The Boy Scouts of Lakeville High

by Leslie W. Quirk

From the substitutes' bench, Bunny nodded his appreciation of this fine sportsmanship. After all, Sheffield had his good points. He watched eagerly as the Lakeville captain and a tall, rangy Elkana boy faced each other in the middle of the floor. Then the referee tossed the ball high into the air between them, piped a shrill blast on his whistle as it reached its top limit, and the game was on.

What followed was so rapid that Bunny could hardly follow the play. Sheffield leaped and whacked the ball to the right, straight for the side. But Turner was there to make the catch. He dribbled it, dodged a rushing opponent, dribbled it another yard, and suddenly shot it, with a long underhand pass, across the floor to Collins, far on the left. Like ants, the players swarmed toward him; the whole playing court, indeed, was curiously like an ant hill. Collins bounced the ball just once before he shot it to Barrett, on the opposite side. Barrett spun it through an open space to Kiproy, who was in a corner of the great quadrangle. By this time, Sheffield had raced down the center to a spot just in front of the basket. Here he took a perfect throw, balanced the ball in his hands, and then looped it upward for the net, scoring the first two points of the game in exactly twenty-seven seconds.

"Oh, boy!" gasped Jump on the bench, "I guess that's teamwork." And the other three Lakeville substitutes agreed that it certainly was.

But one basket in the first half-minute does not spell victory. Even before Lakeville had scored again, by an intricate triangular shooting combination that evolved a forward crisscross, Bunny fancied he could detect a laggard movement here and there; not enough, in any one instance, to interfere with rapid and accurate passing, but still a hint of possible future trouble.

After that, while Elkana was looping its first basket and Lakeville countering with its third, Bunny saw more and more clearly that only Sheffield was maintaining the dashing pace the team had set in the beginning. Barrett was puffing hard and running with a slight effort; Collins and Turner were slowing perceptibly; Kiproy was making passes an instant before they were necessary. In another five minutes of hard play, with the ball rushed from one end of the court to the other a dozen times, the lessening of snap and rush on Lakeville's part was becoming hideously apparent. Elkana had scored twice more, making the count six all.

Bunny knew the turn of the tide was at hand. The Elkana cheerers knew it, too, and yelled and tooted horns and rang bells and swung into a mighty rhythmical roar of, "One, two, will do!" It was a silly thing, Bunny thought; but it wasn't half as bad as the tag of, "Three, four, five, six; all scored on tricks!" when the goals reached that figure; nor the jubilant, "Seven, eight; just you wait!" when the Elkana team added another basket. Lakeville's total was still six.

With the first half nearly over, the visiting team was playing with its back against the wall, strictly on the defensive. Sheffield was still alert and dangerous, but he could not shoot goals when the other players failed to feed him the ball. A dozen times, it seemed to Bunny, the captain broke up threatening formations of Elkana's almost single-handed; and once, just at the end, he shot a clean basket from near the center of the floor, looping the ball upward in a great arc and dropping it like a plummet within the iron ring that supported the net. But Elkana scored again, too; and when the pistol shot signaled the end of the half, the blackboard showed: Lakeville, 8; Elkana, 10.

It meant defeat, Bunny knew, inglorious defeat. Lakeville was slowing and weakening; Elkana was only warming to the final onslaught. In a way, too, his conscience told him, the fault was his; he might have gone straight to the tank that afternoon and begged the fellows to come out before they tired themselves. He wished now that he had.

Between halves, while the four exhausted players lay stretched on benches, Sheffield wandered down the aisle between the rows of lockers for a glass of water. Bunny took quick advantage of his absence.