“No,” said Dick, with a smile. “I suppose they don’t feel very cheerful. Still, they’ve got a chance to come back at us. If they win here, they’ll be willing to let us have the baseball title to ourselves, I guess, without feeling very bad about it.”
Benton pointed to a smoldering fire not far away.
“We had a little bonfire here ourselves when we heard the news,” he said. “Gee! I’d like to have seen that game. That ninth inning must have been enough to give you heart failure.”
“I haven’t got over it yet,” admitted Dick Merriwell, as he settled comfortably back in his chair. “I suppose you haven’t heard many details.”
“Just the bare score by innings,” said Hargreaves. “I called up a couple of chaps at the club in New York, but they were so hoarse from yelling that they couldn’t make me understand. They tried to describe it to me, but all I could hear was that we won by a triple play in the ninth inning, when the bases were full, with none out.”
“Well, that was the gist of it all,” said Dick. “It could be told in a lot more words—but that’s what’s important.”
However, they would not be satisfied until he had described the whole game for them, telling how Jim Phillips, the newly elected captain of the varsity baseball team, had managed, although worn out and almost exhausted, to save the day for Yale when a Harvard victory seemed absolutely certain.
“Now,” he said, when he had finished, “tell me about the crew. I’m anxious to hear about that. I should have been here last week, but the baseball championship seemed mighty important, and I knew the crew was in good hands as long as you two were on the job.”
The two assistants seemed much pleased by the compliment. They were young graduates, both captains of Yale crews in their time, and thoroughly versed in the Yale stroke and the Yale system of rowing, as Bob Cook and John Kennedy had, in different ways, developed it. Dick Merriwell, himself a fine and powerful oarsman, was also an expert in technical watermanship. He had studied the rigging of a shell for an eight-oared sweep race under the greatest masters: Courtney, of Cornell; Rice, of Columbia, and men of similar stamp; and he had evolved for this year’s Yale crew a stroke rather different from that of any of its predecessors.
He had felt willing to do this because he had tried the stroke out the year before with the freshman crew, with good results, and some of the members of that same freshman crew were on this year’s varsity. Murchison, the stroke, who captained the crew, was a veteran, and so was Flagg at number seven, the seat immediately behind that of the stroke, and the second man in the boat in importance.