There is an old saying that “he who asks a question must find the answer” or, with equal aptness: “the answer must find him who asks the question.” In this case the answer found Reed in the form of Seldon’s Annual Winter Carnival.
“As you boys all know,” announced the dean in chapel one morning, “this Carnival attracts the populace of the town and surrounding countryside. It has become an occasion to be anticipated. Particularly the spectacular ski jumping event down the now famous slide of Seldon Hill. This season, Sam Hartley, our ski jumping champion has assured me that he will be out to break his former record jump of one hundred and nine feet....”
The rest of Dean Hogart’s announcement suddenly meant nothing to one Reed Markham who had been listening, up to this time, with lukewarm interest. Sam Hartley!... Sam Hartley!... Sam Hartley!... There didn’t appear to be an activity worthwhile in which he did not prominently figure. Reed was sick of hearing the name mentioned. It was about time that Mr. Hartley was taken down a few pegs. He had the other fellows under his thumb. A suggestion from him and they’d all but tear the school down ... or turn upon the only student from the South to perpetrate further hazings. How they loved to pick on him! And how this Sam Hartley person enjoyed his leadership!
“I’ve dived from a sixty foot perch and I’ve sailed gliders,” Reed considered, quietly. “I wonder if that’s anything like the sensation of shooting through the air on skis?”
With the Carnival but one month away, the majority of the two hundred students went into training for the various sporting events to be run off. The slide, thanks to abundant snow, was in excellent condition and, the first night of practice, Reed waited in the clearing below the incline to watch a group of schoolmates, led by the one and only Sam Hartley, take the jumps.
“Wow!” cried a townsman as Hartley was seen to be whizzing down the slide, first to take-off from long-established precedent. “What form that baby has! Look at his forward crouch ... watch him straighten after he leaves the incline ... there he goes—soaring like a bird! Isn’t that beautiful? Oh! Oh! He spoiled his landing ... took a header....”
“Yes, I see he did!” commented Reed, with a surge of satisfaction.
But Reed’s blood had tingled at the sight of this magnificently built youth skimming down the slide. Whatever he might think of Hartley personally, he was forced now to concede that the fellow had a natural athletic grace which approached perfection. This was the second sport Reed had seen him in, the first sport having been football.
“This looks like his star event,” he estimated. “And it looks like something I could do if I just had a chance to get in some practice without the fellows being wise...!”