“Aha!” he muttered dolorously as a scrimmaging tangle of forms disentangled and showed that Sangamon, by a smart bit of strategy, had gained three yards. “What did I tell you not five minutes back? Those boys lost their hearts before they even began, and now they're due to lose their heads too.”
It really looked as though Ike Webb was qualifying for clairvoyant honours, for promptly Midsylvania's defence became more and more inefficient, more and more uncertain. Sangamon had a smart field commander, and he took leeway of the advantage. He set his men to the job of jamming through; and jam through they did. It took time, though, because Midsylvania, of course, offered a measure of resistance. To me, however, it appeared to be the mechanical resistance of bodies in action rather than anything guided by a spiritual determination—if you get what I mean. It took a good deal of time; but after a while, by dint of shoving ahead with all her tonnage against Midsyl-vania's slighter and lighter displacement, the visitors forced the ball along to Midsylvania's thirty-yard line.
At this point, Sangamon suddenly changed her tactics. Collop, her captain, made a gesture with his arms and the Blue tackles dropped back a little. From the centre of the massed wedge of shapes a signal was barked out. So swiftly that the spectacle made you think of a pyramid of pool balls scattering over a pool table when the cue ball hits it hard on the nose, the visiting players shifted positions.
For ten seconds we lost sight of the ball altogether. When we saw it again it was cuddling in Vretson's vast, outspread paws. Who had passed it, or how it got there after being passed, I never knew. Magically it had materialised in his grasp in the same way that a prestidigitator's china egg is produced from a countryjake's whiskers. He tucked it into the bight of his left arm and, with his mighty right arm swinging behind him as a rudder and before him as a flail, he tore down the field, going away out to the right.
He was fast for his size—wonderfully fast, and besides, he had perfect interference to help him along. His mates, skirmishing out on his flank, threw back and bowled over the men who bored in to tackle him. In his flight he himself accounted for at least two Varsity players who sprang round the wings of his protecting line, hoping to intercept the big sprinter. One he dodged, the other he flung aside; and then he kept on and on until after a run of thirty-five yards, he flung himself through the air; and, with Cabell, of Midsylvania, clutching at the wideness between his shoulder blades, he dropped flat across Midsylvania's goal line. A groan went up from the grand stand.
There wasn't a sound from any quarter, though, as Vretson squared off to kick for a goal; but whoops of relief arose when the ball, after soaring high and straight, veered off under pressure of a puff of air and, instead of passing over the bar, struck one of the goal posts with a mellow smack and dropped back. So the score, by the rules of those times, stood four to naught.
Nearly everybody there, I guess, figured that Sangamon would promptly buttress her lead by at least four additional points, and very possibly more; but she didn't. True, she played all round and all over and all through Midsylvania during the remaining portion of the first half, but she did not score again. This was due not so much to the rebuttal fight the defenders offered, for now their playing sagged more woefully weak than ever, but to small misplays and slip-ups and seeming overconfidence on the part of Sangamon.
It may have been they were cocksure of their power to score again when they chose. Maybe they were a trifle tired. Maybe they were satisfied to postpone the slaughter-house work until toward the end of the game and make a spectacular, overwhelming finish of it. Anyhow, it struck us, in the press stand, that the reason behind their failure to push their advantage still farther, during the next ten minutes or so, was rather because of their own disinclination than because of any strategy or strength Midsylvania's plainly despondent eleven presented against them.
Along here I became aware, subconsciously at first, and then in a minute or so with a fuller sense of realisation, that Major Stone had waked up. I felt him wriggling on the bench, joggling me in the side with his elbow; and when I looked at him his face was an indignant pink and his little white goatee was bristling like a thistle pod.
He was saying something to himself, and by listening, I caught from his muttered words the purport of the change that had come into the old man's emotions, which change, as I speedily divined, was exactly what might have been expected of him. He did not have the attitude of the average spectator over in the grand stand, for his bump of local pride was not being bruised, as theirs was, by this exhibition. Nor had he grasped and assimilated the feelings of those two groups of youngsters whose cleated feet ripped up the turf in front of him.