Miss Nickerson interposed. “You know, Donald, Mr. Moodey here is a great athlete. He is captain of the college team and immensely popular here in Halifax. He is what they call a ‘grid-iron hero’.”
“A grid-iron?” The term puzzled Donald. “That’s what they use in cooking. Nothing to do with eating, has it?”
Ruth laughed and Moodey looked dark. “A grid-iron,” he explained, frostily, “is a slang term for a football ground. It is marked out in squares like a grid-iron.” And as Ruth was still laughing, he gave Donald a look which gave him a hint of the “hero’s” feelings towards him.
Mr. Moodey was now launched into a subject in which he could shine, and he commanded Ruth’s attention for several minutes telling her of past games, the prospects for the morrow, and a good deal of his talk centered around his own personal prowess. “I’m in great shape now,” he observed. “I’ve trained down until I’m as hard as nails.” He raised his right arm and flexed his biceps. “Feel that, Ruth! Hard, isn’t it?” Ruth felt. “Oh, it certainly is hard!” she exclaimed. “You must be strong, Walter. Just feel his muscle, Donald!” There was a merry twinkle in her eye when she made the request. Donald, feeling rather nauseated at Moodey’s brag, gave the muscle a squeeze with his fingers which caused Walter to wince a trifle. A sailor’s grip, with fingers toughened by canvas clawing and rope hauling, is not to be despised, and McKenzie purposely gave the “grid-iron hero” a hard nip and Moodey felt that he would like to get McKenzie where he could hit him for it.
Totally unconscious of the veiled hostility between the two, Ruth chattered away, addressing her talk to both. When Donald spoke to Moodey he was icily polite; when Moodey passed remarks to Donald, they were thinly sarcastic and he, on occasions, introduced a nasty trick of imitating McKenzie’s slightly Scotch accent. Had the circumstances been otherwise, Donald would not have taken any notice, but when these conversational shots occurred, the young sailor felt like giving the college man something more painful than the retort courteous. With the two youths playing a dual role, the evening passed until Helena, who had been holding an earnest colloquy with the skipper, cried out, “Did you know that, Ruthie? Judson tells me that Donald saved his life when the steamer ran them down. They were in the water for an hour.” Ruth’s fine eyes flashed to Donald’s face and there was an expression of surprise and fear in their blue depths. He flushed and squirmed on his chair and shot the creeping sleeves up again as Moodey drawled, with another eye-brow raising, “Oh, really!”
“He sure did,” vouchsafed Judson. “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be here now. You can thank him, Ruth, that your dear brother is not feeding the fish on Quero Bank this night, for I was nearly a goner.”
The girl glanced from McKenzie to her brother with a strange look on her face. “I—I didn’t know there was anything like this in your accident,” she said quiveringly. “I—I thought you were all picked up in your dories a few minutes after the collision. That’s what you said, Juddy. You said it was nothing—”
“Juddy evidently didn’t tell you the whole story,” interrupted Helena. “He has just been telling me how Donald swam about in the sea and found him just as he was going under, and held him up and eventually got him over to a spar and upon it. They were both thrown into the sea by the steamer’s bow and had a dreadfully narrow escape.”
Ruth remained speechless for a moment, as if trying to comprehend it all, then she gave McKenzie a most expressive glance—a look of unspoken thankfulness—and she leaned forward and murmured softly to him, “I don’t know what to say, Donald, but—we’ll talk about it again.” And the youth blushed still redder, felt hot, and to cover his confusion, patted the recalcitrant coat collar into place.