“Here was Barrows’ last card,” said Jim, after the race, when every one was back at Gale’s Ferry. “This thing is a model torpedo. It’s worked by clockwork, and it would have made an awful mess of our shell. It wouldn’t have damaged it much, but it would have thrown the men off their stroke, and would certainly have cost us the race.”
So the scheme that Barrows had evolved was spoiled. Svenson lost his boat; Dennison and Barrows lost the money they had put up, and they had, moreover, to admit that Harding had been right.
As for Jim, among those who learned of the way in which he had saved Yale from defeat, he was more popular than ever. And one of those most hearty in his congratulations was Neilson, the Harvard coach, who took defeat splendidly, and simply said he hoped for better luck the next time the crews met.
Dick Merriwell, on his return to New Haven with the team, hinted slyly that there would be one more baseball game to conclude the season. The men of the team were curious, and asked who the game was to be played with, but Dick was noncommittal and merely said to them:
“Wait!”
CHAPTER XXXV
BOSTON WANTS ITS REVENGE.
A good many Yale men returned to New Haven after the boat race at New London. The college year was over, it was true, but there was still plenty to do around the old college town, and Yale men are particularly loyal to the campus. They hate to go away, especially in the pleasant warm days of June. Packing for the trip home for the long vacation is made to consume several days, as a rule, and there were odds and ends of various tasks to be completed.
The last weeks of the spring term had been so eventful, and so thoroughly filled with exciting athletic events, that Jim Phillips, the newly elected varsity baseball captain, and a number of his friends, found that they had no choice about returning.
So they were there, in Jim’s rooms in York Street, when the little gathering was thrown into a state of pleasurable surprise by the entrance of Dick Merriwell, the universal coach, under whose tutelage Yale teams had just completed the greatest year of athletic triumphs in the history of the college.