Salter still stood alone at the starting line watching the mob that, wild with joy, poured down tumultuous from the Seaton benches, and with crimson banners flashing in the sunlight swarmed about the panting victor. Why was it that the very event for which he had longed so ardently and labored so faithfully should now, as an accomplished fact, find him so lukewarm in his emotion? Salter knew well the cause, and, heartily ashamed, strove to throw off the feeling of depression stealing over him.
“What are you thinking of, you fool?” he demanded of himself angrily. “Did you expect them to come and carry you off on their shoulders? Of course it’s over, and they’ll forget that you had anything to do with it; but you had, all the same, and some of them know it. So behave yourself and get into the game.”
He went forward bravely to find a place in the triumphal procession that was now streaming toward the station. But envious thoughts still haunted him. The victory was won; he had helped to win it. The period of anxious longing was now at an end; and so, too, were the only really happy days his school life had known—those pleasant weeks when he had been something more to his fellow-students than a dictionary to be consulted and thrown aside.
As he neared the throng two fellows came striding toward him: one big and square-shouldered, with round, smooth face aglow with joyful excitement and straw hat tipped back over light, disordered, hair; the other shorter and more slender, with snapping black eyes, and face burned by exposure on the diamond.
“Here he is!” shouted Wolcott.
“You good-for-nothing Sal, why are you sneaking off by yourself?” cried Poole, almost simultaneously. “Come, you belong in this!”
And the two swept him off in the wake of the crowd. No one at that moment—not Strong the victorious, nor Freund, the captain of the team—was prouder or happier than Sally Salter.
CHAPTER XVI
A CELEBRATION
They swarmed forth that evening, in jerseys and old trousers and shoes that feared neither mud nor dust, from every dormitory entrance and every student lodging house; and, like Parisian revolutionists flocking to the barricades, gathered to the sound of the drum on the street before the academy yard. After the football game in the fall, while the victors were romping and rah-rah-ing through the streets of Hillbury, the Seaton lads had gathered in forlorn little groups, and sadly argued the possibly different result if A had done this and B had not done that. Now the tables were turned. While the good people of Hillbury were looking forward to the usual quiet evening, the Seaton citizen resigned himself to the glare of red fires and the din of bells and yells.
With much clamor and vociferation of orders the procession started. Ahead were torch-bearers, red-light artists, and cannon-cracker performers; then the town band, or as much of it as could be got together—it mattered little what, as long as there was a cornet to lead the songs and a drum to stir the blood; then the barge, loaded with victorious athletes and drawn by scores of eager hands tugging at the long ropes; then ranks of boys locked arm in arm, romping in zigzagging lines back and forth across the road, singing and cheering and shouting in the hilarious delight which no staid grown-up can understand. Wolcott and Laughlin guided the flopping pole, Tompkins and Planter led the cheering from the driver’s seat above, Salter and Poole were at the ropes forward, while the twins trained with the artillery in the van.