“Yes, sir, he strung behind him ten men out of the nineteen players Lincoln College had in that game, as he went down the field. From where I was setting on top of the Lincoln centre rush, I counted 'em as he took 'em. Slow and solemn and serious like an avenging angel, Mr. Rooney made for them goal posts, taking no prisoners, and leaving the wounded and dead in a long windrow behind him. It wasn't legalized football, mebby, but it was a grand and majestic sight to see that stoop-shouldered feller with the red whiskers proceeding calmly and unstoppably forward like the wrath of God.
“Yes, sir, the game was ours. We thought it was, leastways. All he had to do was touch that there ball to the ground! The whole of Kingstown was drawing in its breath to let out a cheer as soon as he done it.
“But it never let that yell. For when he reached the goal——”
Here Joe broke off again and chuckled.
“Say,” he said, “you ain't going to believe what I'm telling you now. It's too unlikely. I didn't believe it myself when I seen it. But it happened. Yes, sir, that nut never touched the ground with the ball!
“Instead, with the ball still under one arm, he climbed a goal post. Climbed it, I tell you, with both legs and one arm. And setting straddle of that cross bar believe me or not, he began to shuck. In front of all that crowd, dud after dud, he shucked.
“And there wasn't no cheers then, for in a minute there he set, a monkey! Yes, sir, the biggest blamed monkey you ever seen, trying to crack that football open on a goal post under the belief that it was a cocoa-nut. Monkey, did I say? Monkey ain't any word for it! He was a regular ape; he was one of these here orang-outang baboons! Yes, sir, a regular gosh-darned Darwinian gorilla!”
Joe took a fresh light for his cigar, and cocked his eye again at my sporting supplement. “I notice,” he said, sarcastically, “Princeton had a couple of men hurt yesterday in the Yale game. Well, accidents is bound to happen even in ring-around-the-rosy or prisoner's base. What?”