whip. Only two things broke this unity — the separate strides — about fifty of them — and two breaths, one at the start and one just beyond the fifty-yard mark. - " Ready ! " snapped the starter. ^ He raised himself slightly, screwed his rear foot more firmly against the brace, ^ and held himself on edge. Eleven gave a hoarse, short cough and spat out his || WINGS OF CLAY 165 gum. The two lay figures grinned weakly. " Set ! " commanded the starter. Four pair of legs drew taut as bow- strings. At the word there was some- thing like a click inside his head and a hundred yards away, in thin air above the finish line, a pendulum set swinging. None but he knew of it, not even he could see it, but out of the hundreds of times that he had hurled his body toward a cer- tain crimson streak, always with the thought of catching something before it slipped away, he had involuntarily con- structed a material object to correspond to the mental impression. You will re- call in that tale of Poe's, the pendulum whose knife swung back and forth above the inquisitor's victim. This pendulum was something like that — a lofty, sinis- ter thing, swinging there in the air, in- visible, just above the tape. He could hear within him the start of its fatalistic click at the word "Set!" As the four runners strained forward, in the crouch- ing start, until their centers of gravity 1 66 A BREAK IN TRAINING hung so delicately that the release of a thread of muscle would project them into the course, the slow, relentless second- beat of the pendulum, "Cli-i-ck! — Cla-a-ck!" grew more and more pain- fully distinct. With the throb of it in his brain, the silent crowd down the track — silent, but waiting only to welcome him — he seemed to feel, by a sort of second- sight, the starter put his hand above his head. His right leg, the rear one, stiff- ened until it was almost straight and then, as they leaned forward, straining — strain- ing — he felt the finger hook around the trigger and "They were off! He had timed the start so delicately that his rear foot had sprung from the mark when Eleven caught the shot, and the vicious snap of the pistol seemed but to follow his start and lash him across the back. People said afterward that he had beaten the pistol. This was not true. He had merely left the mark at the pre- cise instant of the shot. A mental impulse is one thing; a muscle in motion is quite WINGS OF CLAY 167 another. He had merely sent the im- pulse of the start burning along his nerves the precisely proper fraction of a watch-tick before the pistol flashed be- hind him. It was not chance. Some- thing had hold of him. As he dove off the mark, out and up- ward, with the pistol shot stinging every ounce of energy into a rush for release, this something within him seemed about to whirl him off his feet. He rippled up into his stride as a well-executed cadenza ripples up the scale. A spasmodic gasp of delight puffed out toward him from the finish line. The crowd had seen four statues leap into life before the snap of the pistol had been carried to their ears; four white patches sweep up a rapid in- cline into erectness, and then, as a tiny smoke-wreath floated off above the green, four vibrating bundles of speed were bearing down upon them. To those at the tape, the runners swelled into view almost as though they were being watched through the large end of an opera glass. He could feel himself acting this out as l68 A BREAK IN TRAINING his piston-rod stride ate up space. He forgot the other man. Every muscle and sense of him was self-centered in the act of reaching the tape. Legs, arms, lungs — every joint and bounding muscle — swirled into a burning unit of automatic action, "Cli-ick— Cla-ack!" Now they were but a couple of strides from the fifty-yard mark. Interestedly, as something pleasantly incidental, he caught the hiss of Eleven's breath. Shrill and more shrill was the swirl of warm air past his ears. The men who leaned over the finish-line could see the loose stuff of his racing clothes held in stiff-blown, intricate wrinkles like the infinitely trou- bled drapery of the Nike of Samothrace. He was running with every inch of him. "Cli-ick— Cla-ack!" He was past the fifty now and there were, he could somehow feel, but four beats more — only a score or so of strides in which to leap upon and clutch the pen- dulum before it started its eleventh swing. At that instant the ribbons fluttered like WINGS OF CLAY 169 a kaleidoscope and a din rolled out from the stands that drowned the wind-swirl in his ears. Lifted by it he felt himself run- ning as one runs in dreams. "Cli-ick!" Eleven's breath was lost behind and the red thread shone but thirty feet away. Arms stretched frantically over the ropes that walled the track and out of the gen- eral din came separate entreating cries. "Cla-ack!" The timers leaned toward him scarce a rod away. He could see them there, squeezing their watches in both fists — see some one, who had slipped through the lines and was crouching under the worsted, pounding the empty air as though he were beating a drum. "Cli-ick!" All at once he knew it. He was as cer- tain as though a real pendulum swung there before his eyes. He would breast the tape before the tenth beat. The instantaneous certainty was like a spur that roweled him deep. For an in- lyo A BREAK IN TRAINING stant he felt as perhaps a trotter feels when at top speed he " breaks," while arms reached toward him and the timers' thumbs trembled over their stop-watches. Then all that was in him burst out at once in the triumphant leap toward vic- tory. And he was ploughing over the cinders on his face ten inches short of the tape. Everything went black. Then he was lying on the grass with his head in somebody's hands. There was a burning cramp in his left leg and some- one was gingerly feeling of the hot mus- cles a bit above the knee. " Ouch ! " He winced and drew away. " Broken tendon," said the man on the ground. He looked up with the far-away eyes of one whose body has been brought back to earth while his spirit is yet among the gods. Through the legs of those crowd- ing about him he could see Eleven — who had shot twenty yards beyond the tape be- fore he stopped — loping back with the regulation veteran's prance, arms well up, WINGS OF CLAY 171 high on his toes, tossing a careless glance at the timers as he came. " Ten flat ! " cried a voice. As something far off, he saw Eleven nod, allow a blanket to be thrown about his shoulders and, as he came panting over, stage-whisper out of the side of his mouth a deprecating — " Cinch ! " " Hard luck, old man," panted Eleven cheerfully, passing by. The crowd closed in tighter. There was a hum of " Ten flat! " and " Even time! " and somebody was crying " He did it in ten flat, Jimmy, and you had him beaten out a good ten yards! Do you hear, Jimmy, ten yards ahead of even time ! " " Ten yards." He winced again and closed his eyes. It meant that he had just missed running the race that no man has ever run. The other man had merely won. He had touched that limit beyond which human springs and levers and the power behind them, however strong, can never go. Faces were peering down at him, feet lostled close to his side. He looked about 172 A BREAK IN TRAINING him, bored and somewhat protestingly, raised himself, and, leaning over, felt ab- sentmindedly of his leg. Then he cringed and gave another quick little grunt. " And any old grayhound could do bet- ter." He looked up, grinning. " Won't somebody please take me away ? " A', WITH THE HOUNDS WITH THE HOUNDS OF course you became very sore about it. you thought that running was an awful bore and you were never going to race again. You had trained hard for the mile that spring and given up things — pounded round the dusty track while the others were up at Riverside canoeing on the river, gone to bed while the rest were in town at the " Pops " or smoking and singing close harmony on the steps of Hohvorthy, rubbed the bloom off the loveliest weeks in the year and — and then in the end you were beaten. Of course, you knew that you weren't a sprinter and you ought to have known that they were running those first three-quarters too slow ; you ought to have swung out in the lead and let that man Jenkins eat his heart out trying to keep up with you for three long laps and then you might have '75 176 A BREAK IN TRAINING beaten him out at the finish. But it wasn't so easy to know this, that muggy May afternoon when the sun was beating down hke August and you couldn't get a decent breath and you were running fourth, locked very neatly into the pace of the three ahead. A lot of girls you knew stood on the bleachers and saw your disgrace and ap- plauded enthusiastically as Jenkins broke the tape. He was quite nice and mag- nanimous about it later that afternoon when you all met at somebody's tea, and he said that, of course, if a man will go to town " fussing " just before a race, go to railroad stations and bother about time- tables and get his nerves all upset with the noise of trains, and stand up all the way to Cambridge — one always stands up, you know, in the Cambridge cars — why, of course, he couldn't hope to be in any proper shape to run. One can't fuss and keep fit, he said, with just the shadow of a wicked little smile, and he himself had been so ungallant he felt like a profes- sional, he really did — and you grinned WITH THE HOUNDS 177 and ground your teeth and decided that you would never forgive him. You decided also that running was a wretched humdrum sport with no sort of fun in it and that next spring you would go in for baseball or cricket or something in which there was a game. But you never forgot that day nor that race all through the summer vacation. Every time you leaped a water hazard and jogged a bit over the soft turf after a golf ball you thought of your legs and the spring in them and when you were trot- ting up and down the beach between dips, hurdling the life-lines and behaving most childishly, you were really thinking of the last hundred yards of your next race and estimating the difference between the feel of sand and of cinders and wondering each day if you were strengthening your wind and improving your form. Still you weren't quite keen enough to train for the autumn games after you came back in the fall. You played tennis in- stead, and loped a bit each day after- wards, just enough to keep fit, and went 178 A BREAK IN TRAINING to the games as a spectator — feeling very- fine with your clerk's badge and your proper raiment and your privilege of watching the new Freshmen. You got enormously excited when the mile was run and you saw, for the first time, just how it looked from the outside, and, as they swung into the stretch and one of the new men came up from behind and won, you ran out and clapped him on the back and you would have given anything if there had been another race right then that you might have thrown off your clothes and gone in. You had thought you'd never race again and here you were suddenly wishing it were spring. The Indian summer faded and the leaves began to fall. In the early morn- ings the elms and the ancient dormitories lay in a bluish opalescence as though they were at the bottom of a sea, a haze hung in the air by day, the crisp breath of evening made you think of hot suppers and open fires and all the land smelled faintly of burning leaves and brush. One morning you opened your Crimson and WITH THE HOUNDS 179 saw a little two-line notice which said that at 4 :30 o'clock that afternoon there would start from the locker-building the first hare-and-hounds run of the year. You stood in your pajamas as you read this, with your toes curling away from the cold bare floor, but your heart gave a percepti- ble jump and a hot glow swept up within you. For days the hazy autumn had been calling you and now at last you heard the call. And you drew in a deep breath and gave your chest a thump and jumped under your icy shower with your teeth set, for your blood was up and you were aching to be up and away — away on the long hard trail 'cross country with the hounds. They were an odd lot, those hounds, sitting on the steps of the locker-building as you trotted across the field late that afternoon, shivering in their sweaters, waiting the word to go. There were brown-legged Mott Haven men, wearing their initials inside out ; i)alc divinity stu- dents with spectacles, whose sense of the proprieties demanded flannel shirts and i8o A BREAK IN TRAINING knickerbockers and stockings and leather shoes, and here and there some mature student of the law who had come down to the East from a far-off inland college and whose story of triumphs, now put aside and forgotten, was mutely told by the faded jersey and the tattered initials of the college he called his own. You looked your new friends over — friends they must be to have heard with you the same call — and at the hares, waiting the word to go, and the timers, muffled to their chins in ulsters, and gradually the gray sky grew darker and you hugged your bare legs as hard little flakes of snow came hurrying down. " All right! " nodded somebody at last, and the hares, slinging their bags of paper clippings over their shoulders, swung off on the trail. You watched them jog easily across the field and disappear round the corner of Boylston, flinging a handful of paper behind them as they passed from view. One minute — two — three — four — jiminy crickets! how cold it was — and you all got up and began WITH THE HOUNDS i8i circling about the timers, stamping your feet and hugging your shivering ribs, when — "Five minutes! Go!" said one of them, and away you went on the trail. Two of the old Alott Haven men set the pace. You fell in at a comfortable distance behind ; and behind, with all sorts of good and bad running, the others straggled in single file. Over the grass, now specked with little wisps of snow, you jogged, and down through Harvard Square. The trail led straight through the tangle of trucks and trolley cars, the crowd waiting at the transfer-station stared and gasped and tittered, and you snuggled up to the wide back of the law- school man just in front of you and were glad there were so many in the pack. Down Boylston Street you jogged toward Soldier's Field, round a corner, and there the trail suddenly stopped. "Watch out, they've doubled!" the leaders cried. The pack scattered like a lot of beagles, and anxiously searched tht ground. It was very annoying and it took up a lot of time, but it showed that i82 A BREAK IN TRAINING the hares knew the game. Over the top of the nearest high board fence popped the heads of a lot of httle muckers. " Aw, yer no good ! " they shrieked in ecstasy. " Git onto dem shapes — Yous '11 never ketch 'em!" They felt very sure of this, because, in the five minutes that had elapsed since the hares passed that way they had carefully picked up every scrap of the trail for a block or more and stuffed it in their trousers' pockets. The hounds were scurrying hither and thither and you had craftily retraced your steps to find where the hares had doubled and started a new trail to the northward, when a very near-sighted divinity student with thick glasses picked up the scent a block or so away in exactly the opposite direc- tion, and with rallying cries of "Trail! Trail ! Trail ! " the pack closed up and was off again. The hares were bothersome and shifty. They had carried the trail through back- yards and over pickets, between chicken- coops and stables, where the pack had to creep along the tops of fences like WITH THE HOUNDS 183 SO many alleyway cats. Your jersey caught on barbed wires, raspberry bushes scratched your bare shins, and every min- nute or two at some narrow gate or slit in a hedgerow the hounds, sifting through two by two, elbowed and fumed as they thought of the hares running free in the open by this time a mile or so away. For half an hour the pack fretted thus through darkest Cambridge, until, at last, they emerged into the open again, pat- tered across the Longwood bridge and, with the cries of coxswains coming through the distance and wherries and singles shooting past, down stream with the tide, you stumbled into the marshy lowlands that edge the Charles. It was real running now. Your feet caught in the tufts of wiry grass and every now and then you slumped down to your knees into a muddy pocket of ice water. The quick weariness of the first three miles — the hardest stretch of a ten- mile run — took hold and took hold hard. You caught a glimpse from across the river of a crew just lifting their dripping 184 A BREAK IN TRAINING shell over their heads, and as the water splashed on the boathouse float you wished you could get some of it too. The sweat was coming out on your forehead as you swung at last into the road again ; it was running into your eyes as the pack trailed across Soldier's Field. The great amphitheater was silent and deserted now and with nothing to break the stillness but the puffs of breath and the muffled tread you filed across the gridiron. After the pack had passed the field the town gave way to scattered houses, and the houses to open fields and scraps of woodland, and finally you found yourself in the open country. Trot-trot, trot-trot, uphill and down, scrambling over boul- ders and stones, pushing through thickets and brushwood, the pace kept up unceas- ingly. The line began to stretch out now. From the top of each rise of ground you could see the slower ones pulling up the slope behind you, while ahead for a quar- ter of a mile the leaders were carrying a broken line of vivid crimson and white out into the hazy distance. Your blood. WITH THE HOUNDS 185 slowly and surely heated by the three- mile pull, now burned evenly to your very finger-tips. The heat of it made you laugh at the frosty air, smoothed out every kink in your body, melted away the weight that had pulled on your chest until your lungs worked as easily as a fish's gills and the rich fruity air sank to the very bottom of them. As you felt your arms, moving like pendulums, low and steadily, and your legs stepping light and evenly, and drank in the wine of the autumn air in great conscious breaths you began to know your strength and be sure of it, and you looked from each hilltop over the long trail yet to be traveled re- joicing, and there seemed in all the world nothing worth while but straight limbs and clean thoughts and stout hearts and the free and open country. And you understood what it means to say that the sport is bigger than the victory and that it is not just to break a tape a few inches in front of another man that one goes in to train. For what a good and glorious thing it is — the mere running! The lift 1 86 A BREAK IN TRAINING and thrust of the thigh, the rhythm of iintrammeled motion ! The catch of the foot on the pathway, the tireless buoyant progression ! When the air strikes deep in the chest, the arms Hft with the leg- thrust and the muscles all sing the same rhythm ! The regular strides on the level, the in-bend as one sweeps round a town, the relentless pace up a hillside, when the feet grip the ground as the fingers grip the rope in hand-over-hand climbing! The run on the beach in the summer, alone with the gold and azure! Or this long trail homeward in the autumn when the frost's in the air and call answers call through the twilight! What a good and glorious thing it is — the mere running ! The gray November day grew grayer and lights began to sparkle through the twilight. You forgot your bare legs and flimsy running clothes, and each of the hounds became merely one of the pack. Now you scrambled up a gravelly gully where the workmen straightened up from their shovels and stared open-mouthed; now you swung through a farmyard WITH THE HOUNDS 187 where the chickens scattered squawking and the girls of the house stood in the kitchen doors laughing as you passed. Now you swished through an orchard, ducking the low branches and plowing through the crackling leaves. Your foot struck something round and hard and you snatched up an apple from its wrapping of frosty grass which was like wine in your cottony mouth and tasted of the autumn and the out-of-doors as only an apple can taste which has mellowed under its own leaves and been cooled and sweet- ened by frost. Over the orchard wall and to the bot- tom of the hill the trail led, straight to a brook too wide to jump and without a bridge. The gang of small boys waiting there assured you earnestly that there " wasn't nothin' nearer than the railroad bridge," full half a mile away. You knew they were lying, but the darkness was closing in rapidly now, there was no time to waste, so into the black water the sweating pack plunged, hip-deep, just as the frosty night was beginning to weave l88 A BREAK IN TRAINING a fringe of ice along the edges. You thought of Valley Forge and the retreat from Moscow as you scrambled up the opposite bank and the wind struck your dripping legs, but before the water had time to freeze it had dried off from you as it would from a stove, and you were pounding down the trail again no worse for your ducking. Alongside a wall the path led presently, through an arched stone gateway, up a drive and into a wood. As you peered after the faint scent there suddenly came a blood-chilling baying through the gloom and a couple of great dogs — regular Lit- tle-Eva hounds with spiked collars — leaped toward you between the trees. The pack huddled back to back like ponies attacked by wolves. You thought of your bare legs. There was a call, a rattling of chains. A convent grounds, somebody said. Then the trail was picked up again and the pack hurried on. The late November darkness closed rapidly down around you now. The specks of the trail could scarcely be dis- WITH THE HOUNDS 189 tinguished from the flakes of snow on the grass tufts and the pack felt its way along slowly, with heads bent and eyes search- ing the ground. Every few minutes there was a halt and plaintive wails of " Lo-o-ost Tra-a-ail ! Lo-o-ost Tra-a-ail !" and then from somewhere off in the dark- ness came at last the clear halloo of some keen-eyed veteran, " Tally Ho! Ta-a-ally Ho-o-o ! " Giving tongue the pack closed in again, and again was up and away. You stumbled out of the woods and fields at last, and as you struck an open road the leaders quietly hit up the pace. You could see the line — not so long as it was, some still toiling back there in the woods — swing under the white glare of an arc lamp and suddenly the road turned and you found yourself in one of those flinty macadam avenues that lead straight into town. The country disappeared as at the fall of a drop curtain, rows of yellow gas- lamps crossed each other in the middle distance, and down toward the glow where the town lay the arc lamps of the avenue stretched like a string of stars. 190 A BREAK IN TRAINING j Now there was work ahead of you. All afternoon you had had chances to loaf i — when the nervous pack were held at a | fence or hedge-row, when the leaders were thoughtful enougii to walk uphill, ' j or over some of the rougher places, when | the trail was lost in the darkness — but there was none of that now. For a good ^ two miles down the hard highway not a 1 bramble or brush or lost trail or fence | gave a chance for soldiering. Straight I down the road you went, all in a bunch, | for none dared to drop behind to come | wandering into Cambridge alone that ¥ night with nothing but his running "^ clothes to cover him. All that tiresome j training for the mile helped you now. Every time that you had ever driven yourself under the trainer's watch through the last two-twenty of a time- trial, when the air was muggy as a steam laundry and the mercury was eighty-five in the shade and the cinders were swim- ming before your eyes, made it so much easier now to look down that long stretch with easy confidence, to hook yourself in WITH THE HOUNDS 191 just behind the leaders, put your arms and back a bit more into it, and laugh at the pace. One by one, as you passed each corner, the swinging arc lamps slipped by over- head, steaming breaths showing in the glare as the pack pounded across each circle of light, shadows leaping ahead fan- tastically as you swept on again into the darkness. Past trolley-cars, humming out to the suburbs loaded to the fenders with office folk and pale-faced clerks, past shop-girls and workmen with dinner- pails, past lighted houses, through the windows of which you caught glimpses of tables set for dinner and blazing open fires, the pack sweeps on. How petty, cramped and absurd seemed all the boxed- up world of rectangular blocks, of narrow grooves called streets, of clothes and trol- ley-cars ! How all the dust of over-civili- zation was brushed away as you strode strongly on with the steam of your breath showing in the lamplight and the sweat running down your face. With what a straight-eyed chastity could you sweep by 192 A BREAK IN TRAINING those chiffon-and-sachet women-folk who giggled at your honest bare legs and coyly averted their eyes; with what Olympian good-humor could you glimpse that lily- livered youth with a cigarette who glared at you cynically as you passed, shivered and wrapped himself tighter in his foolish ulster. Maybe you would wear an ulster some day, perhaps before to-morrow you would admit the tyranny of straight-ruled streets and clothes, but now, to-night, with your eight good miles behind you and the air of the hills in your lungs and the fire of the chase in your blood, now, at least, you were sure of yourself and free. Through the streets of Alston, dodging cars and trucks, down to the railroad sta- tion galloped the pack, clattering down through the echoing subway, up and down again on the other side and along the road to Cambridge. Through the darkness to the left you could presently see the gloomy bulk of the stands on Sol- dier's Field and beyond that the dull glow- ing of the Brattle Square clock and i' WITH THE HOUNDS 193 farther yet in the distance the tower of Memorial. Suddenly the leaders pulled up, panting. ''Here it is!" someone cried. The trail abruptly stopped and a line of paper scraps was laid across the road. It was the end of the trail — the " break." From here it was a run-in home, a mile almost straightaway — down past Soldier's Field and over the bridge, up the hill to the Square and over to the gymnasium steps where the timers waited. " Line up for the break ! " called the master of the hounds, and he looked back over his shoulder into the darkness, panting, as he waited for the duffers to appear. As you saw them toil slowly in, saw some flop down at the roadside, and, lost to vanity, flat on their backs, pant up at the stars, saw the straight road stretch- ing ahead relentlessly and thought of leaping off as though you were starting a quarter-mile dash instead of finishing — who should come jogging up out of the darkness from the direction of the Square, out for an ante-dinner bit of exercise, 194 A BREAK IN TRAINING with a running mate in a crew sweater beside him, but your friend Jenkins. " Hello ! " said he, " what's up ? Lem- me pace you in ! " "Pace!" you cried. "I'll race you in ! " and you took your place on the line. You'd put nine miles behind you and he was fresh from his little jog down the street, but your blood was hot and your fighting edge was up and every piston- shaft and cog-wheel in your carcass work- ing together like a well-oiled and exquis- itely adjusted machine. ' " A race it is ! " grinned Jenkins, and he pushed in beside you, toeing the break. " Are you ready? " demanded the mas- ter of the hounds, looking along the line. "Go!" The pack broke like thoroughbreds at the flinging-up of the barrier. At least that's the way it seemed to you. Your legs, gauged to the easy, 'cross-country pace, seemed tied down and weighted as you tried suddenly to lift them into the long, high strides of the sprint home. Your chest, which but a moment ago WITH THE HOUNDS 195 drank in the cool air to its very depths, closed on each breath now before you'd scarcely caught it in your throat. The taste of the out-of-doors vanished and the air became raw and hot and rough. But again your training helped and the dogged, good-work-well-done-behind-you weariness of the nine-mile run was quite another sort of thing from that hollow- sided distress that comes when the cold blood first meets the shock of the cinder- path dash. Jenkins, fresh as a lark and cocky with his warming, started out at a four-forty clip. You hooked your eyes to his back and lifted your heavy legs into a longer stride. He zvill, will he ! It was more than a sprint from here to the gymnasium and you'd not learned to turn off your ten miles for nothing. He zvill, will he — ar-r-rh ! — Up, guards, and at 'em ; to hell with Yale ; lay on Macduff, and the devil take the hindmost! You saw the Soldier's Field gate slip by and the bridge and the boathouse, and now you were pulling up the hill toward the lights of 196 A BREAK IN TRAINING Harvard Square. On and on you went, hungrily, with your legs eating up the distance with the speed that darkness seems to give. Far behind were the most of the pack and those in front kept slip- ping nearer. You overhauled them, one by one, suddenly bore hard for a dozen strides — " Take that ! " you said under your breath — and slipped past. As you passed Mount Auburn Street there were only three ahead of you, the master of the hounds, one of the Mott Haven veterans and that nimble Jenkins. The pace and the long pull uphill from the river were telling on him now ; you could see his shoulders pumping into it and — and — yes, his arms were going up and his chin slewing round. Straight through the Square you plunged rough- shod, through the crowd waiting with their transfers and with half a dozen trol- ley-car gongs banging unheard in your ears, and then suddenly, only a furlong away, you saw the lights of the gym and knew that the race was almost done. As you caught sight of them a quick exult- WITH THE HOUNDS 197 ant strength lifted through you. All the charm and mystery of the autumn, the rough-shod dash through wood and water, the thrill of the chase came back in a whirl. You quite forgot yourself, an amazing recklessness seized you and you turned everything loose. " Take that — and that — and that! " and across the Square you swept, leaped the gutter to the pathway past the Yard, passed the third man and were blowing your breath on Jenkins's neck. Past Massachusetts and Harvard you strode, shoulder to shoulder, and then you bore on hard again and you heard his breath behind you, and there was nobody ahead but the master of the hounds. Him you overhauled just as you reached the close-set posts of the gymnasium; you flipped through togedier, but he lost his stride, and, taking it on the fly, you finished out the last dozen steps ahead and dropped on the steps a winner. You will undoubtedly become rich and famous in your day and have your mo- ments of triumph here and there, but igS A BREAK IN TRAINING you'll be lucky if you ever have more fun than you had then, as you sat on the cold stone steps panting and hot and happy, and watched with the crowd as the others pumped in out of the darkness, and fin- ished one by one. Jenkins was fourth. " Good work ! " he gasped, slumping down on the steps beside you and drop- ping his- damp head against your shoul- der. "I'm down and out ! " " You weren't warmed up enough," you laughed. " You know we'd been going it for an hour or two." "And finish like that?" he panted. " I've got all I want. I'm not in your class." And as Jenkins happened to be your room-mate and able to put it all over you any day in the sprints, you pulled him to his feet and decided to for- give him after all, and the two of you went down to the baths together. The cup was not a very big one, but it looked very well that night as it stood on your study table under the glow of the big lamp. You stretched out in your big chair, deliciously tired, with a soothing. WITH THE HOUNDS 199 somnolent fire burning drowsily through and through you, and ran the long run over again. It was, indeed, a little cup, but it didn't remind you of seasick fin- ishes as some of your other prizes did, and the older it got the dearer it was to grow. And years afterwards, when more than a path of scattered papers were needed to take you back to the old lost trail, when it was a far cry to the open country, and all that you could see from your window were rows of dingy brick, and all that you could hear was the roar of trucks and " L " trains and trolley- cars, you had but to look at that tarnished old mug and again you were swinging with the hounds through the frosty au- tumn, again you caught the smell of burn- ing leaves and brush and heard again through the twilight the long-drawn cry of "Tally-ho! Ta-a-ally! Ho-oho!" I THE MEN THEY USED TO BE THE MEN THEY USED TO BE TUST around the corner from Madison J Square, and only .half a stone's throw from the avenue and the pattering han- soms, is a little, low, brick stable-building in the face of which are two or three steps and a door. If you enter this door and climb up the old wooden stairs, you will come to a dingy, carpeted locker-room, the walls of which are hung with old framed photographs of groups of ancient athletes, with solemn faces and side- whiskers, like those who used to row when six men made a crew. If you climb a ladder — precisely like the ladders that grow on the sides of haymows in the country — you will emerge in an old gym- nasium. The apparatus is of a pattern different from that in the gym at college; 203 204 A BREAK IN TRAINING you bathe in a little sort of cupboard by filling pails from a faucet and pouring them over your head ; and every time you covertly open a window in the hope of diluting an atmosphere in which are curi- ously balanced the smell of the stable and the vague but depressing odor of mere antiquity, it always closes mysteriously behind your back, like wounds in some invulnerable dragon. Here, of a morning, you will find the brothers De Mar, from the music-hall a few blocks away, laboriously practicing, in dingy neglige, the feats with which they nightly electrify the simple audience on the other side of the footlights. Or, perhaps, Feveril Fortescue, idol of the matinees, is devoting his genius to his biceps, against hjs appearance in the win- ter, bare-armed, in the toga of Ben Hur. In the afternoon strange victims of avoir- dupois or the latest method of physical culture trot stubbornly around the little padded track. Now and then enters the dark, devious, muscle-bound youth, with a strap about his wrist, who solemnly ele- THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 205 vates an enormous iron dumb-bell over his head a dozen times or so — a slowly smold- ering cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth the while — and then as sol- emnly retires, his exercise and sport over for the day. Speaking in the language of other juve- nile ailments, you " get " Wood's in your first autumn after you have come down from college to town. With the first warm breath of the following spring, if not before, you get over it. After- ward, when someone tells you that he has solved the office slave's problem of con- tinuing the undergraduate's regulation ante-dinner sweat-cold-shower-and-rub- down, and begins to describe that classic loft, — " hardly a step from one's room," " right on your way up town," — you have the serene pleasure of wagging your head sympathetically and saying, " Yes — yes, I know ; / had it once." Halloway was beginning to feel just about that way. He was an easy-going young man with a tall and very powerful body, with which he could do a great 2o6 A BREAK IN TRAINING many things easily and exceedingly well. He was one of those men who are so valu- able to their college that to go in for the teams is a matter not so much of pleasure as of duty; and what with playing half- back every autumn, jumping in the indoor winter games, and training on down to the intercollegiate to win his consistent firsts in the mile in the dual meet and at Mott Haven, Halloway was quite glad enough to cut it all out when he came down to town, to live his own lazy way, eating as much and sleeping as little as he chose, and expending all his energy in rearing the foundations for the house in town and country, the stable and steam-yacht, which seem to lie just over the horizon when one is starting in the Street. It one day came across him, har- rowingly, that he was actually getting fat; and as he was not particularly keen for the Seventh or the Squadron, and not temperamentally inclined for the " ear- nest-worker " gyms, he drifted into Wood's. It W'as only a couple of blocks or so from home, and, as Halloway ob- THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 207 served, " I suppose a man really ought to do something." The winter was nearly over when he began to drop in of afternoons to juggle pulley-weights for a lonesome half-hour. Presently, as the days grew warmer, he decided that one day of this, in the middle of the week, with thirty-six holes of golf at the end of it, was enough exercise for a city man. Then a day came when he de- cided that, after all, even that wasn't worth while. It was a warm, pretty day, the tulips were blooming in Madison Square, and even in Broadway one could tell that the spring had come in the country. Halloway had swung over the old row- ing-machines for an imaginary mile or two, taken a turn around the little thirty- lap track, and finally flopped down on one of the mats. As he flung his arms back over his head and closed his eyes on a couple of double-chinned hippopotami who were struggling wath a medicine- ball, he thought of the days when it had seemed to him " work " to go out on a rolled cinder-path and run a fifty-yard 2o8 A BREAK IN TRAINING trial. Yes, they were all out of doors now — the runners on the track; the nine was getting its tan on the field ; and the crew men were rowing on the river. He could hear the crack of the cricket-bats over under the Willows, and see the white figures of the tennis-players flashing in the afternoon sun, and breathe the odor of the fresh grass, and The nervous, fretful squeaking of a rickety pulley- weight woke him back to daylight. Hal- loway rolled over lazily and, with his head still resting on his bare arm, watched the man who was making the noise. What an odd little windfall he was — undersized and knobby-jointed, with flat, thin arms and legs, like those of a boy mysteriously grown old! Squeakity- squeak! squeakity-squeak! went the pul- ley-weights; and, as his arms came up and the veins showed very blue through the white skin, the little chap stared down at his biceps with an air of mingled pride and grave concern. He was bald about the temples, there was a red spectacle- mark across his nose, and his face had THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 209 that curiously gaunt, blue look which comes when a thick black beard, closely shaven, shows through a pallid skin. Squcakity-squeak! Halloway watched the little chap's arms absent-mindedly, thinking of different folk's ideas of exer- cise and sport, and of how this man seemed to epitomize all that was mere muscle-making and lifeless and liltless and leaden, when something in his mo- tions caught his eye. Why, sure enough, it was ! The solemn little man was doing the old Mott Haven pulley-weight drill. Every year, following some occult un- written law, the men who led the gym squads in the winter go through the same series of boresome juggleries. And an old trackman will start off on the drill the moment his fingers touch the chest- weight handles, just as instinctively as a veteran brings his hand to his forehead when some one cries " Salute! " Presently the little man dropped the weights and went over to the track. The moment that he stepped off Halloway saw that he knew how to run. There were 210 A BREAK IN TRAINING several on the tiny oval already — a gray- haired, purple-faced ice-wagon, pounding round and round in an endeavor to re- duce weight ; a " strong man " in tights and velvet trunks and with a torso bowed and knotted with muscle, who scuffled along flat-footed and shamelessly, an irony in flesh ; but the little windfall chap strode daintily and, as it were, disdain- fully, past them all, his toes touching the track lightly, his arms and back in the rhythm, all of him well in hand. How potent an eloquence there may be in the mere holding of a pair of reins, the hand- ling of an oar ! What little things strike the spark of sport's freemasonry when the " know " comes out in a man and proves him not a duffer; Halloway watched the little man until he had sprinted around the last two turns of his twenty-lap jog, and then he smiled to himself : " Why, he's not such a bad sort, after all!" When he had taken his water-bucket shower and pattered back to his locker, THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 21 1 he found the Httle man seated on the bench, solemnly lubricating his limbs with wintergreen oil. Halloway, burnishing off his left shoulder with a rough towel, looked down at him. " What's your time for the mile ? " he inquired. The little fellow started, and a quick smile crinkled his wizened face. He looked like one who suddenly hears his own language spoken in a strange land. But he caught himself quickly. " Never was timed," he said. " Half's my distance." " Oh ! " said Halloway, respectfully, " I wasn't quite sure. I thought your stride looked like a miler's." He meant that the little man wasn't at all the sort to run a fast half-mile. He had neither the quick strength nor the stride. The little man nodded in a pleased way. " Well, you see, I'm not much good," he explained. There was something rem- iniscent about his face, and Halloway felt vaguely that he had seen him before. 212 A BREAK IN TRAINING The little man pointed to the floor over- head, whence came the dull thumping of the exercisers, and shrugged his shoulders wearily. " You're the first man — why, what made you think I could run ? " " I used to run a little bit myself. I know what it looks like, all right. And then I saw you at the pulley-weights," smiled Halloway. " Nobody ever forgets that." The little man's face lighted up with a " Then you were there, too," and all at once Halloway recalled the ridiculous two-mile handicap that was run in the last spring meet of his freshman year. At the limit — two hundred yards — was a gorilla- like hammer-thrower who was getting in shape for the all-round championships, and beside him a little unknown — one of those mysterious beings whom one meets in class-rooms and sees now and then in the Yard, who come from nowhere, know nobody, and presently vanish, none knows whither. It was very droll to see the two start off side by side and be overtaken by THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 213 the scratch man before the half-mile was run. And it was droll to see the big man fall back, and back, and come plowing in after every one had forgotten him. But the drollest part was to see the little man, not knowing at all when he was beaten, hook right on to the leaders as they passed him, and finish, all out and dead to the world, fifth or sixth, just missing a place. "Yes," said Halloway; "I was up there, too." The little man tossed his towel into the locker, — the second-tier lockers at Wood's are as high as one's head, — and something like a coin with a bit of ribbon attached to it dropped out on the floor. Before he could pick it up, Halloway had seen that it was a medal, and, as he looked over at the little man, the latter was blushing. " I always keep it here," he said in an embarrassed way. " You see, I live in one of those hall bedrooms — in a board- ing-house; and there's a corset drummer lives over me that's always coming down to borrow matches and ask questions 214 A BREAK IN TRAINING about things in my room, and there's a fat woman in the room next to me who stays there all day and comes in and reads my letters when I'm gone. Oh, I know she does — I can smell her perfumery on 'em. Well, now, you don't want these women — well, damn it all! there's some things you don't want these people to paw over and see. And besides," he added, after pausing for Halloway's grin of assent, " I'd rather have anything like that here. It kind of gives you a brace. It makes things seem more real." " Sort of sporting shrine," smiled Halloway. " Yes," said the little man, looking hard at him ; " that's about it. That just about says it." He took the medal out of the locker again and turned it over and over in his hand. " It isn't gold ; the gilt is almost worn off on this side. Maybe it's tin for all I know. You see," he explained carefully, " they weren't — that is, they were mucker games." He waited again for Halloway's nod of approval. " You see, I had run in a two-mile handicap and I THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 215 finished fifth. That was from the limit — pretty near half-way around the track. Well, that was the best I'd ever run, and it was the last chance I'd ever have, and along came these mucker games. I saw a notice of 'em in the paper one day — open handicap — over in East Somerville. And so I went in, and on that last race — you know how they try to stick you if they know you're from out there — they put me at scratch." The little man wrig- gled his shoulders and grinned all over. "Think of that," he said— " scratch ! And they had no policeman to watch the fence, and so everybody climbed over, and nobody paid at the gate, and there wasn't any money, and — and so we got tin medals." There was quite a flush on the little man's face and his eyes were ex- cited. He wasn't at all the little man who had been going through the pulley-weight drill with gritted teeth. " And you won ? " asked Halloway. " Yes," said the little man ; " I won — from scratch. Do you know what that means — to win from scratch ? " 2l6 A BREAK IN TRAINING " Yes, I know," said Halloway. He had won his initial in his freshman year. " Great, isn't it ! " "You bet your life it's great!" said the little man. He was almost dressed by this time, and he turned round from the glass in front of which he had been tying his tie and examined Halloway for an instant to see that he wasn't being laughed at. " That day," said he, " that race— why, that was the biggest thing that ever hap- pened to me ! " Halloway nodded respect- fully. There weren't very many big things happening to the little man now- adays, thought Halloway — the little man wasn't exactly one of your Napoleons, and all that sort of thing — your man born to the purple. " It's good enough just to be able to run," cried the little man — " just to have the strength and the wind. It's better yet to run in a good race and be beaten out by a better man; but to start off from scratch, with men just as good as you are, and you just as good as they are. THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 217 and to jump out and run 'em off their feet " " That's something," assented Hallo- way. " You see, I had had plenty of the other thing, and — and I knew. I knew what it was to go in time after time, without a ghost of a show, and your heart going like a steam-riveter, and your mouth all cotton, and feeling about as game as a man who didn't know how to box would feel standing up in a twelve-foot ring against Jim Jeffries. I knew what it was to run yourself out race after race and come wabbling in after the crowd had closed in across the track and the men who got places were trotting off to the locker-building. It doesn't do you any good to tumble in a heap then. There isn't even a gallery to see it." The little man had grown flushed as he talked, and he shook his head and snapped his eyes excitedly as he rushed on. " It wasn't so much fun running in that handicap, on the limit-mark with a man twice your size, as though you were 2i8 A BREAK IN TRAINING a Tom Thumb and the giant in a side show. I knew what the crowd thought, and I could hear 'em laughing across the field, while we waited there for the pistol. And every time we passed the stands they yelled, ' Go it ! ' and things like that. Oh, that was a whole lot of fun, that was ! " But this day " he paused for a moment, affecting a fine air of careless- ness as to what he was saying, and tossed his running-things into the locker — " this day," he repeated, "I was as good as any of 'em. I ran and I won, and I won from scratch. It was a queer crowd there that day, muckers and all, strag- gling along the track. But they were mine, all mine, and the yells were mine, and the look of the men coming back toward me when I began to move up round the lower turn, and the little brush as I passed 'em, and the tape there across the track, with nobody in front, and the knowing, all at once, that I had 'em beaten and nothing on earth could stop me — that was mine, all mine ! " The little man caught himself and THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 219 Stopped. " I'm no wonder, you know," he said ; " I know that. But that thing's done, and you can put your finger on it. And they can't take that away from me, can they? That's mine." " You're right," assented Halloway, smiHng to himself as he thought of the many times that he had done what the httle man had done but once, and of the mantelpiece lined with cups in his room at home which he had quite forgotten these many months ; " they can't take that away." They left the stuffy locker-room and walked together down the old wooden stairs. The warm spring sun was still bright, and Halloway shook his shoulders and took a deep breath as they came into the open and he felt the gay flutter and patter of the avenue only half a block away. But the little man stared straight ahead of him, and a tired look crossed his eyes. " No," he echoed ; " they can't take that away. But this — " he swept his hand out bitterly toward the walls across the 220 A BREAK IN TRAINING street, toward the wilderness of brick, and the dull, persistent roar of the city that hemmed them in — " this can take away something. It's an alarm-clock jerks you into it, — when you've forgotten, — and it's a desk and an electric light over your head when the sun is shining outside in the morning, and it's hanging on to a strap in the ' L ' train with the crowd reading the murders and suicides in the papers going home. And then — it's the boarding-house again and the people — and nobody speaks your language and no- body can understand. I come up here every afternoon, — it seems as though you ought to hang on to it somehow, — but it goes — it keeps a-going — and I can't make it feel the same." They had just reached the avenue now, and, as the little man's voice ran down and paused, Halloway took his arm — and very thin and queer it felt, too, against his own solid one — and swung him along uptown. " All you want is a little vacation," he said. " Work is an awful bore." THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 221 " Oh, it isn't that ! " cried the little man. " It isn't the work ; it's the forgetting. It's when you begin to lose interest. It's when you don't care whether you're stoop- shouldered or straight, when you don't care whether you've got any legs or not, when you think more of whether your trousers are pressed than whether the legs are right inside 'em. Oh, it's when you get to be just a clothes-figure with a thinking-machine on top, and let all the poetry in your body shrivel up and die! And your arms, and all the pull and thrust in 'em, and your legs, and all the spring and stride in 'em, become just bag- gage to carry around. You've run — you know what it is — just the way your feet catch the ground and swing you on, just the way a piece of level meadow where the grass is short, or a smooth stretch of soft roadway, will call out to you ! " And yet I've seen the day," said the little man, solemnly — " I've seen the day when I've envied some old bag of bones, with two feet in the grave, just because he rode up the Sound every night in a 222 A BREAK IN TRAINING steam-yacht; or some fat-faced elephant, who'd die of apoplexy if he ran a block, just because, when I was walking uptown some hot night after work, I'd meet him blowing down the avenue in an automo- bile — just in from the country, with a lit- tle tan on his face ! " Halloway stopped suddenly and looked down at the little man. " By the way," he said, " what have — have you got to do anything next Sun- day? I mean " He was thinking of their place on the Sound, and the saddle- horses in the stable, and the links just beyond the woods, and the knockabout floating in the cove — and that he didn't even know the little man's name. " I mean," stammered Halloway, " we'll talk it over — and — and — come along in and have a little snifter." " Thank you— but I don't believe " " Oh, yes, you do," laughed Halloway. " It'll do you good." And he pushed the little man in ahead of him — into a room the windows of which opened on the Avenue, and where the men, sitting at THE MEN THEY USED TO BE 223 little tables, to whom Hallo way nodded, glanced inquiringly at his companion, as though to ask who that might be he had in tow, with the faded face and the spec- tacles and the quaint store-clothes. Hal- loway tapped a bell and gave the orders, and, dropping into a broad-armed wicker chair, gazed out at the bright stream of carriages and hansoms and the people flowing by. For a moment they sat in silence, and then he turned toward the little man and then looked back, with a shrug of the shoulders, into the street. " There they are," he said, " and there they'll always be, with their dinners and their huzz-biizz and their theaters and the rest. And here we are, in the cage, and we can't get out. And we've got to become pillars of society and all that — and re- member that we aren't antelopes or Indians — and forget for a good many hours each day that there's sunshine and blue water and a wind blowing, some- where, across the moor, and things like that. And they'll never learn to speak our language, and we've got to learn to 224 A BREAK IN TRAINING speak theirs. And — " Halloway smiled and shrugged his shoulders slightly — " it isn't such a bad one, either, when you get used to it; and the funny part is — the funny part is, how quick you do." He reached for his glass and twirled the stem slowly between his fingers. " We're getting old," said he, and he smiled as he thought of his own freshness and lazy strength ; of his father as he looked seated in his club window, ruddy, solidly powerful, and good-humoredly at ease; of his grandfather, smartest of the three in a way — gaunt, fine, erect, taking his hour each morning on the bridle-path in the park. " We're getting old," repeated Halloway, slowly, and the bloom's going ; but we'll hang on to what we have left, and — and here's to the men we once were! " The little man stared hard at Halloway, and raised his glass with a kind of timid smile. " Sir, to you ! " he said gravely. " ' The men we once were ! ' " THE END DATE DUE NOV 6 979 CAYLORD FRINTEO IN U.S.A. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 602 802 1 t»