CHAPTER X
Almost before he knew it Stover was in the car and the wheels were moving at last irresistibly toward the field. There was no longer any pretense in those last awful moments that had in them all the concentrated hopes and fears of the weeks that had rushed away. The faces of his own team-mates were only gray faces without identity. He saw some one's lips moving incessantly, but he did not remember whose they were. Opposite him, another man was bending over, his head hidden in his hands. Some one else at his side was nervously locking and unlocking his fingers, breathing short, hard breaths. He remembered only the stillness of it all, the forgetfulness of others, the set stares, and Charlie de Soto fidgeting on the seat and nervously humming something irrelevant.
Caught up in this unreasoning intensity of a young nation, filled, too, with this exaggerated passion of combat, Stover leaned back limply. Outside, the street was choked with hilarious parties packed in rushing carriages, blue or orange-and-black. Horns and rattles sounded like tiny sounds in his ears, and his eyes saw only grotesque blurred shapes that swept across them.
"I'll get 'em off—they won't block any on me—they mustn't," he said to himself, closing his eyes.
Then, on top of the draining weakness that had him in its grip, came a sudden feeling of nausea, and he knew suddenly what the man opposite him with his head in his hands was fighting. He put his arms over the ledge of the door, and rested his head on them, too weak to care that every one saw him, gulping in the stinging air in desperation.
All at once there came a grinding jerk and the car stopped. From the inside came Tompkins' angry, rasping voice:
"Every one up! Get out there! Quick! On the jump!"
Instinctively obedient, the vertigo left him, his mind cleared. He was out in the midst of the bobbing mass of blue sweaters, moving as in a nightmare through the black spectators, seeing ahead the mammoth stands, hearing the dull, engulfing roars as one hears at night the approaching surf.
Then they were struggling through the human barriers, and he saw something green at the bottom of a stormy pit, and a great growing roar of welcome smote him as of a descending gale, the hysterical cry of the American multitude, a roar acclaiming Yale.