Every one laughed except Woeful Watson, who had appeared, and now stood, looking sadly at Brady.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Brady, with assumed fierceness, and staring savagely at his classmate.
“You are thinner, and that’s a fact,” said Watson seriously. “You want to look out, Bill. It’s the big, husky chaps like you that find it hardest to recover if they manage to get sick in some fashion. I’m just warning you for your own good.”
“Stung!” cried Jack Tempest, who had come up with them from New Haven. Jack had won the intercollegiate championship in both the sprints, and the ten points he had thus gathered had done much toward making it possible for Yale to round out a great athletic year by winning the meet in which colleges from all over the United States take part. Also, he was picked in advance as a sure selection for the American Olympic team, since no sprinter was in sight who had a chance to beat him in either the hundred-yard or the two-hundred-and-twenty-yard dashes.
“You’re stung, Bill,” said Tempest, again. “Old Watson here has called the turn on you. We’ll have to start feeding you up on cod-liver oil, eh, fellows?”
There is strength in numbers. Bill Brady was a match, and more than a match, for any man in Yale in a single-handed combat, but the combined efforts of a dozen of the men who were gathered around him on the float soon subdued him, and, to the vociferous delight of all present, the big catcher was forced to swallow a great spoonful of the cod-liver oil which some one found in the training quarters. It was a medicine Bill had particularly hated since his childhood, and he emerged, choking and gasping for breath, when his captors finally decided the joke had gone far enough.
“I’ll get even with some of you fellows for that,” he promised, when he had rinsed his mouth out with fresh water and felt a little better. But he could appreciate a joke, even when he was its victim, and he dearly loved to play them on others.
“I met a Harvard man in town,” said Tempest presently, “and we had a little argument about the crews. He seems to think they’ve got a chance, even after that trial this morning, but he wouldn’t bet until I gave him three to one. At that I understand that the professionals were offering as much as that, and, in some large bets, five to one. That was at the Iroquois House. That’s where they’re all gathered. I’ve got a fine room there with Harry Maxwell. Only eight dollars a day—regular rates, too. That’s not so bad, though. If you waited until Wednesday night, you’d be lucky to get a chance to sleep in the billiard room, on top of a pool table.”
“I reserved a room for Brady and myself three weeks ago,” said Jim Phillips, “and there weren’t many left, even then. I think that’s pretty reckless betting, Jack. Three to one, on a boat race, is plain foolishness. There’s too many things that might happen.”
“If you ask me,” said Woeful Watson, “those Harvard fellows were just rowing under a pull this morning, with the idea of sending the odds up a bit. They’ve done better than that, and they’ll do it again in the race. I’ve heard of things like that before. My idea is that we’ll be pretty lucky to beat them at all.”