CHAPTER XXVI
THE HARVARD CREW ALSO SUFFERS.
At Gale’s Ferry, on Sunday morning, the scene was one of great activity. Men who turn into bed at nine o’clock, or ten by the latest, get all the sleep they want by a pretty early hour in the morning, and six o’clock saw the Yale oarsmen tumbling out of bed, and shouting merrily to one another as they got into their bathing suits. Then there was a quick rush down to the float, and, one after another, they leaped overboard and splashed around in the water, enjoying their morning dip hugely.
Dick Merriwell and his two assistants were not far behind them, and for fifteen minutes there was a wild carnival in the river. The water was cold. For the time was June and the water had not had time to warm up thoroughly. But the young athletes didn’t mind that. Their bodies were hardened to water a good deal colder than that by their six months of vigorous training for the race that was now so close at hand. On the coming Thursday, they would know the result of all their labor. Then, in twenty minutes or so, the work they had been doing for so many weary months would be put to the test, and the greatest athletic event of the college year would be decided.
More than a hundred and fifty men had answered the first call for crew candidates the previous October in New Haven, when Dick Merriwell had first called the men out for work. Then they had been divided up into squads of eight and set to work on machines in the tank, pulling at oars that were rigged so as to resemble exactly the arrangement of the oars in a racing shell, though all their pulling didn’t advance them an inch. Dick and the other coaches, working carefully, had hammered into all of them the principles of the Yale stroke, and, then, after the actual rowing practice, had come the long cross-country runs, beginning with a mile or two at first, and ending with ten-mile runs through the surrounding country, to perfect the wind.
Gradually, as time wore on and the effects of the coaching showed, the squad had been reduced. When spring training opened, as soon as the winter broke up, in New Haven harbor, a good many of the less promising men had been dropped, and the final cut had been made just before the crews came to Gale’s Ferry, three weeks before the day of the race. Now there were about thirty-seven oarsmen left in the squad. There was the first varsity crew, eight men, who represented, in the opinion of Dick Merriwell and the other coaches, the very pick of all the oarsmen in Yale, trained now to the very minute, and ready to do battle with eight men of Harvard, who had been selected after a similar ordeal.
To give this crew practice, there was the second varsity, eight men nearly as good. From this second crew, in case of any accident, substitutes would be picked for the first shell; and, under Dick’s coaching, it was almost as good as the varsity, and good enough, as all Yale men felt, to beat almost any other college crew in the country.
Next in importance to the varsity eight was the varsity four, scheduled to race for two miles with four men from Harvard, after the freshman eight had rowed its race against the Harvard youngsters. The Yale “Y” went to the members of both the four and the eight. And the oar he pulls in a race is thereafter the most valued possession of every college oarsman. He longs, as did these Yale men that Sunday, to have a stained and worn shirt to drape over it, trophy of victory, for it is an immemorial custom for the losers to toss their rowing shirts to the victors after the race, when both crews lie on their oars for a minute to rest before pulling away to quarters.
The Yale oarsmen finally emerged from the river and dashed up to the house to dry and get into other clothes. A quick rubdown with a rough towel, that set the blood tingling in their veins, then a hasty dressing, in tennis shoes, flannel trousers, and soft shirts—plenty of costume for such athletes in such a climate. And then came breakfast—a breakfast as big as they had earned. Great pitchers of milk, as many eggs as they could eat, steaks, and everything else of healthy food that they wanted. But no coffee and no tobacco.
The oarsmen themselves shared the wonder of the coaches at the poor performance of the varsity in the previous day’s brush with the freshmen. They knew that they had rowed well, but they knew also that they had not got the proper speed out of the shell in view of the strength of their efforts. And, after breakfast, while Dick Merriwell, whose arrival they had all hailed with joy, went into consultation with Benton and Hargreaves, they gathered around in groups to discuss it.