But Bobs heard none of it. At that moment, a fumble on the part of one of his men, had placed the ball at his feet, and like a flash, with the pig-skin in his arms, he had broken loose, hurdled a crouching player, flung two more out of his path—and gained the line.
Five to five—said the score! Marston’s one chance of winning depended, now, on Bobs’s ability to gain an extra point by kicking the ball over the cross-bar between the goal-posts. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then the ball sailed proudly over the bar—time was called—and the Marston crowd went wild!
The game was won. The Marston stand emptied itself like an avalanche into the narrow space between it and the fenced-in field. The wonder was that everyone got down alive, for the leaping and scrambling and pushing were terrific. Everyone wanted to be first at the gate where the team was coming out on its way back to training-quarters.
From their seat in the front row, the Sigma Pi girls had best chance, and Jacquette and Louise stood close to the entrance as the triumphal procession appeared.
First came Bobs, proudly borne aloft by four of his team. There was mud on his forehead, mud on one cheek, and a long scratch on the other—but he was a hero, every inch, in the hearts of his comrades, and the ovation they gave him proved it.
Close behind him rode Quis Granville, and after him the rest of the eleven, each lifted on the shoulders of three or four fellows.
When they had all tramped by, the crowd of schoolboys that always straggles after the team fell into line behind them, and the Sigma Pi girls began to chatter.
“What will they do to that wicked little Clarence Mullen?” Blanche Gross demanded. She had been gleaning the facts from Louise and passing them on. “He’ll surely be expelled!”
“I don’t know! But I could forgive him, after that victory!” put in Mamie Coolidge, who had been screaming, and jumping up and down until her new red velvet hat was flopping wildly over one ear. “Jacquette Willard, you tell your cousin for me that I never saw such a tackle as that in all my life!”
“Yes, but think of Bobs’s kick!” Etta Brainerd put in, soulfully. “Didn’t he look happy when they carried him by? He saw us—don’t you think so?”