Following breakfast, each camp continued to flock by itself. The live stock belonging to each party was picketed in widely separated grazing grounds, so there was no opportunity for Silva and the other packer to wind up their disagreements in a final clash. Peace hovered over the region adjacent to Tinaja Wells, but to Merry it suggested a calm preceding a storm.
Hawkins buried himself among the Gold Hillers, and seemed very careful not to overstep the “dead line” which had been drawn between the two camps. Colonel Hawtrey also appeared content to remain in seclusion among the members of his own party.
About eleven o’clock in the forenoon, Frank and his chums, and the professor and Darrel overheard a brief address which the old soldier was making to the young athletes of the Gold Hill club. Only scraps of the colonel’s little speech floated to the fellows in the Ophir tent, but what they overheard made a deep impression on them.
“Sports of the right kind, properly indulged in, are of vastly more benefit to the upbuilding of character, my young friends, than to your muscles and bodily endurance. Understand me, I do not say that physical development is of less importance than mental development. Both of these should proceed hand in hand; but if, over all, the moral and manly qualities do not grow as they should, all your training in the class and on the track and field will have been in vain. Try, my lads, to develop the faculty of being good losers, and to admire and applaud in others those abilities, natural or acquired, which you possess, but not in the same degree.”
As these words, spoken in a deep and earnest voice, wafted themselves from the rival camp, the professor softly clapped his hands.
“Noble sentiments most nobly expressed, young gentlemen,” he murmured. “This Colonel Hawtrey must surely be a man of splendid character.”
“He is,” said Darrel, in a low voice. “The colonel is one of the finest men that ever lived.”
“Listen!” whispered the professor.
Again the colonel’s words drifted into the rival camp:
“If an amateur athlete is not a true sportsman, which is but another term for gentleman, he is not fit to compete with other true sportsmen. Your real gentleman, if you please, has courage; but, more than that, he is so imbued with the spirit of fair play and so completely captain of his own soul, that the stings of honorable defeat leave him unscathed.”