[CHAPTER II]
WHAT A LAUGH DID
A few minutes later Don was sitting in a corner of the grand stand, smothered in a pile of blankets and with his injured ankle bound in wet bandages. Beside him were two boys of about his own age, one of whom, the lad whom he had addressed as Paddy, was solicitously slopping cold water from a tin can over his ankle at frequent intervals. Nothing serious, Professor Beck had decided, only a strained tendon; and so Don had been helped to his present position, from where he could watch the race run out. He looked pale and woe-begone; but he managed to smile now and then in answer to Paddy’s sallies.
“Paddy” Breen—his real name was Charles—had been given his nickname two years before, when he was a little red-headed junior too small to resent it had he been so inclined. Paddy’s forbears had been Irish a generation or two back, and although there was little about the boy to suggest the fact, barring his red hair and gray eyes and sunny nature, the name was somehow distinctly appropriate, and it had stuck to him through his junior and lower middle years and promised to stick forever. Paddy played center on the first eleven, a position for which his broad shoulders and hips and great strength eminently fitted him. To-day he was attired in a faded and torn red sweater, a pair of equally disreputable moleskin trousers, two red and black striped stockings whose appearance told a story of many battles, a pair of badly scuffed tan shoes, and a golf cap of such bold and striking tones of brown, green, and scarlet as to stamp it at once as brand-new.
The lad who sat on the other side of Don was of even more generous build than Paddy Breen. Dave Merton’s shoulders were broad and set well back, giving him a look of great power. He was, perhaps, the least bit overgrown for his seventeen years, for he topped Paddy by an inch and Don by two. But he looked very healthy and happy, and was as good-natured a fellow as any at the Academy. His hair was black and his eyes dark, giving him a more somber coloring than his bosom companion, Paddy, but, like the latter, he preferred smiling to frowning. Dave had two great ambitions in life at present—namely, to throw the hammer farther than any other Hilltonian and to excel at study. The latter seemed quite within the range of possibility, but as for Dave’s hammer throwing it was a school joke at which even Dave could laugh. Paddy Breen was a brilliant pupil; Dave Merton a hard-working one. Paddy was an excellent football player; Dave an indifferent performer with the weights. Both were leaders in their classes—Dave was a senior—and popular throughout the school. Their friendship was as much a joke as Dave’s hammer throwing and the two were inseparable.
“Beaten?” Paddy was saying scornfully. “Never, me boy. Sure ’tis only beginning we are; just wait till we git our breath!” Paddy, as though to lend indorsement to his nickname, at times dropped into a brogue acquired with great labor from such classics as Charles O’Malley and Tom Burke.
“I only wish we had begun earlier in the race, Paddy,” answered Don hopelessly. “Who is ahead in the bunch there, Dave—can you make out?”
The leaders, House and Beaming, were now far up the course and the next group of runners were some distance behind. Farther back of them other contestants straggled. Two runners were out of the race. A Shrewsburg boy had given up on the second round and was philosophically watching the contest from the top of a distant bank, and a Hillton fellow, Turner, had gone to the dressing room suffering with an attack of cramp. In answer to Don’s question Dave studied the distant runners for a space in silence.
“Well, that’s Northrop in the lead all right, Don, and the next two fellows are St. Eustace men. Then Moore and a Shrewsburg chap, and another St. Eustace man, and—and one of our team—I can’t make out who.” Dave looked frowningly across the field.
“Which one?” asked Paddy. “The fellow with the long legs just taking the hedge? Why, man, that’s Wayne, of course; no mistaking him.”