Center Rush Rowland

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“I can’t do it tonight,” said Ira. “I’ll have to get it out of the bank. But here’s thirty-five cents you can have.”

“Right-o! Thanks awfully, Rowly! You’re a brick. Sorry if I talked nasty.” He got up from the bed, viewing the cigarette stub whimsically. Then he scratched a match, lighted the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the room. “Good-bye forever!” he exclaimed tremulously, and, turning to the window, flicked the cigarette out into the night. “Now for burglary!” Whereupon he picked up the coins Ira had put on the table, planted his cap rakishly over one ear, winked expressively and hurried out.

Ira, arranging his books for study, wished somewhat ruefully that he hadn’t jumped to conclusions by connecting the cigarette odour with Mart Johnston that time. He had met Mart two days before and that youth had passed him with a very cool and careless nod, evidently resentful because Ira had not accepted the invitation to call.

“I guess, though,” thought Ira, as he seated himself at the desk and sucked the end of a pencil, “he doesn’t care very much.”

Gene Goodloe he saw every day, sometimes only long enough to exchange greetings with, sometimes long enough for a chat. But he hadn’t been back to Number 30 Williams yet, nor had Gene, in spite of promises, called at “Maggy’s.” Captain Lyons and Raymond White were always genial when he met them, but it didn’t look much as if the acquaintances with those fellows were likely to expand. Several times Ira watched football practice, and, while he failed to discover anything about the game to captivate him, he viewed it with more interest since meeting Fred Lyons and learning what a difficult task the latter was undertaking. That Lyons had not exaggerated the attitude of the school toward the football team was made plain to Ira by the comments he heard at practice. It seemed the popular thing to speak with laughing contempt of the team and the football situation. The “Forlorn Hopes” was a favourite name for the players, while it seemed to be a generally accepted conclusion that Parkinson would go down in defeat again in November. All this made Coach Driscoll’s efforts to get additional candidates doubly difficult. Some fellows did go out, from a sense of duty, and at the end of the first week of school there were nearly eighty candidates on the field. That number looked large to Ira until he overheard one of the instructors remark to another one afternoon: “A most discouraging situation, isn’t it? Why, four years ago we used to turn out a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty boys, I’m afraid it will be the same old story again this Fall!”

The first game took place Saturday afternoon and Ira paid his quarter and went to see it. It wasn’t much of a contest, and even he, as ignorant of the game as he was, could discern that neither team covered itself with glory during those two twenty-minute halves. It seemed to him that had all the Parkinson players done as well as Captain Lyons or the fellow who played full-back or the one who was at quarter during the first half the story might have been different. But those three stood out as bright, particular stars, and the rest didn’t average up to them by a long shot. Ira, by the way, was interested to find that the quarter-back—inquiry divulged his name to be Dannis—was none other than the youth who had so earnestly and unsuccessfully practised hurdling that day. Dannis ran the team in much the same spirit, but with far more success. He was not very big, and he looked rather heavy, but he had a remarkable head on his shoulders, and was quite light enough to make several startling runs and was a live-wire all the time that he remained in the contest. When, in the second half, another candidate for the position took his place the difference was at once discernible in the slowing down of the game.

While most of the fellows turned out to look on, enthusiasm, when there was any, was distinctly perfunctory. Still, that might have been laid to the game itself, for interesting features were few and far between. Dannis got away several times for good gains and showed himself a remarkably elusive object in a broken field, but as nothing much depended on his success or non-success there was scant reason to enthuse. Mapleton was outclassed from the first and that Parkinson did not score more than the twenty points that made up her final total was less to Mapleton’s credit than to the home team’s discredit. A game in which one contestant takes the lead in the first five minutes of play and is never headed is not very exciting at best, and Ira walked back to the campus after the game with his estimate of football as a diversion not a bit enhanced.

If Parkinson deserved any credit for winning from her adversary by a score of 20 to 0, she certainly didn’t get it. “Just the way we started off last year,” Ira heard a fellow remark on the way back to the yard. “Ran up about half as many points as we should have on Cumner High School and then played worse every game for the rest of the season.”

“We ought to have scored forty on that team today,” replied his companion. “A team with any sort of an attack could have torn our line to fragments. Why, as it was our centre just fell apart every time anyone looked at it!”