“You haven’t tried hard enough. It’s nonsense to say that you can’t keep your arms off your chest; you just won’t!”
Wayne retired behind his Cæsar in silent dignity, and Don, his temper worn by the day’s labor with the hurdlers and jumpers, isolated himself in his window seat and scowled over his history of Greece until hunger drove both to supper, by which time the small quarrel was forgotten and the two raced downstairs and across to Turner Hall in the best of spirits.
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE HOME RUN
Events were crowded thickly into the next week. Gardiner returned to the Academy on Monday and shook up football affairs in a way that surprised even Paddy. On Tuesday two more graduates put in an appearance on the campus and with most terrifying scowls proceeded to work miracles, one with the sprinters and the other with the baseball candidates. The latter coach reached the scene none too soon, for the next day Shrewsburg sent down an aggregation of hard-hitting young gentlemen who had already earned a reputation that reached up and down the valley. Most of the fellows turned out for the game and cheered lustily for the crimson-stockinged youngsters, but despite the support of the grand stand Hillton put up a ragged kind of ball, and at the end of the sixth inning the wearers of the green S were five runs to the good and their earning capacity seemed still unlimited.
Wayne and Don and Dave saw most of the contest from where the former was putting Perkins over the high hurdles in a fraction over record time. Later they adjourned to the stand and Don took a hand in the cheering with encouraging results. Hillton went to bat in the first of the seventh amid a loud chorus of cheers only to retire in one-two-three order. Then the coach asserted authority and a new pitcher went into the box, a lower-middle-class boy, Forest by name, who had gained some success with his class nine the preceding spring. He had a fresh, smiling, and ingenuous countenance, and he delivered nice straight balls that went so fast that the first two Shrewsburg batters went out on strikes and the third one reached first base through the medium of a short grounder that seemed to belong to nobody in particular, and for which nobody tried. But the side was out in the next moment, for the fourth batsman struck up a nice clean fly that settled cosily into the right-fielder’s hands, and the crimson stockings trotted in under a salvo of applause.
“Say, where’s Paddy?” asked Wayne, while the first man at bat was recovering his equilibrium after striking unsuccessfully at a deceptive drop. Dave grinned.
“Paddy’s busy. Gardiner’s got every candidate, new and old, back of the gym teaching them to pass. And Gardiner’s so full of new ideas that Paddy’s head is in a whir all the time. I fear he’ll have brain fever soon.”
“There’ll be two of us,” said Don feelingly, “unless Middleton goes out of training. He knocked over every hurdle to-day except the last three. I don’t understand how he came to miss those.”